Competent speech and writing is an important factor in achieving success. The morphological analysis of the predicate in any sentence, which includes the definition of gender, number, mood, tense, and especially the person of the verb, raises many questions. In fact, whether it is Russian or English, there are no difficulties, there are only characteristic features that you need to remember.
The person of the verb in Russian
When it comes to verbs in the Russian language, the main difficulties faced by a person who studies it is the multitude of formed verb endings, determined, among other things, by one of the three persons. Indeed, the latter is not defined only in the past tense and infinitive.
The person of the verb determines the pronoun with which it is combined and can exist both in the plural and in the singular. For clarity, you can reproduce this in a simple table:
| Verb face | Number | |
| The Only One | Plural | |
| 1 | me | we |
| 2 | you | you |
| 3 | she, he, it | they |
The easiest to understand is the first form, which indicates that the speaker relates the described action to himself. If he says "we", it is understood that he is part of the group about which he is talking. The second person is used if the speaker refers to his interlocutor / interlocutors. In these cases, everything is extremely transparent.
The first and second forms are personal, and the third can take, among other things, an impersonal meaning. Thus, a third-person narrative can refer to a specific or indefinite person / persons, or can be used in a sentence without a subject. Given this, it can be argued that this form is the most versatile and complex.
The person of the verb in English
As already described above, in Russian, at the end of the predicate, you can determine in which person the verb is. The English language developed differently. If a predicate-verb is extracted from a phrase, then it is impossible to determine this grammatical category from it (the only exception is the singular number of the third person, where a characteristic ending appears).
The form of a verb can only be determined by looking at the pronoun that refers to it, since the word itself, denoting action, is used in most cases in the same form.
Only a few verbs fall out of this logical chain:
- to be (declines);
- must and other modal verbs (always used in thisform);
- have (in the third person it has the form has).
With the first two everything is clear, and the service verb to be should be analyzed separately. If the definition of a person does not differ from that adopted in Russian, then the rules of formation are as follows (the pronouns with which the verb is used in this form are indicated in brackets):
- first person singular - am (I);
- the third number of the singular is (She, He, It);
- otherwise the verb takes the form are (You, We, They).
In the past simple, "to be" is the only English verb that takes two forms: "was" in the singular, "were" in the plural.
Thus, the concept of the person of the predicate in Russian and foreign languages is the same, but its forms are formed differently. And only practice will allow you to achieve its unmistakable definition and build the correct grammatical structure.
