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German strong and irregular verbs
(Please read the general notes about working with the WhatBot program before reading the specific notes about this Question Set.)
Read the instructions on how to set up a Question Set and then download this Question Set. You will usually see a choice to Open the file or save it to disc. Choose Save (to disc), not Open
About this Question Set
This Question Set helps you to learn German strong and irregular verbs. It covers 170 or so verbs. It's not particularly easy to try to learn this many verbs at once; it's better to work with a smaller number. For this reason, the verbs are divided into groups, so you can start with one group and progress to the others. You can choose to work on different tenses within the selected group. So a beginner can work with the present tense of one of the groups and an advanced learner can work with all groups and all tenses.
The groups
The main groups are Core verbs, Common verbs and Other verbs. The idea is that you should start with the 'Core verbs' group, then progress to 'Common verbs' and finally move on to 'Other verbs' . The intention is that the ' Core verbs' group should include verbs you are likely to encounter early in your studies and often in day-to-day reading of German, the 'Other verbs' should include verbs you will probably encounter later in your studies and not very often in your reading, while the 'Common verbs' should be somewhere in between.
There's a lot of flexibility in the groups, to match your studies. As you progress from Core verbs to Common verbs, you can choose a group to let you work with both. And when you want to include 'Other verbs' as well, you can choose to be asked about 'All verbs' or 'All except haben and sein'.
Haben and sein have their own group and are handled differently (see below on this).
Verb parts and 'Include questions on' selection.
You can tick any or all of the four choices: Infinitive, Present tense, Imperfect/simple past tense and past participle.
- Questions on the Infinitive give you an English verb; you need to recall the corresponding German strong/irregular verb.
- Questions on the Present tense give you the German infinitive; you need to recall the third person singular of the tense.
- Questions on the Imperfect (simple past) tense give you the German infinitive; you need to recall the third person singular of the tense.
- Questions on the Past Participle give you the German infinitive; you need to recall this form and whether it takes haben or sein.
Haben and sein
These verbs are handled differently - the Question Set asks about all forms of the present tense and not just the third person singular, as with other verbs. They are in their own group for two reasons. The first is that if you are an absolute beginner, you can practise with these verbs in isolation. The second reason is so that, as you get more advanced, you can choose question groups without these verbs.
Which verbs are included?
The Question Set has enough verbs to give a good coverage, though not every verb is included. Where there's a verb form with a prefix that follows the same pattern as the un-prefixed form, only one of the verbs is included in the Question Set.
There's at least one strong verb that is considered vulgar and this verb is not included. This is so that teachers can let younger students use the Question Set without getting complaints from parents.
Licence
This Question Set is automatically licensed until September 2008. You can get an extended free licence until November just by registering in the German verbs forum on the message board. This is to encourage comments on the program - once you've registered you'll be able to post comments.
You can get the key for the extended licence by reading the earliest message in the forum.
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