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Irregular Verbs in the Preterite Tense - Intermediate German with Herr Antrim #15
Hello, German learners.
In the last video Rainer read a story.
This story showed you a lot of irregular verbs in the preterite tense.
Today I will explain to you the rules for them.
If you watch this video to the end,
I will annoy your German teachers,
because I am talking about one of the most controversial grammar rules in German.
Are they strong verbs or irregular verbs
and is there a difference between these terms?
Are there even regular strong verbs or irregular weak verbs?
(Herr Antrim shrugs.)
As I have already said in the other videos, the preterite tense is mostly used
to express something in the past when writing.
The preterite is also known as “the simple past”,
because you usually only use one verb in order to express this past tense.
The verb “sein” is a perfect example of irregular verbs in the preterite tense.
Because I have already explained this verb to you, you can of course conjugate it in the preterite tense.
If not, I will review it
in order to clarify the rules for irregular verbs in the preterite tense.
As you can probably see, “war” is in no way similar to “sein”.
“War” is the new verbstem that we can see in every form.
For “ich” and “er, sie, es” we don’t need anything more.
“War” is enough. I was… He was…
The other endings are exactly as they are in the present tense.
“Du” requires -st.
“Wir” and “sie” -en.
And “ihr” -t.
Now we will look at another example, the verb “geben” (to give).
As you can see the conjugation is quite simple.
No ending for “ich” and “er, sie, es”
and the same endings as in the present tense for the rest.
What happens, however, when the verb stem ends with “S” or “ß”.
For example: essen - In the preterite tense the verb stem is “aß”.
Then we add a helping vowel “E”
between the verb stem and the ending with “du” and “ihr”.
The other forms don’t need that.
We do the same when the verb stem ends with “D” and “T”. For example:
"finden" (to find) in the preterite "fand"
"tun" (to do) in the preterite "tat"
That isn’t so complicated, but now you are asking yourselves, how you are supposed to know the verb stem,
when it looks like they are completely arbitrary?
sein - war, geben - gab, essen - aß, finden - fand, tun - tat.
Do all stem vowels become “A” in the preterite tense?
No. bleiben - blieb.
Do all verb stems in the preterite have the same consonant at the end as the present?
No. ziehen - zog.
Why does everything in German have to be complicated?
In my opinion, it isn’t that complicated.
You simply have to recognize the patterns.
Because I can recognize these patterns, I can usually guess what a verb is in the preterite tense without googling it.
With some practice, you can do it, too.
Many verbs with “EI” in the verb stem in the infinitive,
swap these letters in the perfect and preterite tenses. For example:
Be careful, however, because there is also the verb “heißen”, which switches these vowels twice.
Although most verbs with “EI” in the verb stem swap these vowels,
there are a few verbs that simply have “I” in the place of “EI”. For example:
“IE” often becomes “O” in the preterite and present perfect tenses.
If a verb has “E” in the verb stem, there are two common patterns, E-A-O and E-A-E.
E-A-O
E-A-E
If a verb stem has “A”, there are two common patterns, A-U-A and A-IE-A.
A-U-A
A-IE-A
There is also I-A-U and I-A-O verbs. For example:
I-A-U
I-A-O
What I find especially helpful is that these verbs are often similar in English,
because English and German belong to the same language family.
If you already know the English verbs, the German ones are a lot easier.
For example:
Although these verbs look almost the same in English and German,
there are many other verbs that are irregular in German and English.
Often it is that when a verb is irregular in English,
the German version is also irregular.
If you use an irregular verb in English,
then the verb in German is most likely also irregular.
They might not be similar in how they are irregular,
but it is a good rule of thumb:
irregular in English =
irregular in German.
Unfortunately many English native speakers can’t form irregular verbs anymore or understand them.
Then it isn’t helpful at all.
There is another category of verbs, that some teachers use in their classes
that I think is dumb.
They call this category “mixed verbs” or “irregular weak verbs”.
This category includes for example the following verbs:
First of all, I will explain why I think that it is dumb
to call these verbs either “mixed verbs” or “irregular weak verbs”.
They don’t follow the rules for regular verbs in the preterite.
Because the stems of these verbs are not the same as they are in the infinitive,
that means that you are simply going to have to memorize them.
In my opinion the learner should just memorize them
as if it were another irregular verb.
But why do some teachers call these verbs this and what exactly are “irregular weak verbs”?
That is a semantic distinction, which no learners really understands or needs.
Weak verbs are those that follow the rules.
In preterite that means that the verbs are conjugated with the -te endings and in the perfect they end with -t.
Strong verbs don’t get a -te in the preterite and end with -en in the present perfect tense.
Regular verbs don’t have a stem vowel change in the preterite and present perfect,
while the irregular verbs have one.
There are some teachers who believe “irregular” means that they don’t follow almost any rules,
which means that these verbs are really rare. For example: gehen-ging-gegangen (go-went-gone).
There are a few problems with this thought process, however.
First of all most learners don’t want to know something like this and they don’t need to know it.
It is simpler to say “There are two categories of irregular verbs,
regular and irregular.
The regular verbs follow the rules and the irregular verbs do what they want.
You simply have to memorize them.”
Second of all, too many teachers don’t really understand the difference between strong and irregular
and they teach incorrectly because they have no idea that they aren’t correct.
Third, there are already enough things that German learners have to memorize
without confusing them with weak and strong and regular and irregular.
The simple version:
Regular verbs do what the rules command.
Irregular verbs do something strange.
How this “strange” thing looks depends upon how strange the verb wants to be.
There are other patterns that verbs can follow,
but the ones that I have already mentioned are the most popular ones.
I already have a few other videos about the categories of irregular verbs.
In these videos you can see more examples,
but I have done something special for the people still watching this video.
I have sorted and read the most important irregular verbs.
There is a link in the corner of this video that leads you to this video.
If you are looking online for German language lessons,
you should check out Lingoda.
Their teachers are native speakers and their lessons are fantastic.
There is a link in the description for that.
If you want to see other videos with me, you can click these links.
In the next video, we will finally see Rainer’s apartment and he will talk about that.
That is all for today. Thanks for watching. Until next time. Bye.