German · Chapter 1 · Lesson 16 · Grammar primer

Verb conjugation

Prescribed by the AQA specification.

The short version

Six endings conjugate almost every German verb

Drop the -en and add -e, -st, -t, -en, -t, -en. That one chant covers the present tense of nearly every verb in the language, and the wir and sie forms are just the infinitive again. Learn it out loud once and the rest is vocabulary.

Ich sage, du sagst, er sagt.

I say, you say, he says.

Strong verbs only move their vowel for du and er

Verbs like sprechen, sehen and fahren change their vowel in two places only: the du form and the er form. The ich form and the whole plural keep the infinitive's vowel. So it is ich spreche and wir sprechen, but du sprichst and er spricht.

Ich fahre, aber er fährt.

I drive, but he drives.

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.

Read the full article · 9 min read

Practice

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10-question session

One question at a time, mixed across the exercises in this lesson. Miss one and it comes back round before the end. There are 19 in all: practise more afterwards if you want them.

Lesson 16 of 18 in this chapter

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