Learning Haitian Creole will take you through vocabulary, grammar, syntax, pragmatics, phonetics, and so on. It’s not a difficult journey if you know what you’re doing. Or if you have a teacher assisting you at every step of the way. When talking about verbs, Haitian Creole is infamous for its lack of verb tenses. Instead of verb tenses, you have tense markers that generally precede the verb. And these markers indicate the tense used.
Despite being likened to French, Haitian Creole doesn’t have tenses per se, making it a bit harder to learn the language. But, once you figure out the ins and outs of verb tenses, it’s an easy learning process from there. While there is no conjugation and no subject-verb agreement, the tense markers make things a bit easier.
What are tense markers?
In Haitian Creole, tense markers indicate the tense used. By default, the present tense is unmarked, with “te” marking past tense, “ap” indicating progressive, and “pral(e)” showing future. Until now, it’s nothing too complicated to understand, right? Let’s take a few examples:
- Mwen fe manje – I make food.
- You can see how the present tense (manje) is not marked by any tense marker. “Fe” is the correspondent of “make” in this case and not a tense marker.
- Pierre ap monte bisiklet – Pierre is riding a bicycle.
- In this case, the tense marker “ap”, which indicates progressive, is used to transform the verb “monte” into a progressive one
- Marie te marye mwa pase – Marie got married last month.
- The tense marker “te” indicates past tense, altering the role of the verb “marye” to reflect a past action
The copular verbs “se” and “ye” correspond to the verb “to be”, and they’re used depending on the person utilized. For instance, take the following example: “Li se fren mwen”, which means “He is my brother”. The copular verb “se” is used when talking about the 3rd singular person. But when using the 2nd singular person, such as in “Koman ou ye?”, which means “How are you?”, the copular verb “ye” is used.
Is Haitian Creole easy to learn?
Despite these slight confusions in terms of verbs and conjugation, Haitian Creole is one of the easiest languages you can learn. It’s a bit similar to French, Portuguese, Spanish, and it also has some influences from English. If you know French, you’ll have absolutely no problems becoming an independent Haitian Creole speaker. Even learning its three different dialects won’t be a problem since Haitian Creole is a vernacular French-based language. It has many things in common with the Napoleonian language.
Though, it’s not exactly easy to start learning another language by yourself. Having someone to guide you through the process, step by step, makes things considerably more manageable. That’s what we, at Creole Tutors, have been doing for many years. Our end-game is teaching the world about the wonders of the Haitian Creole culture and its language. We aim to preserve its historical value and help it transcend time itself.
For whatever reason you’re interested in learning Haitian Creole, we’re by your side. Our tutors will help you at every step of the way, including the portions corresponding to verb usage. The truth is that, while the Haitian Creole verb system and its time markers may be confusing, we can name much more confusing things in other languages. Take the German colocations or the use of grammatical particles such as adverbs and prepositions. Now that’s some studying you have to do there! Haitian Creole is a cinch compared to that.