German Irregular Verbs: The Strong Verb Patterns That Repeat

German irregular verbs have a bad reputation, and it is half deserved. The half that is not: almost all of them are strong verbs, and strong verbs are not random. They change their vowel in a handful of patterns that repeat, and English still runs the same system in sing, sang, sung, drink, drank, drunk and write, wrote, written. You already know how this works. You have just never had to learn it on purpose.

sprechen, sprach, gesprochen - speak, spoke, spoken

singen, sang, gesungen - sing, sang, sung

geben, gab, gegeben - give, gave, given

This page is about the past. The present-tense quirks of strong verbs, where sprechen gives er spricht and fahren gives er fährt, are covered in German verb conjugation. How to use the participle in a sentence, with haben or sein, is the job of the perfect tense. What is left, and what this page does, is the vowels themselves.

Weak, strong and mixed

Almost every German verb belongs to one of three families, and only the strong one is ever a real problem.

Weak verbs are the regular ones: -te in the past, -t on the participle, no vowel change. Every new verb that enters the language is weak, so they are the majority by a long way.

Strong verbs change their vowel and take -en on the participle. There are roughly 170 of them, and they are the old, everyday verbs: going, seeing, giving, eating, drinking, sleeping. That is exactly why they survived. Rare verbs get regularised over the centuries; the ones people say fifty times a day are too well worn to change.

Mixed verbs are a small group that change their vowel but take weak endings. More on them below.

The honest bad news is that you cannot tell a strong verb from a weak one by looking at it. leben is weak (lebte) and geben is strong (gab). The good news is that once you know a verb is strong, its pattern usually gives you all three forms at once.

The simple past is where the vowel lives

Every strong verb has three forms worth learning, which grammars call the principal parts (Stammformen): the infinitive, the simple past (Präteritum) and the past participle. The simple past is the key, because it is where the new vowel appears, and it has an ending system of its own that is simpler than the present:

The ich and er forms are the bare stem with no ending at all. Everything else takes the endings you already know from the present. That is the whole Präteritum of a strong verb: one new vowel, one bare form, and the familiar endings on the rest.

The eight patterns

Here are the patterns that cover nearly every strong verb in the course's first 1,000 words. Each is named by its three vowels: infinitive, simple past, participle.

1. ei, ie, ie. The biggest and most reliable group.

A smaller branch goes ei, i, i with a doubled consonant: leiden, litt, gelitten. English ride, rode, ridden and write, wrote, written are the same family.

2. ie, o, o. Also very regular within itself.

lügen, log, gelogen joins this group despite its ü. English kept one fossil of the pattern: forlorn is the old participle of a lost English verb meaning to lose, and a direct cousin of verloren.

3. i, a, u. The one English speakers get for free.

Sing, sang, sung; drink, drank, drunk. A close branch goes i, a, o before a double n: beginnen, begann, begonnen and gewinnen, gewann, gewonnen.

4. e, a, o. Almost all of these also change e to i in the present (er spricht, er hilft), which is a useful signal.

Also werfen, brechen and stehlen. English speak, spoke, spoken and break, broke, broken show the same o in the participle.

5. e, a, e. The same present-tense change (e to i or ie), but the participle goes back to the infinitive's vowel.

Also vergessen, treten and geschehen. English give, gave, given matches it exactly.

6. a, u, a. The a to ä verbs of the present tense.

English shake, shook, shaken and take, took, taken run the same pattern.

7. The ie past, same vowel in the participle. A mixed bag of infinitive vowels (a, au, u, ei) that all take ie (or i) in the past and return to the infinitive's vowel in the participle.

fangen, fing, gefangen belongs here too. English fall, fell, fallen is the same verb.

8. The loners. A few very common verbs follow no group, and they are worth learning as straight vocabulary:

gehen and stehen are the strangest of the lot, picking up a consonant in the past that the infinitive does not have, and English go, went, gone and stand, stood are no better behaved.

Mixed verbs: a vowel change with weak endings

A small group, all common, change their vowel like strong verbs but then take the weak -te and -t:

English bring, brought and think, thought are the same verbs with the same history. haben is irregular in a similar way, with weak endings on a squashed stem: hatte, gehabt.

Prefixes change nothing

This is where the patterns really pay off. A verb built on a strong verb is strong in exactly the same way, whatever prefix sits in front of it:

• verstehen, verstand, verstanden follows stehen.
• bekommen, bekam, bekommen follows kommen.
• verlassen, verließ, verlassen follows lassen.
• versprechen, versprach, versprochen follows sprechen.
• anfangen, fing an, angefangen follows fangen.
• aussehen, sah aus, ausgesehen follows sehen.

The only thing a prefix changes is the ge- of the participle, which disappears after be-, ver-, er- and the other inseparable prefixes and moves inside a separable verb. The perfect tense sets out that rule. The vowel itself is untouched. So each strong verb you learn is really several verbs, and the list is much shorter than it looks.

When you actually need these forms

You need the participle from the moment you talk about the past, because the perfect tense is built on it: Ich habe das Buch gelesen.

You need the simple past for reading. Books, newspapers and every story ever told in German run on the Präteritum, starting with the first line of every fairy tale, Es war einmal ein König. Here is the kind of paragraph you will meet within weeks:

Der Mann kam spät nach Hause. Er trank ein Glas Wasser, las einen Brief und ging ins Bett. Dann klingelte das Telefon.

The man came home late. He drank a glass of water, read a letter and went to bed. Then the phone rang.

Four strong verbs in three sentences, and one weak one at the end (klingelte) for contrast. You can read that without knowing a single pattern. You cannot write it.

And you need the simple past to build Konjunktiv 2 the old-fashioned way. Take the Präteritum, add an umlaut where the vowel allows one and an -e: kam gives käme, ging gives ginge, and gab gives gäbe, which survives in everyday speech as es gäbe (there would be). The most useful single form on this page may well be the plain es gab (there was, there were).

Mistakes English speakers make

Making a strong verb weak. Gehte, gesingt and getrinkt are the German for goed and drinked. Children make exactly this mistake in both languages, and Germans will understand you, but it marks the sentence at once. If a verb is common and short, suspect that it is strong.

Taking the wrong vowel into the participle. The past and the participle do not always share a vowel. sprach but gesprochen, never gesprachen. sang but gesungen. This is why you learn three forms, not two.

Adding -e to the ich form of the simple past. It is ich kam and ich sprach, with no ending. Ich kame does not exist, and ich käme is a different thing entirely: Konjunktiv 2.

Assuming the English verb tells you the German one. It is a good guide, not a rule. Help is weak in English and helfen is strong. Bring is irregular in both, but bringen is mixed. Use the English cognate to remember the German pattern once you know it, not to guess it.

Mixing up similar verbs. liegen, lag, gelegen (to lie, to be lying) is strong; legen, legte, gelegt (to lay, to put down) is weak. English has exactly the same pair in lie, lay, lain and lay, laid, laid, and gets them just as confused.

What to do next

Learn every strong verb as three words, said aloud as one unit: singen, sang, gesungen. Never the infinitive on its own. Then file each new verb under its pattern, so trinken arrives already knowing its forms because singen got there first.

Start with the loners and the dozen verbs you say most (gehen, kommen, sehen, geben, nehmen, sprechen, finden, bleiben, schreiben, fahren, schlafen, lesen) and the patterns will fill themselves in around them. The word pages for sprechen, sehen and gehen show all three forms, and the German course meets these verbs in the past from chapter 6 and reaches this page in chapter 10, by which point most of the patterns will already look familiar.