Stems and Pieces

When you look up a verb in a dictionary, you see something like this:

to go
to speak
to be good
to read

Let's call this the "dictionary form" of a verb. The stem of the verb is what you get when you take away the

. You'll be putting your verb endings onto this stem.

Note that the verbs to be good and to read have stems that end in a consonant; the other two stems end in a vowel. This is an important distinction.

The process of adding endings to the verb stem is called conjugation. Before we can start conjugating, we need to know whom we're talking to.