German Verb Conjugation: The One Pattern Under Every Verb

German verb conjugation has a reputation it does not deserve. There is one set of endings, it covers almost every verb in the language, and the verbs people call irregular are mostly regular verbs with a vowel that moves.

English barely conjugates at all: I say, you say, we say, they say, and one lonely -s for he, she and it. German marks every person with its own ending, which looks like more work and is actually less guessing. Once you know the ending, you know who is speaking, even before you have heard the pronoun properly.

Step one: find the stem

Every German infinitive ends in -en (a few end in plain -n, which we will come to). Chop that off and what is left is the stem:

• sagen gives sag-
• machen gives mach-
• gehen gives geh-
• kommen gives komm-

The stem carries the meaning. The ending carries the person. That division of labour is the whole system.

Step two: add six endings

These six endings are the single most useful thing on this page. Learn them as a chant, because you will use them in every sentence you ever say in German:

Three things jump out of that table, and all three save you effort.

1. The wir and sie forms are the infinitive. wir sagen, sie sagen. Nothing to learn (sein, with wir sind, is the one exception).
2. The formal Sie is the same as they. Sie sagen means you say (politely) and sie sagen means they say. Only the capital letter tells them apart, and in speech only context does.
3. er and ihr share -t. er sagt and ihr sagt are identical in form. The pronoun does the work.

So the six endings are really four shapes: -e, -st, -t and -en. That is the pattern underneath every German verb, and the rest of this page is small adjustments to it.

Two spelling adjustments you cannot skip

The endings stay the same, but two groups of stems need a little help to stay pronounceable.

Stems ending in -t or -d add an extra -e-. Without it, du arbeitst would be unsayable, so German slips in a vowel: du arbeitest, er arbeitet, ihr arbeitet. The same goes for finden (du findest, er findet) and warten (du wartest, er wartet).

Stems ending in an s sound drop the s of -st. heißen (to be called) would give a clumsy heißst, so the du form is simply du heißt, identical to er heißt. sitzen does the same: du sitzt.

And the verbs whose infinitive ends in plain -n, such as erinnern and ändern, take -n rather than -en in the plural: wir erinnern, sie ändern. That is as exotic as regular German gets.

Strong verbs: the same endings plus a vowel change

Here is where the reputation comes from, and where it falls apart on inspection.

German verbs come in two families. Weak verbs keep their vowel in every tense and build the past with -te: sagen, sagte, gesagt. Strong verbs change their vowel to make the past: gehen, ging, gegangen. English has exactly the same split. Walk, walked, walked is a weak verb; sing, sang, sung is a strong one. You have been using strong verbs since you were three.

In the present tense, most of that difference disappears. gehen is strong, but its present is perfectly regular: ich gehe, du gehst, er geht. So is kommen, and finden, and bleiben.

A subset of strong verbs does one extra thing in the present: it changes the stem vowel in the du and er forms only. There are three patterns and no others worth worrying about:

The endings are exactly the ones you already learned. The ich form keeps the infinitive's vowel. The whole plural keeps it too. Only two cells in the column move, and they always move together: if the du form changes, the er form changes in the same way.

Other common verbs in each group:

• e to i: geben (er gibt), nehmen (er nimmt, which also doubles its m), helfen (er hilft), essen (er isst), vergessen (er vergisst), treffen (er trifft).
• e to ie: lesen (er liest), sehen (er sieht), stehlen (er stiehlt).
• a to ä: schlafen (er schläft), tragen (er trägt), fallen (er fällt), halten (er hält, with no extra -e- once the vowel has changed), lassen (er lässt), and laufen, where au becomes äu: er läuft.

The dictionary will tell you which verbs belong here, and the course flags them as they come up. What you do not need is a separate table for each verb. You need the six endings, plus the knowledge that some du and er forms borrow a different vowel.

The four verbs that really are irregular

A handful of verbs do break the pattern, and they are, unhelpfully, the four you need most. Learn them as vocabulary rather than grammar:

Even here, most of the table is regular. haben only loses its b in du hast and er hat. werden is an e to i verb that also bends its ending. wissen behaves exactly like the modal verbs, with no ending on ich or er. Only sein is irregular top to bottom, and English be (am, are, is, was, were) is no better.

One present tense does the work of two

English has I work and I am working. German has only ich arbeite, and it covers both:

• Ich arbeite heute. - I am working today.
• Ich arbeite viel. - I work a lot.

This is not German being vague. It is English being unusually fussy. Most European languages manage with one present, and context settles the rest.

The German present also covers much of what English does with the future, as long as a time word makes the meaning clear:

• Er fährt morgen in die Stadt. - He is driving into town tomorrow.
• Wir gehen heute nach Hause. - We are going home today.

German does have a real future tense, built with werden, but in speech the present plus a time word does most of the job, and it is the more natural choice in simple sentences like these.

Mistakes English speakers make

Building a continuous with sein. Ich bin arbeiten does not mean I am working: in speech it means I am out at work. English speakers reach for it because I am working has two words. (You will also hear ich bin am Arbeiten in casual speech, especially in the west; it is colloquial, so leave it until you know where it fits.) German has one: ich arbeite. If you must stress that it is happening right now, add gerade: Ich arbeite gerade.

Changing the vowel in the plural. The vowel change is a du-and-er affair. Wir sprechen, never wir sprichen. Ihr fahrt, never ihr fährt. If you find yourself changing a plural vowel, stop.

Changing the vowel in the ich form. Equally common, equally wrong. Ich spreche, ich fahre, ich sehe. The ich form is always built on the infinitive's own vowel.

Dropping the ending entirely. English speakers tend to say the stem and hope. Ich sag does exist in casual speech, but du sag and er sag do not, and the -st and -t endings are how a German listener knows who you are talking about. Say them.

Mixing up du, ihr and Sie. du is one person you know well, ihr is several of them, and Sie is anyone you would call Mr or Mrs, singular or plural. Each has its own verb form, so choosing the pronoun also chooses the ending. German personal pronouns covers when to use which.

Where the verb goes

Conjugating the verb is half the job. The other half is putting it in the right place, and German is strict about that: in an ordinary statement the conjugated verb sits in second position, whatever comes first.

• Ich gehe heute nach Hause. - I am going home today.
• Heute gehe ich nach Hause. - Today I am going home.

The verb has not moved. Everything else has. That rule, and the one that sends the verb to the end after weil and dass, is the subject of German word order, and it is the natural next step once the endings are automatic.

What to do next

Learn the six endings until you can say them without thinking: -e, -st, -t, -en, -t, -en. Then run a few verbs through them out loud, starting with machen, sagen and kommen. After that, learn sein and haben as vocabulary, and meet the strong verbs one at a time as they turn up, noting only whether the du and er forms move their vowel.

That is the entire present tense. It really is one pattern, with a vowel shift on top for some verbs and four genuine exceptions, and the German course drills it from the first chapter so the endings arrive through use rather than through tables. The cases chart is the other half of German grammar worth getting early, because a verb that is conjugated perfectly still needs the right article on the nouns around it.