Strong and Weak Verbs

And now let's look at the present tense of the real verbs. However, before we do this, you have to know that German, like English, distinguishes between two big group of verbs.

In English, we think of these groups as the "regular" verbs and the "irregular" verbs. The "regular" verbs form a past tense by adding -d or -ed:

love, loved; waltz, waltzed.

The "irregular" verbs are the ones whose past tense you have to learn, and the past participle too:

run, ran, had run; sing, sang, had sung; drive, drove, had driven. (be/am/is/are, go/gone/went, have/has)

German calls the irregular verbs STRONG (starken Verben) and the regular ones WEAK (schwachen Verben). How's that for grammatical morality?

A weak verb changes person, number, tense, etc. simply by changing the ending. A strong verb is one which changes the stem vowel, the vowel of the accented syllable.

We called "sein" irregular, because in both German and English its forms draw on several different earlier verbs for "to be." The strong verbs in German actually change according to predictable patterns, so they are not really irregular; you just have to get a feel for the pattern to which the verb belongs.

Why do English and German verbs have these patterns? It's a matter of the history of the language. In the origins of the European languages, verbs formed the past and the past participle essentially by changing the stem vowel and specific endings, and these produced the families of strong verbs. The ones that we use now are verbs that everybody uses all the time - that's why we remember the right forms.

Before the modern languages began to develop, the old Indo-European languages adopted a second conjugation system, which used new endings as indicators for the past and past participle, without changing the stem vowel. These are called the weak verbs, and most verbs added after that time belong to this group. So we could also call the strong verbs the "old" verbs.

To make it easier for you to memorize which verb is strong and which one is weak, we have given them different colors in our Wortschatz. This is useful because

you cannot distinguish a strong verb from a weak verb in the infinitive form.

Soon, though, you will learn some more forms to memorize along with the infinitive of a strong verb, to help you identify it.