VERBS

CONTENTS

Transitive versus intransitive verbs
Regular vs. irregular verbs
Tense
Active/Passive
Verb Inflections
Verbs with Prefixes
Strong Verbs


Verbs are words that inflect for time. You can tell the verb in a sentence by putting the words "today", "yesterday" and "tomorrow" in front of the sentence and the word that changes in the verb. Examples:

Today I talk to my friend.
Yesterday I talked to my friend
Tomorrow I will talk to my friend.

Verbs in both English and German have Verb Inflections
endings or inflections which indicate the "person" (1st (person speaking), 2nd (person being addressed), 3rd person being spoke about)). Verbs are laso divided in a number of ways: transitive/intransitive and regular (weak)/irregular (strong)..

TRANSITIVE/INTRANSITIVE

Transiive verbs can take an object. That is to say that the action ACTS on something.

"The person hit the ball (the ball is hit, so the hitting occurs on the ball, hence it is a transitive verb)
"The person sits down" (nothing is, in effect, "sitted")

REGULAR/IRREGULAR VERBS

(See also Strong Verbs

) You notice that in English, the past tense of "regular" verbs adds "-ed" (or "-d")

Regularity in a verb means that it is the most common ending and any variation can be predicted by the sound at the end of the word.

An irregular verb changes its form in a way that can not be predicted by the sound.

Examples of irregular verbs in Enlish are:

Sing/sang
know/knew

 and so on.

(Compare tthe regular verb snow/snowed with the irregular verb know/knew)."Snow" follows the pattern of adding "-ed" but "know" does not.

. In some verbs, the change is so great no part of the word survives. These are called "suppletive" forms and they exist in English in forms like "go/went"

As a result, there are usually 4 forms of each verb that you need to know to predict all the other forms. These are (1) the infinitive form (the one that occurs with "to" as in "to dance" "to sing") (2) the third person singular present tense (3) the past tense and (4) the past participle (a participle is an adjective derived from a verb and refers to the form of the word, not its use. Participles can be present or past but are not marked for person. A present participle in English usually ends in -ing and is the form that occurs in the progressive aspect "X is .....ing" (e.g. "Someone is singing; Someone is writing etc.). The past participle occurs in English usually with have to form the perfect tenses "He has sung", "He has written"- the one that occurs in the perfect tenses - usually after "have" in English as in "has walked".

Regular English verbs like "to walk" would have the following principle parts:

to walk, walks, walked, has walked.

An irregular verb like "give" would have the following principle parts:

to give, gives, gave, has given

German verbs have the same kinds of structure and one needs to know the same principle parts.

. An example of a regular German verb is "machen". The principle parts are:

machen, macht, machten, gemacht.

 An irregular verb like "geben" has the following principle parts:

geben, gibt, gaben, hat gegeben,

TENSE

Generally six tenses are defined in German. These are: Present
Past
Future

Present Perfect
Past Perfect
Future Perfect

The approximate meaning of these is as follows, but it is important to remember that the use of tense in German is not exactly the way they are used in English so these are "glosses" or "approximate translatioins". German "Ich lachte" can mean "I laugh" "I am laughung" or "I do laugh".

Tense lachen laugh
Present lachen laugh
Past lachten laughed
Future werden lachen will laugh
Present Perfect haben gelacht have laughed
Past Perfect hatten gelacht had laughed
Future Perfect werden geglacht haben will have laughed
For the past tense German adds "-t" or "-et" to regular verbs. For the future German uses the appropriate form od the word "werden" where English uses "will" For the perfect tenses German uses either "sein" or "haben" with the past participle of the word (see below for the formation of the past participle). Sein is used in general with verbs which can not take a direct object and which indicate a change in location or condition. In addition the verbs sein, bleiben and passieren taek "sein" as the auxiliary verb in the perfect forms.

Examples:

(with SEIN)

kommen, kommt, kamen, IST gekommen
bleiben, bleibt, blieben, IST geblieben

(with HABEN)

machem, macht, machten, HAT gemacht.

To "ge-" or not to "ge-" The past participle does not always take "ge-" and even when it does, it may not be at the beginning of the word.. Verbs which have inseperable prefixes like be-, ent- -er, ge-, and ver- do NOT take the "ge-"

verstehen, versteht, verstanden, hat verstanden

Verbs which end in -ieren go not take "ge-"

studieren, studiert, studierten, hat studiert

"-(e)t" or "-(e)n"
"t" or "-et" is added to weak (regular) verbs
"n" or "-en" is added to string (irregular) verbs.

ACTIVE/PASSIVE VOICE

Active sentences are the most common. They occur with both transitive and intransitive verb. In English and German only transitive verbs can be made passive.

In transitive sentences person doing the action (called the "actor") appears grammatically as the subject. The person or object being acted upon (called the "patient") appears as the direct object.

In the ACTIVE sentence "The dog eats the meat", the dog is the actor (the one doing the eating) and the meat is the patient (the thing the dog is eating). . The dog appears as subject and the meat as object. The same holds true in German:

Der Hund frisst das Fleisch.

 . In the PASSIVE forms, the PATIENT becomes the Subject and the Actor become the agent:

"The meat is (being) eaten by the dog"

 In the above statement, the dog is still the one doing the eating, and the meat is still being eaten.What has shifted is the focus or the topic.

German forms the passive by turning the object into the subject and the actor into an agent and making the verb passive.

To make the verb passive use the proper form of the verb "werden" PLUS the past participle of the verb in the active sentence. The agent is indicated by the use of "von" plus the noun in the DATIVE.

Das Fleisch WIRD von dem Hund gefressen RULE

To Make the Passive

Take the active sentence and change the object to the subject and the subject to the agent (marked by "von + the dative form).

Active: Ich sehe dich. (I see you)
Passive: Du wirst von mir gesehen (You are seen by me)
A (SUBJECT) VERB B (OBJECT) => B + werden + von A + verb in past participle form