Irregular Imperatives

Most Czech imperatives are predictable: you take the present-tense stem and add an ending, as covered in the formation pages. But the verbs you reach for most often — be, have, eat, come, take — are exactly the ones that refuse to follow the rule. Their imperatives are short, irregular, and impossible to reconstruct from the present tense, so the only honest advice is to learn them as fixed vocabulary, the same way an English child learns don't! before learning anything about negation. The good news: there are only about nine of them, and you will hear them every single day.

Why these forms have to be memorized

A regular imperative is built from the present stem. Nést "to carry" has the present nese-, and the command is nes! From číst "to read" (čte-) you get čti! That machinery breaks down for the verbs below, because their present stems and their imperatives went their separate ways centuries ago. You cannot look at jím "I eat" and predict jez! "eat!", and you cannot look at vím "I know" and predict věz! "know!" There is no rule waiting to be discovered here — these are simply the oldest, most worn-down verbs in the language, and high-frequency words resist regularization in every language (compare English go / went, not goed).

The core list

Notice the spelling traps: buď and pojď end in ď (a soft d with a háček), not a plain d. Měj keeps the ě of mít. Getting these diacritics right is not optional — buj or poj are simply not words.

být and mít: buď and měj

These two are the workhorses, because be and have underpin so many expressions. Buď issues a command about how to be — calm, quiet, nice, careful — and měj appears in some of the warmest everyday phrases in the language.

The phrase měj se / mějte se ("have yourself well") is the standard friendly goodbye, far more common than any literal na shledanou among friends.

pojď and pojeď: the special word for "come"

Here is something English hides from you. English uses come for both walking and riding; Czech splits motion into on foot versus by vehicle, and it also has dedicated come-imperatives that are suppletive — they don't look like their own infinitives at all. The plain "go" command from jít is jdi!, but to summon someone toward you, you use pojď! Likewise jet "go by vehicle" gives jeď! "drive/go!", while pojeď! means "come along (by car, train, bike)."

That last one shows the pojďme "let's go" form — by far the most natural way to propose leaving together.

vezmi, pověz, pomoz

Vezmi (from vzít "to take") almost always comes with the dative reflexive si when you take something for yourself — vezmi si "help yourself, take one." Pověz (from povědět) is the intimate "tell me," and pomoz is the everyday cry for help.

věz: the bookish one

Věz "know!" is the odd one out in register. You will rarely bark it as a casual command; it lives mostly in set, slightly elevated phrases meaning "be aware that…" or "rest assured that…" (literary/formal). Recognize it, but in everyday speech you would more often say abys věděl "just so you know."

Negatives: switch verb, switch aspect

Czech prohibitions usually use the imperfective verb, and several of these irregulars have negatives that look quite different from their positive forms. Buď negates straightforwardly as nebuď, měj as neměj, and jez as nejez. But the come-forms have no negative of their own: to tell someone not to come, you switch to the habitual verbs chodit and jezdit, giving nechoď (on foot) and nejezdi (by vehicle).

Common Mistakes

These are not exotic forms hidden in old texts — they are the verbs of the kitchen, the doorway, and the goodbye. Drill the nine positive forms and their negatives until they are automatic, and a huge slice of everyday spoken Czech opens up.