Hindi verbs are regular to an unusual degree — strip the ना from the infinitive and the endings attach the same way to almost every root. Around forty verbs cover the majority of daily conversation, and this page lists them with the ending patterns laid out so you can conjugate anything without hunting through a grammar book.
The Twenty Verbs You Need First
These ten plus बोलना, सुनना, पढ़ना, लिखना, समझना, चाहना, मिलना, रखना, बैठना and सोना give you a working verb vocabulary. करना alone is enormously productive because it combines with nouns to form hundreds of compound verbs — काम करना, बात करना, इंतज़ार करना.
The Ending Patterns
Three sets of endings cover the main tenses. The root is the infinitive minus ना.
- Habitual — root + ता/ती/ते + होना. करता हूँ, करती है, करते हैं.
- Continuous — root + रहा/रही/रहे + होना. कर रहा हूँ, कर रही है.
- Perfect — root + आ/ई/ए. किया, की, किए.
- Future — root + ऊँगा/ओगे/एगा, fused onto the verb with no auxiliary.
Swap the auxiliary to change the tense and swap the middle piece to change the aspect. That single insight replaces most of a verb table.
The Irregular Perfects
A handful of very common verbs have irregular perfect forms, and these are worth memorising outright.
Five irregulars, and they happen to be among the five most frequent verbs in the language, which is why they feel like a bigger problem than they are. Everything else follows the regular आ/ई/ए pattern — खाया, देखा, बोला.
Compound Verbs
Adding जाना marks completion or finality, लेना marks benefit to the doer and देना benefit to someone else. These are not optional decoration — भूल गया is what people say for forgot, and plain भूला sounds incomplete. Learners who avoid compounds sound noticeably flat.
One rule breaks more sentences than any other, so it is worth restating as a reference.
- In the perfect tenses, transitive verbs take ने after the subject.
- The verb then agrees with the object, not the subject.
- Intransitive verbs never take ने.
- If the object has को attached, the verb defaults to masculine singular.
So मैंने रोटी खाई takes the feminine ending because रोटी is feminine, even from a male speaker, while वह गया needs no ने because जाना is intransitive. The commonest test for whether a verb is transitive is simply whether it can take a direct object.
Pronunciation Tips
Verb endings are unstressed and run into the auxiliary — करता है comes out closer to ‘karta hai’ as one phrase than as two separate words. हूँ is nasalised with a long oo, and करूँगा carries a nasal in the middle that is not optional. Over-articulating endings is itself an accent, since native speakers swallow them almost entirely.
Common Mistakes
- Forgetting ने with transitive verbs in the past.
- Making the perfect verb agree with the speaker rather than the object.
- Using ने with intransitive verbs like जाना.
- Avoiding compound verbs, which makes speech sound textbook-like.
- Learning conjugation tables without learning which verbs are transitive.
Practice Exercises
- Conjugate करना across all four tenses in your own gender.
- Write the perfect form of ten verbs and mark the irregulars.
- Build five sentences with ने and check object agreement.
- Convert five plain verbs into लेना and देना compounds.
- Sort twenty verbs into transitive and intransitive.