Present Tense - Verbs conjugation

In the Present Tense, the verb form depends on the subject of the sentence:

For third person plural:

• use one for a group of women
• use oni for a group of men or a mixed group

śpiewać – to sing

When addressing someone formally, use polite forms of address and the third person verb form (singular or plural). Note that this differs from English, where the second person verb form is used.

In the Present Tense, there are 4 groups of endings, commonly called classes:

The best approach is to learn every verb together with its first two forms.The first two forms are sufficient to determine the verb's class.

The following example demonstrates how to determine the verb class. Consider this verb:

This is the infinitive form of the verb "to think". At this point, the verb's class cannot be determined from the ending. Consider its first form:

Based on the first form, the verb's class remains unclear because the ending -ę matches both the first and second classes. Consider its second form:

Now we know that the first two endings are -ę and -isz, so we can determine that this verb belongs to the second class.

You might notice, that you don't have to learn both forms for the third and fourth class, because they have unique endings in the first form. Nevertheless, I encourage you to learn the first two forms for all the verbs because it will help you later with the stem irregularities during conjugation. These irregularities occur frequently.

The conjugation pattern is straightforward if the first two forms of a verb are known (these should be learned together with the infinitive form as stated in the previous section). To conjugate a verb, extract two stems from these forms and then add appropriate endings to them (a stem is the verb without the ending).

Let X represent the first stem and Y represent the second stem. The conjugation pattern is as follows:

Based on the endings -ę and -esz, we can determine that the verb belongs to the first class, so we will use the following endings:

Based on the first two forms of the verb we can extract the stems:

Now we can conjugate the verb by connecting stems with appropriate endings according to the pattern:

The second class of verbs requires additional clarification because it has two sets of endings. To determine which ending to use, follow the same pattern as for stems. If the first form X uses the left ending -ię, then all X forms should use left endings. If it uses the right ending -ę, then all X forms should use right endings. The same rule applies to the Y forms.

This behavior can be observed in the verb myśleć. It has the same stemmyśl- for both X and Y forms, but its endings follow the X/Y pattern. For X forms, it uses right endings; for Y forms, it uses left endings:

There are some verbs that do not follow the regular conjugation pattern and have some irregularities in their conjugation. These conjugations must be learned by heart.