Guide to present tense verbs and how to conjugate them

When you read in a dictionary, you will find words like jeść (to eat (imp.)). This is the infinitive (the basic form). But you must know how to conjugate the infinitive into personal forms ('I', "you" (singular - when talking to one person), "he", "she", "it", "you" (plural - when talking to groups), "us", "them").

In English, the infinitive is "to eat", but you would say "he is eating" (or "he eats"). In Polish jeść conjugates to on je ('he eats/he is eating').

It is easy to conjugate verbs in English. But in Polish there are a few rules to learn.

There are three main groups of verbs, based on the endings of the words. There are also lots of irregular verbs which must just be learnt.

BTW, all of present tense verbs are (imp.). You can't get present tense perfective verbs. So everything here relates to imperfective aspect.

The Polish Present Tense Groups

Group 1: -ę, -esz

The -ować set of verbs (add ej!)

But there is something very important to remember if the verb infinitive ends in -ować (many do!)

They are basically the same as the table above, but you first replace -ować with uj, then add the ending. See the table below, hopefully it'll make sense!

Pracować = to work

As you can see it is the same endings as in the first table, but with the ować taken off the end of the verb, then uj put there, then the normal endings from the first table.

Group 2: -ę, -isz / -ysz

Group 3: -m, -sz

For verbs such as:

• czytać - to read
• grać - to play
• jeść - to eat
• nazywać się - to be called
• oglądać - to watch
• otwierać - to open
• przepraszać - to apologize
• pytać - to ask
• pływać - to swim
• rozmawiać - to talk
• szukać - to look for
• umieć - to be able to
• wiedzieć - to know
• zamykać - to close
• znać - to know

Irregular verbs that you must just learn

Coming soon, but they include verbs like jeść (to eat).

Być - to be

This is a very useful one to learn, but it is very irregular. Just learn it from scratch!