The Irregular Präteritum
The Irregular Präteritum
To build the irregular forms of the Präteritum you will again need the stem of a verb. But this time you will have to change the stem-vowel. Usually there’s only one of those in a stem:
fahr.en | to drive |
At times there’s two vowels next to each other:
schreib.en | to write |
lauf.en | to walk |
Unfortunately there is no way for us to predict this change. I don’t know why we have to say: es flog instead of es fliegte therefore you won’t need to know it either. Take a look at a few examples:
fahr.en | fuhr |
lauf.en | lief |
frier.en | fror |
You can see that the stem is pretty much intact and the only problem is the changing stem-vowel. There is also no –te– after the stem like in the regular Präteritum but the personal endings remain the same as for the regular Präteritum. One example:
ich | fuhr |
du | fuhr.st |
es | fuhr |
wir | fuhr.en |
ihr | fuhr.t |
sie | fuhr.en |
To summarize the specialties of the irregular Präteritum:
- They don’t add –te– to their stems
- They usually change their stem vowels
Regarding the use of the Präteritum please refer to the section about the differences between the Präteritum and the Perfekt tense.