Irregular verbs

I’m not going to lie to you – there are a lot of irregular verbs in English! So where do you start? The first step is to make sure you understand how to form the past simple and present perfect in their regular forms. Whichever course you are following, make sure that you have completed and understood all your lessons on these two important topics before looking at irregular verbs.

Next, find a list of irregular verbs in English, perhaps starting with the 50 most common ones.

Note: you’ll see that the third column in these lists is called the ‘past participle’. This is the form that is used for making the present perfect, but it is also used in other past tenses. So that explains why it’s called the ‘past participle’ and not just ‘present perfect’. If you haven’t yet learnt other past tenses, don’t worry about this now. All will become clear later on!

 Here are some lists that my students have found useful.

Irregular Verbs (perfect-english-grammar.com)

On the above website, there is a video that you can listen to and the list below that. This is also a good webpage to bookmark, as it includes a much longer list that you can download when you’re ready.

Another useful list is:

Irregular verbs | - | LearnEnglish (britishcouncil.org)

Or, if you’d prefer, you can learn verbs in groups that have features in common (e.g. ones that don’t change, ones that have the same vowel patterns i,a,u, etc). This could help to make it easier to memorise, and perhaps even more fun (maybe…!). Here is a grouped list that you can use:

100-Irregular-verbs-list.pdf (undergroundenglish.cl)

Once you’ve chosen the list you want to use, what next? Well, it helps to learn the present, past simple and past participle of each verb as if they are a poem or rhyme, and to practice them out loud if you want to. E.g.

“Do, did, done”

“Eat, ate, eaten”

See how fast you can say them, and practice with fellow students if you like working in a group. Tick the ones you find easy and that you can still do the following day. Then focus on those you find more difficult.

You can also practice writing sentences in the different tenses. Then, when you feel that you know quite a few of them, you can make lists in the following way:

• The ones you know and are comfortable with already
• The ones you think are particularly useful for your everyday life
• The ones you don't yet know.

I realise some of these may overlap, and that's fine. Thinking about verbs in this way will hopefully help to make it a bit more interesting and more practical for you.

Maybe you have found other ways of learning irregular verbs, or will discover something new once you start…and what about other languages – your own and others you’ve learnt – how do English irregular verbs compare? Don’t hesitate to write about this in the comments section below!