Grammar: verb base forms

Just like nouns and adjectives, verbs have their base forms too

Verbs & Action

In most languages, it is the verbs where all of the action happens.

Since verbs encode so much meaning, they usually have many different forms to express these differences in meaning.

You can observe this even in English:

Noun - 2 forms: ox (Singular) - oxen (Plural) 
Verb - 3 forms: to do, did, done

In total, an Estonian verb can appear in 43 different forms.

Sounds like a lot, but in practice, you only need to know four different forms - the four base forms - to derive all of the other ones.

What’s in a verb?

A verb in Estonian expresses the following pieces of meaning/information: