Present tense of e-class verbs

You already know two groups of verbs: the ones whose he/she form ends in -a (on peva), and the ones whose he/she form ends in -i (on trči). There is a third group, and its he/she form ends in -e: on piše — he writes. Take that -e as the mark of the group, and hang the person endings on it.

The endings

Five of the six endings simply add -e plus the person mark you have already met. Only they breaks the pattern: it is bare -u, not -eu and not -ju.

The stem is the hard part, not the endings

With pevati you could cut off -ti and start building: pev-a-m. With this group you often cannot. The part of the verb that stays put in the present — its present stem — frequently looks different from the dictionary form:

Do not try to work the stem out from the infinitive. There is no rule at this level that gets you from ići to idem. Learn every new verb as a pair — ići / idem, putovati / putujem — and the other five forms follow from the endings above.

The same six endings on other stems

Telling the three groups apart

The they form is where the three groups look least alike, so it is worth holding all three side by side.

čitati (čitam) and gledati (gledam) look like pisati but are a-class — another reason the ending of the infinitive settles nothing. What settles the group is the form you say for ja.

As always, the pronoun is optional: Pišem pismo is a complete sentence, and Ja pišem pismo only adds emphasis.