How to Memorize German Irregular Verbs: Seven Patterns, Not 200 Words

Every German textbook has the same appendix: two hundred verbs in three columns, in alphabetical order. Backen, befehlen, beginnen, beißen. Alphabetical order is the one arrangement that hides everything useful about them, and learners who try to memorise the table from the top usually give up somewhere around fliegen.

The verbs are not random. German strong verbs change their stem vowel in a small number of recurring patterns, inherited from a system that English still shows in sing, sang, sung and drive, drove, driven. Learn seven patterns and the appendix turns into seven short groups plus a handful of true oddities. Then put the forms on cards the right way, and a review schedule does the rest.

What you actually have to store

For a regular verb you store one thing, the infinitive. Machen gives machte and gemacht by rule. For an irregular verb you need the Stammformen, the principal parts:

Some verbs also change in the present tense for du and er/sie/es: sehen - du siehst, er sieht, fahren - du fährst, er fährt. That is a fourth form to store, and it is the one you need first, because the present tense comes up in every sentence from A1.

So a complete entry is: infinitive, third person present if it changes, Präteritum, Partizip II with its auxiliary. fahren, fährt, fuhr, ist gefahren. Say it as one line. German schoolchildren recite it exactly like that.

The seven vowel patterns

Linguists call the vowel change Ablaut and number the classes. You do not need the numbers, only the sound of each pattern.

That is nine rows for seven classes, because two of the classes split into a long and a short variant. Together they cover the great majority of the strong verbs you will ever need.

Two useful regularities ride along:

• The verbs that change in the present are almost all in the e and a rows. An e becomes i or ie (helfen - hilft, sehen - sieht), an a becomes ä (fahren - fährt, schlafen - schläft). The ei, ie and i rows never change in the present.
• A strong Partizip II ends in -en, never in -t. gefunden, geschrieben, gefahren. If you are unsure whether a verb is strong, this is the tell.

The mixed verbs: a small closed group

A few verbs change their vowel and take the regular endings -te and -t. There are only about a dozen that matter:

bringen, brachte, gebracht - denken, dachte, gedacht - kennen, kannte, gekannt - nennen, nannte, genannt - rennen, rannte, gerannt - brennen, brannte, gebrannt - wissen, wusste, gewusst

The modal verbs behave the same way: können, konnte, gekonnt, müssen, musste, gemusst, dürfen, durfte, gedurft. Learn this group as one block in one week. More on the modals in our guide to modal verbs.

The true irregulars

What is left fits no pattern and has to be learned by heart. Luckily it is the verbs you use fifty times a day:

sein, ist, war, ist gewesen - haben, hat, hatte, gehabt - werden, wird, wurde, ist geworden - gehen, ging, ist gegangen - stehen, stand, gestanden - tun, tat, getan - kommen, kam, ist gekommen - essen, isst, aß, gegessen - sitzen, saß, gesessen - liegen, lag, gelegen

Frequency does the work here. You will see war, hatte and ging so often that they need very little deliberate effort.

Which forms you need at which level

The full three-column table is a B1 goal. Before that, learn in the order you need the forms.

In conversation, Germans tell the past with the Perfekt: Ich habe ihn gestern gesehen. The Präteritum is the tense of novels, news and reports, plus a few very common verbs that keep it in speech (war, hatte, wollte, konnte). So sah can wait, gesehen cannot. The split is explained in Präteritum or Perfekt, and the choice between haben and sein in Perfekt with haben or sein.

How to put a strong verb on a flashcard

Most verb cards fail because they ask the wrong question. A card with gehen on the front and "to go" on the back teaches you a word you already knew by the end of week one. It never tests the forms.

Use two kinds of cards.

The first is the principal-parts card. Front: schreiben plus the meaning. Answer: schrieb, hat geschrieben, said out loud as one line. This is a rhythm you are memorising, almost a short melody, and it works because the patterns above make most lines sound like lines you already know.

The second is the sentence card with a gap:

• Gestern ____ ich einen langen Brief ____ . (schreiben) - answer: habe ... geschrieben
• Er ____ jeden Tag mit dem Bus zur Arbeit. (fahren) - answer: fährt

The gap card is what proves you can use the form at speed, with the right auxiliary, in the right position. If you only have time for one kind, take this one.

Add verbs by pattern, not by alphabet. When you learn finden, fand, gefunden, add trinken and singen in the same week. The second and third verb of a pattern cost a fraction of the first.

Prefixed verbs are free. verstehen follows stehen: verstand, verstanden. ankommen follows kommen: kam an, ist angekommen. bekommen, bekam, bekommen. One base verb unlocks five to fifteen others, which is why a list of 200 strong verbs is really about 60 base verbs. The only thing to watch is the ge-: separable verbs put it in the middle (angekommen), inseparable ones drop it (verstanden). See separable verbs and what the verb prefixes mean.

A four-week plan

• Week 1: the true irregulars and the mixed verbs. About 25 verbs, most of them already half familiar.
• Week 2: the two a-patterns and e - a - e. fahren, schlafen, geben and their relatives, with the present tense change.
• Week 3: e - a - o and the two i-patterns. helfen, finden, beginnen.
• Week 4: the two ei-patterns and ie - o - o. bleiben, schneiden, fliegen.

That is 12 to 15 new verbs a week, two minutes of new material a day, and at the end of the month about 60 base verbs on a review schedule. From there, each new strong verb you meet in a text slots into a pattern you already own.

Where this sits in merke.me

In merke.me the strong verbs come in two places, and both run in one review queue. The verbs themselves are vocabulary entries in the frequency decks, so the common ones arrive first, each with example sentences and audio. The forms are grammar: the Perfekt with haben and with sein, the Präteritum of regular and irregular verbs, the Präteritum of sein, haben and the modals are separate points in the grammar library, each with its own explanation and at least 20 example sentences. They are reviewed as sentences with a gap, so ist gefahren gets drilled where it lives, in a sentence, not in a table.

That covers the second kind of card from above without any card making. The first kind, the recited line fahren, fuhr, ist gefahren, is worth keeping on paper next to it: a single sheet with the nine patterns, read aloud once a day for a month. You can look at any verb in the vocabulary and any tense in the library before signing up for anything.