Present Tense: -i- Verbs

The -i- conjugation is one of the three big regular present-tense classes in Croatian, and it is the one most beginners meet first because it includes everyday verbs like raditi ("to work / to do"), govoriti ("to speak"), misliti ("to think") and vidjeti ("to see"). Its signature is the vowel -i- running through almost every form: radim, radiš, radi, radimo, radite — with one twist at the very end that catches English speakers out, the 3rd person plural rade.

The endings

Every verb in this class takes the same six personal endings. Strip the infinitive's -ti and, for most members, you are left with the present stem you add these to. With raditi → rad-:

Notice that the subject pronoun is in brackets in real speech — Croatian normally drops the pronoun because the ending already tells you who is doing the action. Radim on its own means "I work"; you only add ja for emphasis or contrast.

The one trap: 3rd person plural is -e, not -iju

Here is the single most important thing on this page. The "they" form ends in -e: oni rade ("they work"), oni vide ("they see"), oni govore ("they speak"). Beginners often expect -iju by false analogy (because the stem vowel is -i-), but that form does not exist for this class. Learn rade, vide, misle, govore as the plain -e ending.

More model verbs

The same six endings apply unchanged across the class. A few high-frequency members, fully spelled out:

The real difficulty: which infinitives are -i- verbs?

If every -iti verb were -i- class, this page would be trivial. The problem — and the reason this page exists — is that the infinitive ending does not reliably tell you the class. You cannot read it off the page; you have to know it.

• Most verbs in -iti are -i- class: raditi → radim, govoriti → govorim, misliti → mislim, učiti → učim. Good default, but not a law (piti → pijem is e-class; htjeti is irregular).
• A large group of verbs in -jeti belongs here too, even though the -j- might make you expect something else: vidjeti → vidim, voljeti → volim, živjeti → živim, trpjeti → trpim ("to endure"). The -je- of the infinitive collapses to -i- in the present.
• And — the genuine sting — some verbs in -ati are -i- class, against the strong instinct that -ati means the -a- class (pjevati → pjevam). The members to memorise are držati → držim ("to hold"), bojati se → bojim se ("to be afraid") and stajati → stojim ("to stand"). Note that the lookalike spavati → spavam ("to sleep") is a plain -a- verb — so even within the -ati infinitives you have to check each one.

Because of this, the 1st person singular present is part of every verb's identity. Vidjeti is not enough; you must store vidjeti → vidim. There is no shortcut here, and pretending otherwise would mislead you — the membership is lexical, learned verb by verb. The good news: once you know the 1sg, the other five forms are completely predictable.

How this compares to English

English present-tense verbs barely change shape — I work, you work, he works, with a single -s on the third person singular and nothing else. Croatian instead marks every person with its own ending, which is exactly why the language can drop the subject pronoun: the verb carries the information that English packs into the pronoun. So where English needs two words (I work), Croatian needs one (radim) and the "I" is built into the -m. When you learn a Croatian verb, you are really learning a small machine with six outputs, not a single fixed word.

Common Mistakes

Key Takeaways

• Endings: -im, -iš, -i, -imo, -ite, -e — the -i- vowel runs through five of six forms.
• The 3rd person plural is -e (oni rade, vide, govore), never -iju and never the e-class -u.
• Class membership is lexical: -iti, -jeti and even some -ati verbs land here, so memorise each verb's 1sg present (vidjeti → vidim).
• Drop the subject pronoun by default; the ending already says who.