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:

At times there’s two vowels next to each other:

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:

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:

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.