Tom here. When I moved to Podgorica for work, my plan was to learn "to be" and "to have" first and build outward, the way you would with French. Wrong move — the present tense here doesn't route through a helper verb at all. Every verb takes its own ending, and once six of them are automatic, you can conjugate almost anything on the spot. (I wrote up the fuller order that actually works in our beginner's roadmap, but this bit alone will get you talking.)
The six endings, learned once
Take raditi (to work). Drop -iti, keep the stem rad-, add:
| Person | Ending | Raditi |
|---|
| ja (I) | -im | radim |
| ti (you, sing.) | -iš | radiš |
| on/ona/ono | -i | radi |
| mi (we) | -imo | radimo |
| vi (you, pl./formal) | -ite | radite |
| oni/one (they) | -e | rade |
The vowel shifts a little depending on which family a verb belongs to, but the underlying shape — who does what — never changes. Learn it once on raditi and you've effectively learned it on the majority of verbs you'll meet in your first year.
Three families, not forty conjugations
- -ati verbs: pričati (to talk) → pričam, pričaš, priča, pričamo, pričate, pričaju.
- -iti verbs: raditi above, or govoriti (to speak) → govorim, govoriš, govori…
- -eti/-ovati verbs: voljeti (to love) → volim — yes, it jumps to -im — and kupovati (to buy) → kupujem.
That last one is the one that trips people up exactly once: kupovati doesn't become kupovam, it becomes kupujem. It's one pattern shared by a whole class of verbs, not an exception you memorise per word.
The four that just misbehave
A small handful of everyday verbs skip the families entirely, the same way English speakers memorise "go, went, gone" without asking why:
- biti (to be) → sam, si, je, smo, ste, su
- hteti/htjeti (to want) → hoću, hoćeš, hoće, hoćemo, hoćete, hoće
- ići (to go) → idem, ideš, ide, idemo, idete, idu
- moći (to be able to) → mogu, možeš, može, možemo, možete, mogu
Four verbs. That's genuinely the whole irregular list worth memorising in month one.
Put two of them in a sentence and it already sounds like a real conversation: Hoćeš li ići sa mnom? ("Do you want to go with me?") uses hteti and ići back to back, no extra scaffolding required. That's four irregular conjugations covering an enormous share of daily small talk — ordering, asking, agreeing to plans.
Drop the pronoun once the ending sticks
Native speakers only add ja, ti, mi for emphasis or contrast — "Ja radim, a on ne radi" (I work, but he doesn't). Radim on its own already means "I work". Tacking a pronoun onto every verb is the single most common thing that marks out a beginner's speech, more than any accent ever will.
Two questions people ask me
Do I need "am/is/are" anywhere? No — it's built into the ending, which is genuinely the good news buried in all of this.
Do I need the pronoun before the verb? Not by default; add it only for emphasis, or where the ending alone would be ambiguous.
What actually eats time later isn't this — it's verbal aspect, the genuine grammar boss fight, where nearly every verb has a twin depending on whether the action is ongoing or finished. Present tense is just the ammunition you need before that fight starts. Get the six endings solid, notice which family a new verb falls into, and speaking stops being translation and starts being automatic — which is exactly the order Gora teaches it in, one real sentence at a time.