The Present Tense: Regular Verbs | Dutch Grammar

The Dutch present tense is built on one move you already know: take the stem and add an ending. There are only two possible endings — nothing or -t — plus the full infinitive in the plural. That is the whole system. The famous English worry, "which person takes the -s?", has no Dutch equivalent: Dutch never adds an -s. What it has instead is a single small rule that trips up almost every learner — the -t disappears when jij hops behind the verb in a question or after fronting. Master the three endings and that one disappearing -t, and regular present-tense conjugation is essentially solved.

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You are not memorising six different forms. You are learning a stem, one ending (-t), and the infinitive for the plural. Get the stem right (see verbs/fundamentals/infinitive-and-stem) and the rest is almost mechanical.

The pattern: three shapes, not six

Dutch has six subject slots, but they collapse into just three written shapes. Here is the logic, using the stem werk (from werken, "to work"):

ik → the bare stem: ik werk. Nothing is added.
jij / u / hij / zij / het → stem + t: jij werkt, hij werkt. One ending for every singular "you / he / she / it."
wij / jullie / zij (plural) → the infinitive: wij werken. Always identical to the dictionary form.

So the three things you ever write are werk, werkt, and werken. Compare that to English, which marks only the third person ("he works") and leaves everything else bare. Dutch marks more subjects with -t (all the singular non-ik ones), but it also has the tidy compensation that the entire plural is just the infinitive.

Subject	Form	Rule
ik	werk	stem only
jij / je	werkt	stem + t
u	werkt	stem + t
hij / zij / het	werkt	stem + t
wij / we	werken	infinitive
jullie	werken	infinitive
zij (plural)	werken	infinitive

Ik werk bij een bank in het centrum.

I work at a bank in the city centre. — 'ik' takes the bare stem 'werk'.

Hij werkt veel te hard de laatste tijd.

He's been working far too hard lately. — 'hij' takes stem + t.

Wij werken allebei vanuit huis.

We both work from home. — the plural is just the infinitive 'werken'.

Why ik is the bare stem

It feels odd to English speakers that ik takes no ending at all — not even the -t that "you" and "he" get. But remember what the stem is: it is already the "I" form. When you derived werk from werken, you were deriving the ik form directly. The other persons add to it; ik is the baseline. This is why the imperative — also the bare stem — looks identical to ik: Werk! ("Work!") and ik werk share the same shape for the same reason.

Ik begrijp het nog steeds niet helemaal.

I still don't quite understand it. — bare stem 'begrijp', no ending.

The -t covers jij, u, hij, zij, het

A single ending serves all four singular non-ik subjects. There is no separate "you" form versus "he" form the way English has none either — but where English uses the bare verb for "you" (you work) and adds -s only for "he" (he works), Dutch does the reverse pattern: it adds -t to all of them and leaves only ik bare.

Jij werkt toch ook bij die nieuwe startup?

You work at that new startup too, right? — 'jij' + -t.

Zij werkt als verpleegkundige in het ziekenhuis.

She works as a nurse at the hospital. — 'zij' (singular) + -t.

The inversion rule: werk jij?, not werkt jij

Here is the rule that defines this page. When jij (or its weak form je) comes right after the verb — as it does in a yes/no question, or whenever something else is fronted to the start of the sentence — the -t drops. The verb reverts to the bare stem.

Subject before the verb	Subject after the verb (inversion)
Jij werkt hard.	Werk jij hard?
Je komt mee.	Kom je mee?
Jij woont hier.	Hier woon je dus.

Jij werkt op zaterdag, toch?

You work on Saturdays, right? — jij before the verb: keep the -t.

Werk jij ook op zaterdag?

Do you work on Saturdays too? — jij after the verb: drop the -t.

Waar woon je tegenwoordig?

Where do you live these days? — 'woon je', no -t, because je follows the verb.

This is not a quirk to memorise blindly — it has a real phonological cause. The weak pronoun je is a clitic: it leans on the verb and the two fuse into a single spoken unit, kom-je, werk-je. Historically the verb's -t and the j- of je merged, and the -t was absorbed. So the rule has a clean formulation: no -t when je/jij sits immediately after the verb. Say werk je and werkt je out loud — the first is what every Dutch speaker actually says.

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The disappearing -t happens only with je/jij, and only when it directly follows the verb. With every other subject the -t stays put even in inversion: Werkt hij?, Komt u?. We unpack that restriction in verbs/present/subject-verb-agreement.

A complete model: wonen → woon

Putting stem-finding and the endings together, here is wonen ("to live, to reside"). The stem is woon (the open syllable wo-nen closes, so the long oo doubles — that re-spelling is covered in verbs/present/spelling-changes).

Subject	Statement	Inversion / question
ik	ik woon	woon ik?
jij / je	jij woont	woon je? (-t drops)
u	u woont	woont u? (-t stays)
hij / zij / het	hij woont	woont hij?
wij / jullie / zij	wij wonen	wonen wij?

Woon je al lang in Utrecht?

Have you been living in Utrecht long? — inverted je, bare stem 'woon'.

Woont u hier in de buurt?

Do you live nearby? — inverted u keeps the -t: 'woont u'.

Common Mistakes

Every error here comes from an English habit: English marks the third person with -s, marks nothing else, and never reshapes a verb when a question inverts the subject. Dutch does the opposite on each count.

❌ Hij werks bij een bank.

Wrong — Dutch never adds -s for the third person. That's an English ending.

✅ Hij werkt bij een bank.

He works at a bank — the Dutch third-person ending is -t, not -s.

❌ Werkt jij dit weekend?

Wrong — when jij follows the verb, the -t must drop.

✅ Werk jij dit weekend?

Are you working this weekend? — inverted jij takes the bare stem 'werk'.

❌ Jij werk te veel.

Wrong — in a normal statement, with jij before the verb, you keep the -t.

✅ Jij werkt te veel.

You work too much — jij before the verb takes stem + t.

❌ Wij werkt samen aan het project.

Wrong — the plural never takes -t; it uses the infinitive.

✅ Wij werken samen aan het project.

We're working on the project together — plural = infinitive 'werken'.

❌ Ik werkt vanuit huis.

Wrong — 'ik' takes the bare stem, never the -t ending.

✅ Ik werk vanuit huis.

I work from home — 'ik' is just the stem 'werk'.

Key Takeaways

Three shapes, not six: stem (ik werk), stem + t (jij/u/hij werkt), infinitive (wij/jullie/zij werken).
Dutch never uses -s. The third-person ending is -t, and it covers every singular subject except ik.
ik is the bare stem because the stem is the "I" form — same shape as the imperative.
The inversion rule: drop the -t when je/jij comes directly after the verb (werk je?, not werkt je?). It is clitic fusion, and it applies to je/jij only.

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