Purpose

By the end of this lesson, you will be able to conjugate regular Russian verbs from both conjugation groups in the present tense.

Lesson Explanation

Russian verbs fall into two conjugation groups, genuinely simpler in number than the three-way splits seen in Spanish, Italian, and French, but each with its own full set of personal endings.

First conjugation, modeled on читать (to read): я читаю, ты читаешь, он читает, мы читаем, вы читаете, они читают.

Second conjugation, modeled on говорить (to speak): я говорю, ты говоришь, он говорит, мы говорим, вы говорите, они говорят.

A genuinely important spelling/pronunciation detail connecting to Part 1, Lesson 6’s consonant rule: after ж, ч, ш, щ, the first-conjugation ending -ю (in “они” and “я” forms) changes to -у/-ат respectively in certain stems, following the same spelling logic already seen with adjectives.

Unlike Spanish or Italian, where verb endings alone are often enough to identify the subject without a pronoun (Part 1, Lesson 5), Russian present-tense endings genuinely do distinguish person clearly — читаю, читаешь, читает all sound and look distinct — yet the pronoun is still conventionally included, a genuinely different balance between the two languages’ grammar and their actual usage habits. There is no equivalent to Spanish’s stem-changing verb category in the present tense; instead, Russian’s irregularity shows up mainly in a handful of high-frequency verbs with a genuinely unpredictable stem, like хотеть (to want): хочу, хочешь, хочет, хотим, хотите, хотят — mixing first- and second-conjugation endings within the same verb.

Practice Questions