The Irregular Perfekt

The Irregular Perfekt

Its Construction

To build the irregular forms of the Perfekt you will again need the stem of a verb. And like in the irregular Präteritum, the stem usually changes its vowel(s). Another difference to the regular Perfekt tense is that the Partizip II now ends in -en and not in -t anymore. Three examples: schreib.en = ge.schrieb.en trink.en = ge.trunk.en sterb.en = ge.storb.en The inseparable verbs (those starting with the prefixes: be-, ent-, er-, ver-, zer-, ge- miss-) still don’t like the ge- hence the following forms: besitzen = besessen (=to possess) vergessen = vergessen (=to forget) < that is no typo, the infinitive is identical with the Partizip II. verlieren = verloren (=to lose) < this is the only example of an irregular verb ending in -ieren afaik.

About Strong(er) Verbs

Then there are a few verbs who are truly irregular. Those are e.g.:

As you can see they change their stems beyond the stem-vowel but as those are few in number and are also somhow easily distinguished when listening to a German speaker, so that they won’t cause you any significant trouble.

Last but not least

There are  a few Mixed Verbs that we will have to talk about in another chapter. Those combine elements of the regular and the irregular Perfekt.

And then there’s the question: sein oder nicht sein, which means that some irregular verbs take the verb sein instead of haben as a partner in the Perfekt. Just two quick examples:

Ich bin um acht Uhr zur Arbeit gegangen.

I have at eight o’clock to-the work gone.

Ich bin erst um zehn Uhr aufgestanden.

I have only at ten o’clock got up.

There are only a few verbs that use ‘sein’ in the Perfekt tense that you need to know for B1. I will cover those in another chaper of this app.