Asking “When” in Persian

Learn how to ask "When?"

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Lesson Transcript

Salam be hamegi, Sāre hastam! Hi everybody! I’m Sareh.

Welcome to PersianPod101.com’s “Persian in 3 minutes”. The fastest, easiest, and most fun way to learn Persian.

In the last lesson, we learned how to ask "Where" questions in Persian.

This time, we are going to ask questions with the interrogative word "When?"

let’s go! bezan berim!!

Imagine you want to ask when your roommate is coming back home. You will ask him Key miresi khoone?

[slowly] Key miresi khoone?

So let’s break down this answer:

First we had:

Key, which is the basic translation of "When" in Persian.

We remember Be, the preposition for "to".

Miresi is the verb "to arrive", miresi is the pronoun of the verb "residan", with the present root of "res" and the past root is "resid".

Mi + res (the present root) + i

And finally khooneh, which is the informal way of saying Khāne meaning "home."

So, all together it is Key miresi khoone?

"When will you arrive home?"

So in Persian, "When" is generally translated as the word Key.

For example, if you want to ask "When were you born?" it’s Key motevalled shodi?

As you can see, the interrogative word is placed in the 1st position, then the affirmative form of the verb with its suffix..

So let’s have a look at another example:

How can you say "When did you arrive?"

It is really simple, since it is exactly the same pattern: Key residi?

First we have Key, which is "When"

The second word is the verb residi in 2nd person present indicative tense.

It is the pronoun of the verb "residan" meaning “to arrive”, with the past root of "resid".

Have you noticed a difference between the sentences Key miresi khoone? and Key residi?

The first one is talking about a future action – "When will you arrive home?" Whereas the 2nd one is referring to the past "When did you arrive?"

The conclusion is that you can use the interrogative word Key to talk about any moment, whether past or present.

If you want to ask a question about duration, as in "Since when have you been teacher?" Then you will have to add prepositions. Do you remember az? You can use it for "since" too! Altogether, the question is Az key moallem boodi?

So az key means "Since when?"

Let’s see how to ask "Until when?" in Persian. It is very easy, as you can translate it directly. We learned about "until" preposition in our last lesson. So it becomes: Tā key?

So for example, if you want to ask a friend "Until when are you going to stay here?" It will be Tā key injā hasti?

Of course there are other ways to ask about time; You can even be more specific by asking about the year, but you can not use Key anymore. Because then, you need to start the question with “What” - Che/chi - then add the date or the hour.

For example, you can ask:

- "Which year did you start working?" which will be

Che sāli shoroo’ be kār kardid?

- "Which day is better for you?" which will be

Che roozi barāye shomā behtar ast? Or...

- "What hour can we meet?" which will be

Che sā’ati mitavānim molāghāt konim?

Now it’s time for Anita's Advice

To ask how long an action has been taking place in Persian, we could use Az key and then add our specified action, which will literally mean “since when”. But for saying “how long”, you need another way to do it. And that is, again, using “what”, which is Che or chi!

Then you just have to add Che before moddat to ask about duration, or before ghadr to ask about quantity. We use both of them when asking about duration.

Che moddat… means “How long”

Cheghadr… means “How much”

As in Che moddat montazer boodi? / or Cheghadr montazer boodi?

That is "How long have you been waiting?"

Ok, so in this lesson, we learned how to correctly use the interrogative Persian word for "When", Key, but also its different variations.