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The verb system, without the fog

Three tenses, gender agreement, and the noun-plus-करना trick that gives you hundreds of expressions free.

Hindi verbs are regular to a degree that surprises people who have heard the language is hard. The stem is the infinitive minus ना: बोलना gives बोल.

Present habitual is stem plus ता/ती/ते plus the right form of होना. मैं बोलता हूँ, वह बोलती है, हम बोलते हैं. Future is stem plus ऊँगा/एगा/एँगे — the most regular of the three and the best place to build confidence. Past perfective is stem plus आ/ई/ए, and it is where the ने construction appears for transitive verbs.

Every one of those endings changes with gender and number, which means the verb is doing more work than an English verb and carrying information English puts elsewhere or nowhere.

The highest-leverage thing a beginner can do with Hindi verbs is learn करना properly. Hindi builds an enormous number of expressions as a noun followed by करना: काम करना (work), बात करना (talk), मदद करना (help), इंतज़ार करना (wait), पसंद करना (like), शुरू करना (begin). Master one verb and several hundred expressions become available at once. The same is true, to a lesser extent, of होना and लगना.

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