Kilo Lingo

English · Chapter 7 · Lesson 8 · Grammar primer

Irregular verbs

The common verbs that do not add '-ed' in the past - go/went, take/took, dig/dug, shake/shook - and the patterns that make them easier to remember.

The short version

The past simple is not the participle

Every irregular verb has three forms, and the third one does most of the damage when you get it wrong. The past simple builds the past tense, but the past participle builds the present perfect and the passive. Learn go, went, gone as a set, out loud, rather than stopping at go, went.

I have gone.

The present perfect needs gone; I have went uses the past simple and is wrong.

That's the gist. The full article goes deeper - more examples, the edge cases, the why - and the practice below scores like a vocabulary session and earns the same XP.

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Lesson 8 of 23 in this chapter

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