Present tense of i-class verbs

In the last lesson you met verbs where the "I" form ends in -am: ja gledam, ja pitam. Serbian has a second big group where the "I" form ends in -im instead. Raditi (to work) is one of them: ja radim — I work.

Everything works the same way as before. You take the ending off and put a new one on, and the ending alone tells you who is doing it — so you almost never need the pronoun.

The six endings

Five of the six endings keep the i. Only the "they" form breaks the pattern: it is -e, not -ie or -iju. Oni rade — they work. Oni govore — they speak. Oni misle — they think. This is the form to watch.

The "they" form is where the two classes really part ways. An a-verb has -aju (oni gledaju), an i-verb has plain -e (oni rade, oni misle). If you hear -e at the end, you are hearing an i-verb.

The two classes side by side

There is no rule that tells you which class a verb belongs to — it is simply a fact about the word, like gender. Learn each verb with its "I" form: raditi → radim, učiti → učim, govoriti → govorim. Once you know that one form, the other five follow.

Talking about work and study

Most of the verbs you need for this topic are i-verbs: raditi (work), učiti (study, learn), govoriti (speak), misliti (think), živeti (live), voleti (love, like). They all take the same six endings.

• Gde radiš? — Where do you work?
• Šta učiš? — What are you studying?
• Radim u školi. — I work at a school.
• Ne govorim engleski. — I don't speak English.

To make any of these negative, put ne in front of the verb, as a separate word: ne radim, ne učimo, ne govore. A small handful of verbs swallow the ne instead of keeping it separate — of the ones you have met, biti (nisam) and imati (nemam). Every other verb, including all the i-verbs here, uses the separate ne.