Esperanto · Chapter 1 · Lesson 12 · Grammar primer
Verb tenses: -as, -is, -os, -us, -u
Five endings, no irregular verbs, and the same form for every person. This is the entire verb system of the language.
The short version
Five endings, and not one irregular verb
Drop the -i from the infinitive and add -as for the present, -is for the past, -os for the future, -us for the conditional or -u for a command. That is the entire verb system. There are no irregular verbs in Esperanto, and the verb to be proves it: esti gives estas, estis, estos, estus, estu, every one of them the form you would have guessed.
mi estas, mi estis, mi estos
The ending never changes for person
One form covers everybody: mi estas, vi estas, li estas, ni estas, ili estas. The pronoun already says who is acting, so the verb does not repeat it. English needs am, is and are for that same column and French needs six forms, irregularly. This single rule removes the largest memorisation load in most European languages.
mi estas, vi estas, ili estas
-u is the command and the wish together
The -u ending covers what a grammar book would split into the imperative and the subjunctive. Venu is come. Ni iru is let us go. And after ke, when somebody wants something to happen, the second verb takes -u rather than the infinitive: mi volas, ke vi venu. English uses an infinitive there, which is why this one catches people.
Mi volas, ke vi venu.
That's the gist. The full article goes deeper - more examples, the edge cases, the why - and the practice below scores like a vocabulary session and earns the same XP.
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