Verb endings

I'm sure you've noticed by now that Latin has a whole disconcerting fleet of endings. Endings for nouns, adjectives, verbs, everything. Any properly transitive verb has 134 possible forms. This seems really daunting. The truth is that you really only need four, yes four, to deal with the most common forms: 3rd person singular and plural. All tenses, voices and moods.

	Singular	Plural
Active	-t	-nt
Passive	-tur	-ntur

This will get you about 85% of the way home. And yes, I'm aware that there is more to the ending than the chart. This is meant to be quick and dirty. Of course, you'll want to get all the way there, but sometimes quick and dirty is what you need.

	Main	Passive	Perfect
1st S	-o/-m	-r	-i
2nd S	-s	-ris	-isti
3rd S	-t	-tur	-it
1st P	-mus	-mur	-imus
2nd P	-tis	-mini	-istis
3rd P	-nt	-ntur	-erunt

Obviously there are a few more wrinkles, but this will allow you to get to person and number immediately in only 19 endings. What's cool about this setup is that the perfect tense immediately announces itself with it's odd endings (32%). This is good. It means you now know tense for nearly 1/3 of all verbs. If you know the -ba- signal for the imperfect (13%), you can almost (but not quite) assume the rest is present tense (40%). (Of course I'm making some pretty free assumptions here, they aren't necessarily true. I'm trying to show you how easy this can be.)

So here's the upshot: Four endings get you nearly everything you need to know about a verb. Four.

Note: All percentages drawn from a most excellent book, though not really meant for students as much as teachers. Distler, Paul. Teach the Latin, I Pray You.