Hindi verb tenses: present, past and future on one page

Hindi verbs are built from three pieces: a stem, an ending that agrees with the subject's gender and number, and an auxiliary that carries the tense. From करना (to do) you get मैं करता हूँ (I do), मैं कर रहा हूँ (I am doing), मैंने किया (I did), मैं करता था (I used to do) and मैं करूँगा (I will do). The stem कर never changes — everything after it does.

This is genuinely easier than English, which has to memorise go/went/gone. Hindi is regular almost everywhere. The catch is that the endings agree with the subject, so every tense comes in masculine and feminine forms.

Start with the infinitive

Every Hindi verb in a dictionary ends in -ना. Remove it and you have the stem, which is what you conjugate.

Present habitual: things you do

Stem + ता / ती / ते, then हूँ, है or हैं. This is the tense for routines, facts, and anything generally true.

The ending tracks the subject, which for मैं means it tracks the speaker. A woman saying the same sentence as a man changes the verb, and no translation engine can know which applies — that problem has its own guide.

Present continuous: things happening now

Stem + रहा / रही / रहे, then the same auxiliary. English uses '-ing' here; Hindi inserts a separate word.

Beginners often use the habitual where the continuous belongs. मैं जाता हूँ means 'I go' as a matter of habit; if you are leaving right now, you want मैं जा रहा हूँ.

Future: one ending, no auxiliary

The future is the tidiest tense in Hindi. The ending fuses onto the stem and there is no separate है or था at the end.

Past: two kinds, and one complication

Hindi splits the past. For a completed action use the perfective — stem + आ / ई / ए. For something you used to do, use the habitual ending with था instead of है.

The complication is ने. With a transitive verb in the perfective, the subject takes ने and the verb stops agreeing with the subject — it agrees with the object instead.

This is the single hardest thing in Hindi grammar and it only appears in the perfective past. मैं गया has no ने because जाना is intransitive; मैंने खाया does, because खाना takes an object. Learners get it wrong for years, and are understood the entire time.

The whole system in one verb

Read down the middle column and the pattern is obvious: the stem holds still, the ending agrees, the auxiliary marks time. Every one of these sentences also ends with the verb, which is the rule that governs Hindi word order.

The four irregular verbs

Hindi has almost no irregular verbs. In the perfective, these four do not follow the pattern, and they are among the most common words in the language.

That is the entire irregular list worth memorising as a beginner. Compare the hundreds of irregular verbs an English learner has to absorb. Hindi front-loads its difficulty into agreement and then largely leaves you alone.