Present-Tense Endings and Subject Agreement

The present tense is the first thing you conjugate in German, and the endings you learn here recur, almost unchanged, in tense after tense. Master this one paradigm and you have built the spine of the whole verb system. The logic is simple: drop the -en from the infinitive to get the stem, then attach an ending that matches the subject.

The six personal endings

German has six grammatical persons, and each one calls for a specific ending on the verb. Here they are on the regular verb machen (to do/make), stem mach-:

Two efficiencies are built into this table. First, wir and sie/Sie always take -en — the same form as the infinitive. So wir machen, sie machen, Sie machen all look like the dictionary form; you get three persons for the price of learning one ending. Second, the polite Sie (capitalized) borrows the third-person-plural form, which is why Sie machen covers "you (formal) do" as well as "they do."

The subject pronoun is obligatory

This is the rule English speakers get right by instinct but Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese speakers stumble over: in German, you must state the subject. Even though the -st ending already screams "du," German will not let you drop the pronoun. The verb ending is a confirmation, not a replacement.

You cannot say Spielst heute Abend mit? on its own — the du has to be there. The only systematic exception is the imperative, where the command form deliberately omits the pronoun (Komm her! — Come here!). Everywhere else, no subject means an ungrammatical sentence.

Why does German keep the pronoun when the ending seems redundant? Because the endings are not fully distinctive: er macht and ihr macht share -t; wir/sie/Sie machen share -en. Without the pronoun, you genuinely could not tell who is meant. The pronoun carries the load that the ending alone cannot.

Putting the verb in second position

There is a second non-negotiable rule riding alongside agreement: in a German main clause, the finite verb stands in second position (the "V2" rule). "Second" means the second slot, not the second word — a whole phrase can fill the first slot. Whatever you front, the verb still comes right after it, and the subject then slides behind the verb:

In Heute mache ich nichts, the time phrase heute takes slot one, mache holds slot two, and ich follows. English keeps the subject first (Today I do nothing); German lets almost anything go first but guards the verb's second position fiercely. We treat this in depth on the verb-second word order page.

The linking -e- after t- and d-stems

Now for the one wrinkle that trips everyone up — and the good news is it is completely predictable. Try to say du arbeitst out loud: the t-st cluster is a tongue-twister. German solves this by slipping a linking -e- between the stem and the ending whenever the stem ends in -t or -d (and after certain consonant clusters like -chn, -dn, -fn, -tm). This affects exactly the endings that would otherwise pile consonants onto the stem: the du, er/sie/es, and ihr forms.

Here is arbeiten (to work), stem arbeit-:

The key insight is that this is phonology, not vocabulary. You don't memorize "arbeiten takes -e-" verb by verb. You apply one rule — if the stem ends in t/d, insert -e- — and it predicts findet, redet, badet, öffnet, rechnet, atmet automatically. The same logic, the same single rule, every time. We list every consonant cluster that triggers it on the stems in -t, -d, -s page.

A related sound rule: -s, -ß, -z stems and du

A second small pattern touches only the du form. The du ending is -st, but if the stem already ends in an -s, -ß, -z, or -x sound, that s would be doubled or redundant — so German drops the s of the ending and you just add -t:

(Note that lesen also shows a strong-verb vowel change — du liest, er liest — which is a separate matter covered on the e → i / ie vowel change page. The -s/-ß/-z rule and the vowel change can stack on the same verb.)

Common Mistakes

Key Takeaways

• The present endings are -e, -st, -t, -en, -t, -en; in practice only four distinct shapes (-e, -st, -t, -en).
• wir and sie/Sie always take -en (= the infinitive); polite Sie copies the sie plural.
• The subject pronoun is mandatory — German never drops it (except in the imperative).
• After a t/d-stem, insert a linking -e- (arbeitest, findet, atmet); this is a sound rule, not a list to memorize.
• An -s/-ß/-z stem drops the s of the du ending: du heißt, du liest, du tanzt.