Conjugating Russian Verbs: Two Patterns And A Missing Present
Russian verb endings are, for once, a modest amount of work. Six forms in the present, four in the past, and one of the commonest verbs in the language does not appear at all.
Two patterns
Every Russian verb belongs to one of two conjugation classes. The difference is the vowel running through the present-tense endings: an -e- in the first, an -i- in the second.
Here is (to know), a first-conjugation verb:
| person | form |
|---|---|
я | |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| знают |
Six endings. Learn them, learn the second pattern's six, and you can conjugate the regular majority of Russian verbs in the present. Which class a verb belongs to is largely predictable from the infinitive, with a short list of awkward cases.
The past tense is easier than the present
This surprises people. The Russian past ignores person entirely. It does not care whether you are talking about yourself, the person opposite you or a stranger. It agrees with gender and number instead:
| subject | form |
|---|---|
| a man | |
| a woman | знала |
| a group | знали |
Three forms in ordinary use, against six in the present. So if you are a man saying what you knew yesterday, and a woman saying what she knew yesterday, and a crowd saying what they knew yesterday, you need three words between you, not six.
There is a real consequence worth noticing: in the Russian past, the verb tells you the speaker's gender. A woman cannot say she did something without the ending announcing it. English has nothing like that.
The verb that is not there
means to be. In the past and the future it behaves normally. In the present it simply does not appear:
Я. - I am here.
дома. - He is at home.
Literally I here and he home. These are not shorthand or slang. They are the ordinary, complete, grammatically full way to say those things, and putting a verb in would be wrong.
English speakers find this genuinely uncomfortable, because our sentences feel unfinished without a verb. It passes. Within a couple of weeks the gap stops registering and you start producing it yourself.
The future, and where aspect shows up
Two routes, and which one you take depends on aspect:
- Imperfective: the future of
plus the infinitive. Two words, straightforward. - Perfective: no extra machinery at all. A perfective verb has no present tense, because an event seen as a completed whole cannot be happening now, so the form that looks like its present is its future.
That second one catches everybody out once. It is not an irregularity: it is the aspect system being consistent, and it is the clearest demonstration that tense and aspect really are two different dimensions.
The thing nobody can teach you
Russian stress moves. It shifts within a paradigm, it is not marked in normal writing, and it changes meaning: the same string of letters can be two different words depending on which syllable you lean on.
There is no rule to learn, native speakers cannot articulate it, and dictionaries mark it precisely because you cannot work it out. Learn the stress with the word, the way you learn a gender, and treat the marks in a learner's dictionary as part of the spelling while you are still reading them.