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< Vocabulary 5B—Frequently Used Verbs Conjugated Like Читать

Vocabulary 5B—Frequently Used Verbs Conjugated Like Читать

In English the endings of verbs change to match the subject of the sentence. For example, we say “He reads.” but “They read.” These changes are called “verb conjugation”. Verbs are conjugated in Russian too, but in Russian there are more endings to memorize.

Most Russian verbs are conjugated in one of two ways which are known as the first and second conjugations. The verb “читать” is used in textbooks as an example of a first conjugation verb. Go to Grammar 8—Verb Conjugation and memorize its present-tense forms and then come back here and practice conjugating these verbs which also belong to the first conjugation.

Notice that these verbs are conjugated by adding a fixed set of endings to a “stem” which does not change. There is one subtlety though. When the stem ends in й, the й gets swallowed by any vowel added after it and changes the vowel to its soft equivalent. For example знай + у = знаю. You can find a table of hard and soft vowel pairs in Alphabet 4—Phonetic Rules Reference.