German Grammar Explained /
Perfect tense: irregular participles
We use past participles to build our sentences in Perfekt (the German past tense star).
lesen → gelesen
Ich habe dieses Jahr schon drei Bücher gelesen.
I have already read three books this year.
In this post, we have collected the most important irregular past participles and we hope that with the help of our self-study materials you will memorize these forms with little effort!
Note that most irregular forms end in -en.
With haben:
| finden | → | gefunden |
| nehmen | → | genommen |
| lesen | → | gelesen |
| trinken | → | getrunken |
| essen | → | gegessen |
| schlafen | → | geschlafen |
| helfen | → | geholfen |
| schreiben | → | geschrieben |
| treffen | → | getroffen |
With sein:
| fahren | → | gefahren |
| fliegen | → | geflogen |
| kommen | → | gekommen |
| gehen | → | gegangen |
With sein where it's not really clear why:
| bleiben | → | geblieben |
| sein | → | gewesen |
| werden | → | geworden |
My head...
Time to practice!