Proofreading a Classmate's Verb Forms
A student writes a forty-word paragraph about yesterday and asks a classmate to check it. The draft reads: من دیروز به بازار رفتیدم و یک کتاب بخریدم. برادرم دو دفتر آوردن کرد. ما به خانه رفتند و مادرم گفت که فردا به مدرسه میرویم. The checker announces a simple rule: "Take the infinitive, remove -دن, and that is the past stem; then add the ending for the person." The writer points out that this rule produced رفت from رفتن but cannot explain why آوردن became آوردن کرد. The teacher gives the pair eight minutes to find every verb error, classify each as a stem error or an agreement error, and state the corrected sentence. They may use only the paragraph and their knowledge of common verb paradigms, not a dictionary.
1. Correct the paragraph and classify each error as stem formation or personal agreement.
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Corrected version: من دیروز به بازار رفتم و یک کتاب خریدم. برادرم دو دفتر آورد. ما به خانه رفتیم و مادرم گفت که فردا به مدرسه میرویم. Classification: رفتیدم is an agreement error, because the subject is من but the ending -ید belongs to شما. بخریدم is both a stem and agreement error; the past stem of خریدن is خرید, and the first-person ending is -م, giving خریدم. آوردن کرد is a stem error: the writer used the infinitive as a auxiliary instead of the past stem آورد. رفتند is an agreement error; the subject ما takes رفتیم, not the third-person plural. میرویم is correct for a future or habitual statement and should be left alone; the checker must not “correct” it just because the paragraph is about yesterday.
2. Why does the checker's rule work for خریدن but fail for آوردن and رفتن?
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The rule assumes that the past stem is the infinitive minus -دن, which is true for many verbs such as خریدن → خرید and نوشتن → نوشت (with a spelling adjustment). It fails because Persian has irregular past stems that must be learned as pairs: رفتن → رفت, آوردن → آورد, آمدن → آمد, بودن → بود, دادن → داد. For آوردن, removing -دن gives آور, which is the present stem, not the past stem; the writer then supplied کردن to carry the tense, producing a non-existent compound. For رفتن, removing -دن gives رف, which is not a past stem either. The practical rule is to learn each infinitive together with its past stem, and to use the infinitive-minus rule only as a first guess to be checked against the known paradigm.
3. The writer asks whether میرویم is wrong because the paragraph is in the past. Give a reasoned answer.
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It is not wrong. The quoted speech گفت که فردا به مدرسه میرویم reports a plan for tomorrow; the future time word فردا and the reported intention license the present (or future) form. Tense in the paragraph is not uniform: narration is in the past, but the embedded clause refers to a later time. The checker should therefore distinguish the narrative frame from reported speech before correcting. A defensible alternative would be فردا به مدرسه خواهیم رفت if the writer wanted a formal future, but میرویم is idiomatic and grammatically well formed. The judgement call is to correct errors of form and agreement without flattening every verb into the past.