Albanian Verbs: Conjugation & Tenses

First, the two you can't skip: jam and kam

Before the groups and patterns, memorise these two irregular verbs - jam ("to be") and kam ("to have"). They are the most common verbs in the language, and they also act as helpers to build other tenses.

The six groups of Albanian verbs

Albanian has no infinitive, so a verb is named by its first-person singular present form ("I …") - punoj is literally "I work". Grouping verbs by how that form ends makes their patterns predictable.

Formal grammars usually describe about three conjugations; the six groups below are a practical teaching split that pulls out a few useful sub-cases. Learn which group a verb belongs to and its endings mostly follow.

How the present tense works

Most groups share a family of endings, and the pronoun is often optional because the ending already shows who is acting. The -oj class is the model to learn first - swap -oj for the ending that matches the subject:

The other patterns at a glance

Consonant-ending verbs add the endings straight onto the bare form - the singular often stays unchanged (hap, hap, hap … then hapim, hapni, hapin). Short vowel-stem verbs barely change in the singular (pi, pi, pi … pimë, pini, pinë). And reflexive / non-active verbs take their own endings, -hem / -hesh / -het:

One verb through every tense

Here is punoj ("to work") across the tenses you will actually use. Notice the present perfect uses kam, and the future uses the fixed particle do të with the subjunctive.

What to focus on first

You do not need all of this at once. Nail the present tense of the -oj class plus the two irregulars jam and kam, and you can already build most everyday sentences. Add the simple past and the future next, and leave the finer moods for later.