German · Chapter 16 · Lesson 3 · Grammar primer
Irregular verbs
Prescribed by the AQA specification - revisited.
The short version
Learn every strong verb as three words
The past and the participle do not always share a vowel: sprach but gesprochen, sang but gesungen. Learn the infinitive alone and you will guess the rest wrong. Say all three aloud as one unit, singen, sang, gesungen, and file the verb with others that follow the same pattern.
Er sprach mit mir. Wir haben lange gesprochen.
A prefix never changes a strong verb's vowels
verstehen follows stehen, bekommen follows kommen, versprechen follows sprechen. A verb built on a strong verb takes exactly the same vowel changes, so every strong verb you learn is really several. Only the ge- of the participle is affected by the prefix, never the vowel.
Ich verstand ihn nicht.
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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One question at a time, mixed across the exercises in this lesson. Miss one and it comes back round before the end. There are 20 in all: practise more afterwards if you want them.
Lesson 3 of 20 in this chapter