Strong and Irregular Verbs: Master Reference Table

Weak verbs you can build from a rule. Strong and irregular verbs you have to know. A strong verb forms its past not by adding -te/-de but by changing the stem vowel (ablaut): geven → gaf → gegeven, zingen → zong → gezongen. Most strong participles end in -en, not -t/-d. On top of these sit a handful of genuinely irregular and mixed verbs — zijn, hebben, gaan, brengen, denken — that bend even the strong patterns. This page is the capstone lookup: one big table of the verbs that won't follow the weak rule, grouped by ablaut class so the hidden regularities show through.

How to read the table

• Simple past (sg.) is the ik / hij form; simple past (pl.) is the wij / jullie / zij form. For most strong verbs the plural just adds -en to the singular (gaf → gaven), but several classes also lengthen the vowel in the plural (at → aten, sprak → spraken) — those are the ones worth memorising as a pair.
• Aux is the perfect-tense auxiliary: h = hebben, z = zijn. Some verbs take zijn when they express a change of state/place and hebben otherwise — marked z/h.
• Vowel length matters: a single vowel in a closed syllable is short (kwam), a doubled or open vowel is long (kwamen, gaf/gaven). The spelling carries the sound.

The essentials: zijn, hebben, worden, and the modals

These are the highest-frequency irregulars in the language. You will use them in nearly every sentence, so they are worth memorising cold before anything else.

Class 1: ij → ee → e (long-i verbs)

A large, very regular class: infinitive ij, past ee, participle e.

Class 2: ie/ui → oo → o

Class 3: short i/e → o → o (nasal + consonant)

The -ng / -nk / -nd / -lp verbs, mostly with a short vowel throughout.

Class 4 & 5: short past, long plural (e → a → e/o)

The classic "singular short, plural long" verbs — the pattern worth memorising as a pair.

Class 6: long-a verbs (a → oe → a)

Class 7: reduplicating verbs (ie/i in the past)

A distinctive group whose past takes ie or i and whose participle returns to the infinitive vowel.

The mixed verbs: weak ending, changed vowel

These take a dental ending like weak verbs and change the stem vowel like strong verbs (brengen → bracht, denken → dacht). They are pure memorisation — and extremely frequent. The last two rows are listed as warnings rather than members of the class: zeggen is irregular (zei), and leggen is in fact perfectly regular weak — included only because learners constantly confuse it with the strong verb liggen (lag → gelegen).

The high-frequency irregulars: doen, gaan, zien

The three you cannot avoid, each a one-off pattern.

Common Mistakes

Key Takeaways

• Strong verbs change the stem vowel and usually end the participle in -en (geven → gaf → gegeven); weak verbs add -te/-de and -t/-d. When in doubt, treating an unknown verb as weak is the safer default — but every verb in this table is an exception.
• Several classes keep the singular past short and the plural past long: at/aten, sprak/spraken, nam/namen, gaf/gaven, kwam/kwamen.
• Mixed verbs (brengen, denken, kopen, zoeken) combine a changed vowel with a dental ending: bracht, dacht, kocht, zocht.
• Watch the auxiliary: change-of-state and motion verbs (blijven, komen, gaan, vallen, worden, zijn) take zijn; most others take hebben; several (rijden, vliegen, lopen, breken) switch depending on whether a destination/result is expressed.
• The fastest path to fluency is to over-learn the top block — zijn, hebben, worden, gaan, komen, doen, zien and the modals — because they recur in nearly every sentence.