A couple of Hindi questions

[isolationthirst]

I am extremely confused with the perfective tenses; my textbooks state this:

The Simple Perfective = English Past Simple
The Present Perfective = English Present Perfect
The Past Perfective = English Past Perfect; or

मैं आया → I came
मैं आया हुं → I have come
हैं आया था → I had come

However, my professor insists we use the Past Perfective in instances you

Comments

[shanrina]

Your professor is wrong. Repeated/habitual actions in the past use verb stem + taa/ti/te followed by the present tense of honaa, like "I used to go to the store on Mondays" would be "Main Somwar ko dukaan jaati thi" for me because I'm female, or "...jaataa thaa" for a male. I found that the others are a lot like English, personally-- most of the time if you're saying something like "I went to the store" then you'd use the simple perfective, if you're saying "I have come to the party" then you'd use the present perfective, and if you're saying "I had gone to the store" then you'd use the past perfective.

What textbook are you using, by the way?

[rfk]

past perfect (with "tha") is also used where simple past appears in English, when it is an action far in the past.

[shanrina]

Ah, yes, you're right.

[isolationthirst]

Ah thank you so much for confirming my doubts, I like to do my grammar in advance and I've been using them like that so I was pretty dumbfounded when he said that, though with my one semester of Hindi I'm hardly in position to argue ^^. Maybe he got confused or something.

We're using A Complete Course for Beginners and a grammar book by Zdravka Matišić in class.