Beginner's Latin
Latinum hodie disce!

Welcome to Beginner's Latin: a basic guide to the ancient Romance language. This first lesson will consist of verbs, as verbs are the cornerstone of Latin sentences.

Lesson 1: Verbs

Before diving too deep into verbs, a few things must be addressed. Firstly, Latin verbs conjugate, or change endings, based on certain principles (more on this in a second). Just like in English, Latin verbs have a root and the ending changes according to the context.

Secondly, there are four varieties of Latin verbs: first, second, third, and fourth conjugations. The first and second follow a similar pattern for forming the endings. The same is true of the third and fourth (apart from a few exceptions).

Lastly, in the vocab, verbs have four principle parts. The first two are the only ones discussed in this lesson.

In English, verbs have five attributes associated with verbs: Person, Number, Tense, Mood, and Voice. Latin verbs also have these attributes, and the following table shows what each of these characteristics entails.

Characteristic	Description	Examples
Person	Who performs the action	1st Person: I, we 2nd Person: you, you all 3rd Person: he/she/it, they
Number	How many persons	Singular: I, you, he/she/it Plural: we, you all, they
Tense	Time the action takes place (Latin has six)	Present: I praise Future: I will praise Imperfect: I was praising Perfect: I praised (has praised) Future Perfect: I will have praised Pluperfect: I had praised
Mood	Manner of how the action is performed	Indicative: Indicates or declares facts Imprative: Gives commands Subjunctive: Describes hypothetical or potential actions (not discussed in these lessons)
Voice	Whether subject performs or recieves action	Active: Subject performs action (I praised him.) Passive: Subject recieves action (I was praised by him.)

These five characteristics are essential to understanding how to form a Latin verb. Just like in English, Latin changes the endings of words depending on each of the five characteristics. This lesson will only look at person and number for the 1st and 2nd conjugations. The following paradigms are using the present tense, indicative mood, and active voice for simplicity.

1st and 2nd Conjugation

These conjugations follow the same principle for forming an ending.

1. Find the root of the verb.
2. Determine the correct ending based on the five characteristics.
3. Add the ending to the root.

Simple enough, right?

The biggest difference between these two conjugations is the last vowel of the root. Take two Latin words: Laudāre (to praise) and Monēre (to remind). These words are in the form known as the present active infinitive, also the second principle part. To find the root (Step 1), we remove -re from the end. So we get Laudā and Moneē. 1st Conjugation verbs have roots ending in -a and 2nd conjugation verbs have roots ending in -e.

Person and Number

Person, as described above, describes who is performing the action of the verb: him, her, you, me, etc. Number goes hand in hand with person because it describe the number of persons: one or more than one. Within the small realm of present tense, indicative mood, and active voice verbs, conjugations are pretty simple. The following tables show the conjugations for these verbs based on person and number.

The endings for both verbs for the corresponding person and number.

This concludes the verb lesson, continue on to nouns by clicking below!