Russian Verbs - Present Tense


This refers to actions which are going on, obviously, in the present.
Since the action is ongoing, only imperfective verbs are used in the
present tense. These correspond to all English present tenses; for
instance "I see" and "I am seeing" as well as "I do see" have only one
corresponding form in Russian, я вижу....


Russian verbs are generally broken down into two or three groups or
"conjugations" generally the first and second; for the sake of clarity,
I will use a slight variant: 1a (e-verbs) 1b (ё-verbs) and 2 (и-verbs)


These three are very similar in appearance (though not in pronunciation)
and each form is distinctive. Because there little room for confusion, pronouns
are rarely repeated more than once in a sentence.

	Conjugation 1a (e-verbs)		Conjugation 1b (ё-verbs)		Conjugation 2 (и-verbs)
	Знать	Читать	Петь	Звать	Говорить	Готовить
	To Know	To Read	To Sing	To Call	To Say/Speak	To Prepare
Я Ты Он/Она/Оно Мы Вы Они	Знаю Знаешь Знает Знаем Знаете Знают	Читаю Читаешь Читает Читаем Читаете Читают	Пою Поёшь Поёт Поём Поёте Поют	Зову Зовёшь Зовёт Зовём Зовёте Зовут	Говорю Говоришь Говорит Говорим Говорите Говорят	Готовлю* Готовишь Готовит Готовим Готовите Готовят

As you can see, the only difference is the vowel preceding the ending,
and deciding which one is the real trick to all of this; in many cases,
it's fairly obvious: verbs ending in -ать are usually 1st Conjugation,
and verbs ending in -ить are usually 2nd Conjugation. Verbs
ending in -еть can be either, and verbs ending in -сти are almost always 1b. The easiest way to find out for sure is
when you look up a verb in your dictionary, look at the ты or он form,
and look to see which vowel is used; because the same endings are
always used otherwise, the rest is easy.


Note however, that if there is no vowel, or the stem ends in ш, щ, ж,
or ч, the first person singular ending could be y instead of ю, and the
third person plural (for 1st conjugation verbs) could be ут instead of
ют, or ат and not ят in the 2nd conjugation.

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This article was used with permission from:
Indo-European Languages