Urdu Verb Forms
Common Urdu verbs in ten forms each, with one example sentence carried unchanged through every form so that only the verb moves. Set the person and gender, then open a verb.
About this table
This table runs a set of common Urdu verbs through ten forms and carries one example sentence unchanged through all of them, so the only thing that moves down a column is the verb. The words in those sentences come from the vocabulary list I keep for my own classes, which holds the examples inside a beginner’s range.
Two romanisations appear for every verb, and each is included for a different purpose. The first is the spelling my teacher uses in class, which I have kept because it is what I actually read and write when I study. The second is the loosely ALA-LC system used on the script page: macrons for long vowels (ā ī ū), subscript dots for retroflexes (ṭ ḍ ṛ), and ṉ for nasalisation. The teacher’s spelling is faster to read aloud and closer to how a word sounds to an English ear. The ALA-LC spelling is unambiguous, which matters for pairs like paṛhnā (to read) and paṛnā (to fall), which the teacher’s system writes the same way.
How to use the subject selector
Urdu verbs agree with their subject in gender and number in every form except the transitive perfective, so a static table has to either list every variant in one cell or pick one and hide the rest. Setting the person and the gender at the top changes the agreement across the whole table at once. The perfective row is the one to watch. A transitive verb in the perfective takes the postposition ne on its subject and then agrees with its object instead, so moving from maiṉ to āp swaps the pronoun and leaves the verb exactly where it was. Those rows are shaded. A few verbs, such as khulnā and pighalnā, cannot take a human subject at all, and they keep their own fixed subject whatever the selector says.
Limitations
This verb table has three limitations:
- Ten forms is not the whole verb system. The passive (perfective participle plus jānā), the compound verbs built with vector verbs such as jānā, lenā, denā and ḍālnā, and the causative series (karnā, karānā, karvānā) are all absent.
- Transitive and intransitive are treated as a binary. A small group of verbs, including lānā, bhūlnā, bolnā and samajhnā, take an object but never take ne. They are tagged separately in the list.
- Most example sentences use a singular object, which hides the fact that a plural object pulls the perfective and its auxiliary into the plural. Pahannā is included as the one worked example of that.
Sources and method
The verb list is my own, kept as a spreadsheet through about a year and a half of conversational classes. Forms were checked against Schmidt (1999) and Matthews and Dalvi (2014). Oesterheld and Tahir (2024) was consulted where the two disagreed.
This is a learner’s reference compiled by a learner, not a teaching text. Corrections from native and heritage speakers are very welcome.
References
Matthews, D., & Dalvi, M. K. (2014). Complete Urdu: Beginner to intermediate course (6th ed.). Teach Yourself.
Oesterheld, C., & Tahir, A. M. (2024). Urdu für Anfänger (2nd ed.). Buske.
Schmidt, R. L. (1999). Urdu: An essential grammar. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203979280