Latin/Imperatives Lesson 1

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We’ll learn how to use imperatives in this lesson. The imperative is a "mood" of verbs: so far we’ve studied the indicative mood, which is used for observations of fact. But the imperative is used to give commands. An imperative verb is bossy; like a bossy person, it (usually) pushes to the front of a sentence.

Imperatives are formed in both singular and plural; because they are always addressed to “you” in second person, it’s necessary to decide whether you are speaking to you (singular) or you (plural). We’ve already encountered some imperatives used in conversational phrases. For the four conjugations, look at these model verbs to see how the imperative forms are typically constructed.

For our sentences, we’ll give both singular and plural forms in Latin: usually the English translation will be the same for both. We’ll do irregular imperatives and imperatives for deponent verbs in a future lesson.

Practice
Thank you for following along with these Latin lessons. Valēte et habēte bonam fortūnam!