Questions & Answers about Tämä kokous oli hyvin tärkeä.
Why do we use oli in this sentence?
Oli is the past tense form of the verb olla (to be) for the third-person singular (he, she, it). Because tämä kokous (this meeting) is a single thing that happened in the past, we use oli to mean 'was'.
How would I change this sentence to say the meeting was NOT important?
You would use the negative word ei and the past participle ollut. The sentence becomes: Tämä kokous ei ollut hyvin tärkeä. In the past tense, the negative form for 'it was not' is always ei ollut.
Doesn't hyvin usually mean 'well'?
Yes, hyvin is the adverb for 'well' (as in voin hyvin - 'I am doing well'). However, when placed before an adjective like tärkeä, it is very commonly used to mean 'very', similar to words like tosi.
Why is tärkeä in its basic form and not the partitive case (tärkeää)?
Because a meeting (kokous) is a whole, countable thing. When a sentence describes a singular, countable noun, the adjective stays in the basic nominative form. If the subject were an uncountable mass word like coffee (kahvi), the adjective would take the partitive case.