Learning how to conjugate Russian verbs is a necessary step for building basic sentences.

Verb conjugation simply means changing the ending of a verb to match the person doing the action.

English does this occasionally, like changing “I play” to “he plays”.

Russian takes this a bit further by changing the verb ending for every single subject pronoun.

Fortunately, the rules for changing these endings follow predictable patterns.

Once you learn these core patterns, you can confidently use thousands of new Russian verbs.

You’ll explore the two main verb groups and see exactly how to conjugate them.

What are Russian infinitives?

Before you can conjugate a verb, you need to recognize its infinitive form.

The infinitive is the base dictionary form of a verb.

In English, infinitives always start with the word “to”, like “to run” or “to eat”.

In Russian, infinitives are easily identified by their endings.

Almost all Russian infinitives end in the letters -ть.

For example, the verb делать means “to do”.

The verb говорить means “to speak”.

When we conjugate these verbs, we remove this -ть ending and replace it with something else.

The two Russian conjugation types

Russian present tense verbs fall into two main categories.

These are called the First Conjugation and the Second Conjugation.

You can usually tell which group a verb belongs to by looking at its infinitive ending.

First conjugation verbs generally end in -ать, -ять, -еть, or -овать.

Second conjugation verbs almost always end in -ить.

There are a few irregular verbs that break these rules.

However, the vast majority of Russian verbs fit perfectly into these two groups.

First conjugation verbs

The First Conjugation is the most common verb pattern in the Russian language.

To conjugate these verbs, you first remove the final -ть from the infinitive.

This leaves you with the verb stem.

Next, you add a new ending that matches the subject pronoun.

Here are the standard endings for first conjugation verbs.

Let’s look at these first conjugation endings in action.

Second conjugation verbs

The Second Conjugation pattern mostly applies to Russian verbs ending in -ить.

The process is slightly different from the first group.

Instead of just dropping the -ть, you usually remove the entire -ить ending before adding the new suffix.

The vowels in the second conjugation endings are also noticeably different.

Here are the standard endings for second conjugation verbs.

Sometimes, Russian spelling rules force the -ю ending to become -у, and the -ят to become -ат.

However, the overall pattern remains exactly the same.

Let’s see this in action using a few second conjugation verbs.

Russian past tense conjugation

Present tense in Russian requires learning six different endings for every verb.

The past tense is actually much simpler to learn.

You don’t need to worry about first or second conjugation patterns in the past tense at all.

Instead, you only need to change the verb based on gender and number.

You simply drop the -ть from the infinitive and add -л, -ла, -ло, or -ли.

Male speakers always use the masculine ending for “I” (я), while female speakers use the feminine ending.

Let’s look at how simple the past tense is in practice.