Verb Conjugation Patterns

One ending pattern per person, plus a stem-vowel wrinkle for some verbs

Telugu verbs already change their ending for nearly every person — chesthanu/chesthavu/chesthadu are all visibly different forms, the same way mache/machst/macht are. So the basic German habit of 'listen for the ending, not just the pronoun' is one a Telugu speaker already owns, unlike a Malayalam speaker, whose verbs never change form for person at all. But watch a genuine wrinkle in the opposite direction: Telugu's 3rd person singular splits by gender in a way German's doesn't — వాడు చేస్తాడు ('he does', masculine -ాడు) versus ఆమె/అది చేస్తుంది ('she does'/'it does', a single shared non-masculine -ుంది ending covering both feminine and neuter). German's er/sie/es macht uses the exact same verb ending regardless of gender — only the pronoun changes. So Telugu conjugates further than German here, not less. Separately, German's stem-vowel shift in fahren/essen/sprechen/lesen (a→ä, e→i, e→ie only in du/er forms) has no Telugu counterpart at all — that specific list of stem-changing verbs must simply be memorized one by one.