Weak, Strong, and Mixed Verbs

Every German verb belongs to one of three classes, and the class decides how the verb behaves in the past. The good news for English speakers is that this is the exact same system you already use. English has regular verbs (walk, walked, walked) and irregular ones (sing, sang, sung); German simply calls them weak and strong, plus a third hybrid called mixed. Learn to recognize the class, and you can predict the past tense and the participle.

The defining test: how a verb forms its past

You classify a verb by looking at its three principal parts — the infinitive, the Präteritum (simple past), and the past participle:

That single table is the whole concept. The rest of this page just shows you how to use it.

Weak verbs: the regular, productive default

Weak verbs keep their stem vowel unchanged and signal the past with predictable endings: -te in the Präteritum and the frame ge-...-t in the participle. Machen is the model:

Weak is the default and productive class. This matters enormously: whenever German invents or borrows a verb, the verb is automatically weak. Modern loanwords prove it — googeln (to google) gives googelte and gegoogelt; liken (to like, on social media) gives likte and geliked/gelikt; downloaden gives downloadete. No new verb has ever joined the strong class. The strong pattern is a closed museum; the weak pattern is the living factory.

Strong verbs: vowel change (ablaut) and ge-...-en

Strong verbs change their stem vowel to mark the past — a phenomenon called ablaut — and take the participle frame ge-...-en (note the -en, not -t). Singen and fahren are classic models:

Here is the part competitors gloss over: the most common verbs in German are strong. Gehen, kommen, sehen, geben, nehmen, essen, trinken, fahren, lesen, sprechen, finden — the verbs you reach for a hundred times a day — are almost all strong. This is identical to English, where go, come, see, give, take, eat, drink are exactly the irregular ones. High frequency protects old patterns from being smoothed out. So you cannot avoid strong verbs by sticking to "easy" vocabulary; the easiest words are the strong ones.

Mixed verbs: a small, awkward middle group

Mixed verbs (sometimes "irregular weak verbs") do both things at once: they change the stem vowel like a strong verb but take the weak endings -te and ge-...-t. There are only a handful, but they are high-frequency, so they are worth memorizing as a block:

The mixed verbs are the German equivalent of English bring/brought/brought and think/thought/thought — and the parallel is not a coincidence. Bringen/brachte and bring/brought, denken/dachte and think/thought descend from the same ancient Germanic verbs. If a German mixed verb has an obvious English cousin that is also irregular, you already half-know it.

Strong verbs are not pure chaos: the ablaut series

Most courses present strong verbs as a list to be brute-force memorized. That overstates the difficulty. Strong verbs fall into ablaut series — recurring vowel patterns shared by whole groups of verbs. Once you internalize a pattern, every verb in that group comes for free:

The patterns are not perfectly reliable — German would not be German if they were — but they cut the memory load dramatically. We map out every series on the dedicated ablaut series page.

Common Mistakes

Key Takeaways

• Weak verbs add endings only: machen → machte → gemacht. They are the default; all new and borrowed verbs are weak.
• Strong verbs change their stem vowel and end the participle in -en: singen → sang → gesungen. The most frequent verbs are strong — exactly as in English.
• Mixed verbs combine a vowel change with weak endings: bringen → brachte → gebracht. There are only about five common ones; memorize them as a set.
• Strong verbs cluster into ablaut series (i-a-u, e-a-o, ei-ie-ie…), so they are partly predictable, not random.
• The reliable test for any verb is its three principal parts: infinitive, Präteritum, participle.