Saturday 21 February 2009

The present tense

Many German verbs follow a regular pattern which is not too difficult to learn. take the verb trinken which means to drink. Take off the en and you are left with the stem trink-. All you have to do is add e, st, t, en, t, and en and you have all the forms of the verb that you need for the present tense.

The pronouns I Ich, you (informal) du, he er, she sie, it es, we wir, you (plural informal) ihr, You (formal) Sie, and they sie, are all you need for all regular and irregular verbs.

ich trinke wir trinken
du trinkst ihr trinkt
er trinkt Sie trinken
sie trinkt sie trinken
es trinkt

Verbs are not difficult but you need to learn them. Learn the nine pronouns and then because of repetition, you only have to learn five different forms of the verb, e.g. he she and it are all the same.

Bis bald

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