My Favorite Verbs!

The Slovak language is beautiful and phonetic. The grammar is thought provoking and.........mind boggling.

But, I discovered there is a group of verbs that I love. Yes, love. They are "ovat" verbs - meaning verbs that end in those letters. There are two main reasons I love them. First, this group of verbs always conjugates the same, so there is no guessing about the ending while you are talking, no memorization to make sure you get the irregular verb endings right.

So, an example is "potrebovat" which means "to need". It conjugates like this

potrebujem - I need
potrebuje - he/she/it needs
potrebuješ - you need (informal)
potrebujeme - we need
potrebujete - you need (formal or plural)
potrebuju - they need

Because the ending in and of itself conveys meaning, you do not have to use the pronoun in a sentence. You may say, "Potrebujem pomoc." (I need help.) You may ask, "Potrebujete pomoc?" (Do you (formal or plural) need help? Of course this also means that the endings are very important because you change the unspoken pronoun with them.

There is another reason I love "ovat" verbs. There is a collection that are considered international words. This means they are words that were not in the original Slovak language, but have been adopted over the years or have become more popular. Some have just been developed in the last ten years. The best part about them is they sound very English.

Here are some examples:

telefonovat'
planovat'
kritizovat'
chatovat'
fotografovat'
flirtovat' (yes, really)

This doesn't necessarily mean that this is the only Slovak verb for these things (though it is for internet based words), but they are becoming more widely used, especially among the younger generations.

So one of my current projects is making a list of all the "ovat" verbs that sound similar to English. I know I can memorize them more easily and since the conjugation is consistent I will always know how to use them. My tutor laughs because while she is talking I will suddenly say, "There's another one!" as I hear her use an "ovat" verb. This just happened with mixovat' yesterday.

So far I have 60. Sixty glorious verbs!