Essential Russian Verbs contains some of the most frequent and most practical verbs based on data from the Russian National Corpus. This book contains 15 pairs of verbs essential for everyday communication. Each verb pair is numbered and arranged on a two-page layout, with the imperfective aspect shown in a blue table and its perfective equivalent shown in a red table.

We have presented verb forms with accent marks in the tables but not in the example sentences. We suggest that you listen to the accompanying audio and mark stressed syllables in the example sentences, where needed, as an additional exercise.

Example sentences appear next to the tables. Under the tables, we can find collocations and idioms, proverbs and expressions, synonyms, and derivative verbs. These make use of extra space under each table and do not necessarily correspond to the imperfective or perfective aspect of the verbs in the table on that page. The synonyms are other verbs which could be used in certain contexts and meanings instead of the featured verb. Derivative verbs are verbs derived from the featured verbs but with prefixes which change their meanings.

On the audio tracks, you will hear the past tense forms preceded by он, она, оно, and они. These are meant to help show the gender of the forms. Of course, past tense forms in Russian can be preceded by other pronouns or nouns.