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86 Top Serbian Verbs: Present & Past Tense Chart 👨🏻‍🏫

Get the world’s best learner’s chart for present and past tense Serbo-Croatian verbs, with conjugations, rules/exceptions, and examples. Designed for both comprehensive­­ness and ease of use.

See also: Serbian cases.

I’m a beginner at studying Serbian, and charts help me with all the crazy complicated grammar. But I’ve found that existing charts are generally not comprehensive enough for my needs or not organized simply, so they’re hard to follow during class or conversation. So I’ve been creating my own.

I previously posted a chart of Serbian cases and got great feedback that it’s the best such chart that many learners and native speakers have seen. I’ve just created a new chart for Serbian verbs that includes all the present and past tense rules. Click the image to view the full PDF.

Serbian verb chart: conjugations and rules for present tense and past tense verbs

You can download this with either a Letter (USA) or A4 (international) page size for ease of printing without distortion, or download my PPTX source file if you want to edit it for your own needs:

For now, this covers only present and past tenses, but in the future I’m planning to add additional charts for the others.

I’m sharing this under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, which means you should feel free to give it away or adapt it with appropriate credit.

Tip: Use en.wiktionary.org to look up conjugations for any Serbian verb. First search for the verb in its infinitive form, then click the “show ▼” link in the Conjugation section to reveal a detailed table.

How can I improve this in future versions? Did I make any mistakes? Is there anything I’m missing that’s important to include? Let me know!

Version History

  • V1.2 (2021-08-04): More verbs, more details, and minor corrections/clarifications.
  • V1.5 (2021-09-14): Marked verbs with perfective aspect only, plus numerous minor tweaks.

6 thoughts on “86 Top Serbian Verbs: Present & Past Tense Chart 👨🏻‍🏫”

  1. Reddit
    Great chart!

    Damn, when you look like this, Serbian is really difficult language to learn. Kudos to you for your effort. I will “steal” this so my wife can make some improvements in her tackling Serbian.

  2. Reddit

    It is an excellent chart! Just one suggestion: for the Past Tense of the verbs that end with -ći, you have verbs like peći (to bake) where the forms are pekao, pekla, peklo or reći (say) – rekao, rekla, reklo. So, -ć- from the infinitive can be transformed into -k- also. There is no easy explanation for this, but in Serbian language we make the past tense using the verb to be (jesam – sam, si, je…) and another verb form (radni glagolski pridev – I am sorry, I don’t know how to say this in English): ja sam radio, ja sam išla, oni su pekli. And sorry if you knew this already and you just didn’t include it because it makes things a little more complicated.
  3. Reddit
    Damn it… as a native speaker you never get into this way too deep, but it sure looks complicated. Keep up the good work!

  4. Hi Magdalena, thanks! That’s great to hear from a linguist and Serbian teacher like yourself. 🙂

    I primarily referenced my own notes I took during classes at the Serbian Language and Culture Workshop in Belgrade. I also used Wiktionary pretty heavily to check verb conjugations. A blog post from Ling App listed common Serbian verbs, and I used that to fill in a few that I didn’t already have listed.

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