The Romanian Verb System: Overview | Romanian Grammar

Before you memorize a single conjugation table, it helps to see the whole landscape. Romanian verbs are richly inflected — a single verb form often tells you the person, the number, the tense, and the mood all at once — but the system is organized, and most of it rewards pattern-learning rather than brute memorization. This page is a map. It shows you how verbs are sorted, what the moods and tenses are, and the three structural facts that trip up English speakers the hardest. Every section points you to a dedicated page where the real work happens.

How verbs are sorted: the four conjugation classes

Every Romanian verb belongs to one of four conjugation classes, defined by the ending of its (short) infinitive. The class is the first thing you should identify about any new verb, because it predicts the present-tense endings.

Class	Infinitive ends in	Model verb	Meaning
I	-a	a lucra	to work
II	-ea	a vedea	to see
III	-e	a merge	to go, to walk
IV	-i / -î	a dormi / a coborî	to sleep / to descend

Note how close classes II and III look: a vedea (with the -ea diphthong) is class II, while a merge (with a plain -e) is class III. That single letter is the whole distinction, and it changes how the verb behaves.

Lucrez de acasă în fiecare vineri.

I work from home every Friday.

Nu văd nimic fără ochelari.

I can't see anything without my glasses.

Merg pe jos până la birou.

I walk to the office on foot.

Dorm prost când e prea cald.

I sleep badly when it's too hot.

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Class I (in -a) and class IV (in -i) are the two big, productive classes — almost every new or borrowed verb joins one of them. Classes II and III are small and closed, but they contain some of the most frequent verbs in the language. The full breakdown is on the conjugation classes page.

The moods Romanian inflects for

A mood tells you how the speaker frames an action — as a fact, a wish, a hypothetical, a command. Romanian has more grammatical moods than English, and learning to recognize them by their telltale markers is half the battle.

Mood	Romanian name	What it does	Marker
Indicative	indicativ	states facts	(plain conjugation)
Subjunctive	conjunctiv	wishes, goals, after modals	particle să
Conditional	condițional-optativ	"would" — hypotheticals, wishes	auxiliary aș, ai, ar...
Imperative	imperativ	commands	special command forms
Presumptive	prezumtiv	"probably / must be"	oi fi, o fi... gerund/participle

You will spend most of your early study inside the indicative (present, compound past, imperfect, future) and the conjunctiv (the să-clause). The conditional comes soon after. The presumptive is real and worth recognizing, but it is the rarest mood and you can safely leave it for later — it expresses an inference ("he must be sleeping"), and native speakers use it sparingly.

Cred că vine mâine.

I think he's coming tomorrow. (indicative — a plain statement)

Vreau să vină mâine.

I want him to come tomorrow. (conjunctiv — a wish about someone else)

Ar veni mâine dacă ar putea.

He would come tomorrow if he could. (conditional)

Alongside these finite moods, Romanian has four non-finite forms that don't carry person or number: the infinitive (a cânta), the gerund (cântând), the participle (cântat), and the distinctively Romanian supine (de cântat). They are surveyed on the finite vs non-finite page.

Three pillars for English speakers

If you internalize the three facts in this section early, the rest of the system falls into place far faster. Each is a place where Romanian works fundamentally differently from English.

Pillar 1: The să-subjunctive does the work of the English infinitive

In English, "I want to leave" stacks two verbs with a plain infinitive: want + to leave. Romanian almost never does this. Instead it uses a conjunctiv clause introduced by să, and the second verb is fully conjugated for person.

Vreau să plec acum.

I want to leave now. (literally: I want that I leave now)

Trebuie să mănânci ceva.

You need to eat something.

Pot să te ajut?

Can I help you?

Saying vreau a pleca with the bare infinitive is archaic and sounds wrong in modern speech. This să-preference is a Balkan feature shared with Greek, Bulgarian, and Albanian, and it is the single biggest structural surprise for learners arriving from Spanish, French, or Italian, where the infinitive is normal here. Full treatment is on the conjunctiv overview.

Pillar 2: The everyday past is the compound perfect with a avea

Romanian's normal spoken past — the one you use for "I ate," "I went," "I saw" — is the perfectul compus, built from the auxiliary verb a avea ("to have") plus the participle.

Am mâncat deja.

I already ate.

Ai văzut filmul?

Have you seen the film?

Au plecat acum o oră.

They left an hour ago.

This is the default past tense in conversation. Romanian does have a simple past (the perfectul simplu, e.g. mâncai), but in modern speech it survives only regionally (in parts of Oltenia and the southwest) and in literary narration — elsewhere the compound perfect covers it all. Start with the compound perfect; see the perfectul compus overview.

Pillar 3: There are several competing futures

English has essentially one future ("I will go"). Romanian has three live forms that all mean roughly the same thing but differ in register and frequency.

Form	Example ("I will go")	Register
voi infinitive	voi merge	formal, written
o să conjunctiv	o să merg	neutral, the everyday spoken default
am să conjunctiv	am să merg	colloquial, slightly emphatic

Mâine o să merg la piață.

Tomorrow I'm going to the market. (everyday spoken)

Guvernul va anunța măsurile săptămâna viitoare.

The government will announce the measures next week. (formal, written)

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If you only learn one future to start, learn o să + conjunctiv (o să merg). It's the neutral spoken default, it works in any register short of formal writing, and it reuses the conjunctiv forms you're already learning — so it costs you almost nothing extra.

In daily conversation, o să merg is what you'll hear most; the voi merge form belongs to writing and formal speech. See the future overview for when to use which.

No continuous tense

Here is a fact that quietly causes a lot of unnatural learner Romanian: Romanian has no continuous (progressive) tense. There is no grammatical equivalent of English "I am going." The simple present merg covers both meanings.

Merg la școală.

I go to school. / I am going to school. (both — context decides)

Ce faci? — Citesc.

What are you doing? — I'm reading. (just 'citesc', no progressive)

English speakers instinctively reach for an "-ing" construction and try to build one with the gerund (citind) — but sunt citind is not Romanian. Resist the urge. The plain present does the job, and if you genuinely need to stress that something is in progress, Romanian uses adverbs like acum ("now") or tocmai ("just now, right now").

Tocmai gătesc cina, te sun mai târziu.

I'm cooking dinner right now, I'll call you back later.

Common mistakes

❌ Vreau a pleca.

Wrong — the bare infinitive after a verb of wanting is archaic.

✅ Vreau să plec.

Correct — modern Romanian uses the să-subjunctive after 'a vrea'.

❌ Sunt mâncând acum.

Wrong — there is no progressive 'to be + gerund' construction in Romanian.

✅ Mănânc acum.

Correct — the simple present covers 'I am eating'.

❌ Eu sunt mâncat pâine.

Wrong — 'to be' is not the auxiliary for the everyday past.

✅ Am mâncat pâine.

Correct — the perfectul compus uses 'a avea' (am, ai, a...) as its auxiliary.

❌ Văd un film acum, deci a vedea este clasa a III-a.

Wrong — 'a vedea' ends in -ea, so it is class II, not class III.

✅ A vedea este un verb de clasa a II-a (terminație -ea).

Correct — the -ea ending puts 'a vedea' in class II.

Where to go next

Treat this page as your table of contents. The natural learning order from here is: the four conjugation classes to learn how verbs are sorted, then the present indicative to start producing real sentences, then the compound perfect for the past, and the conjunctiv to unlock everything you want, need, and can do.

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