Verbs:Verben - Überblick

Verbs describe the action of a sentence. To find out who the subject of a sentence is, you ask "WHO is doing what?" To find out what the verb of the sentence is, you ask "WHAT is this person DOING?"

I. Infinitives vs. conjugated verbs

Verbs can appear either in the infinitive form or in their finite, conjugated forms. English infinitives are preceded by the word "to": to work, to be.

Conjugated verbs indicate when an action takes place and, often, by whom (although this is less obvious in English than in German):

II. Regular verbs

Regular verbs follow a regular pattern (amazingly).

III.-ieren verbs

Verbs like dekorieren, reparieren, informieren are regular in the present tense, but will be a separate category in the past tense.

IV. Irregular verbs

Just like in English (am/are/is or have/has), there are many German words that are irregularly conjugated. In both languages, the most irregular are the most frequently used words, and there is nothing else to do but memorize the different forms (they are not known for logical conjugation!).

V. Tenses

Verb tenses allow us to show when actions take place: present, future, past.

a) present tense verbs express actions that are happening right now or events that happen regularly.

b) the future tense is not used all that often in German; we express future events merely by stating something in the present tense and adding a time expression of the future.

If the future (with the help of a future time expression) is not clear from the sentence, then you can use the verb werden plus an infinitive to describe actions in the future.

c) the past tense can be expressed in two ways: simple past (used in formal writing and speech) or conversational past (used in informal writing and spoken language).

Also, some verbs (modals, haben, sein, wissen) are often used only with the simple past. In German, both the conversational past and the simple past express the same idea: something happened in the past.

d) the past perfect tense is the remaining past tense. It is used when you want to state that something had happened even before another past event took place (this is really helpful in narration, as you can imagine, with words like bevor or nachdem – before/after).

VI. Participle forms

As you could see in both the present perfect and past perfect tenses, the verb takes on a special form (just like "been" or "taken" in English). This is the participle form of the verb.

a) regular verbs are formed by adding a ge- before and a -t at the end of the stem (the infinitive minus the -en):

b) -ieren verbs are also formed by adding a -t to the stem, but they do not get the ge- prefix:

c) irregular verbs can be formed with or without the ge- prefix, but end in -en (instead of the -t). And many of them have changes in the verb stem vowel.

d) mixed verbs put a bit of spin on things because they act like both regular and irregular verbs in some ways. They are like regular verbs because they all get a ge- prefix and a -t suffix, but they are like irregular verbs because the stem vowel changes.

VII. Prefixes

One more facet of verbs is that they can be preceded by prefixes, small units of language that somehow modify or enhance the meaning of verbs. Some of these prefixes are separable from the stem of the verb while others are not. Whether the prefixes are separable or not matters in declarative sentences (basic statements) and in forming the participle.

a) separable prefixes (such as aus, an, mit, nach, etc.) move to the end of a sentence or phrase in basic statements (declarative sentences):

b) inseparable prefixes (be-, emp-, ent-, er-, ge-, ver- and zer-) stay with the verb at all times:

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