Czech Verbs

-       Present Tense

In Czech, verbs take endings to form the present tense. There are five classes of verbs, each with several sub-types.  These must be memorised from the following table.

These endings can help you a lot, because with them you can conjugate most of verbs into the present tense, you only need the stem of the verb, for example the stem of tisknout  (to print) is (tisk-).

-       Past Tense

In Czech as well as in English the simple past tense (imperfect) is used to describe past events. The endings for the past tense verbs follow the same 5-class paradigm as in present tense.

The above table only lists the third person. First and second person  for both singular and plural is made by adding  modal verb after the imperfect verb. Nesl jsem (I carried), nesl jsi (you carried). In past tense, gender affects the affix. After the imperfect stem usually ending with -l,

-a is added for feminine and -o for neutral gender.  For plural, -i/-y is added for all three genders, while 3^rd person pl. takes only the stem and suffix -i and 1^st person pl.  takes the affix and modal jsme and 2^nd person plural takes the affix and modal jste.

So just take any regular verb stem and add it to the endings above, for example our previous verb tisknout (to print), its stem is “tisk-”, plus the ending and modal above becomes tisknul jsem   (I printed).

-       Future Tense

To form the future in Czech is complicated as perfective verbs, i.e. verbs in present tense having taken a phrasal prefix ( similar to English system of phrasal verbs) become future tense verbs. Example: táhnu (I pull), vytáhnu (I will pull out). The prefix –vy indicates both the phrasal modification (out) and future tense.

Future tense of imperfective verbs, i.e. plain verbs  with no phrasal prefix,  is made by preceding the infinitive verb by modal verb být (to be) in its future tense, in accordance with person and number.

So  the verb hrát (to play) in 2^nd person future tense becomes budeš hrát.