Unit 3: Texts, Tenses, and Interpretation
What Unit 3 demands
Unit 3 shifts to reading and producing longer texts: short stories, letters, notices, and simple articles. You must recognise and use the past perfect, future, conditional, and imperative moods, and understand aspectual distinctions between the aorist (completed past) and the imperfect (ongoing or habitual past). Study the formation of the aorist stem, which is often irregular (գնալ → գնացի, տալ → տվի, լինել → եղա), and the conditional particles կ- and կար-.
Reading strategies
Identify connectors (և, բայց, որովհետև, եթե, երբ, որպեսզի) that signal cause, contrast, condition, and purpose. Recognise reported speech introduced by որ. Note how relative clauses are formed with որ and the relative pronoun.
Traps to watch
- Treating the aorist and imperfect as interchangeable; the imperfect marks repeated or background action.
- Missing irregular aorist stems and inventing regular forms.
- Misreading կ- as future only - it also marks conditional.
- Overlooking negation scope: չ- before the auxiliary negates the whole clause.
- Confusing եթե (if) with երբ (when).
Worked example
Translate "If I had time, I would read." Use the conditional: Եթե ժամանակ ունենայի, կկարդայի - եթե introduces the condition, the imperfect-conditional ունենայի marks the unreal condition, and կկարդայի carries the կ- prefix. Rule of thumb: both clauses of an unreal conditional take conditional forms in Armenian.