Regular verb: I had worked for the company for only 6 months when I decided to leave.For example, the past perfect tense uses the auxiliary verb “have” + the past participle of your main verb to describe an action that happened and ended in the past. The past participle is used in other English tenses that have an auxiliary (or “helping”) verb.Irregular verb: I spoke to my best friend yesterday.Regular verb: I worked for 40 hours last week.The simple past tense describes any action that takes place before right now.Not sure what those are? Here’s a simple way of looking at it: You can recognize them because they look so different in the past tense.Īn English verb is irregular when it doesn’t end in -ed in the simple past tense and past participle form. Irregular verbs, though, don’t follow that pattern. Usually all you have to do is add the letters -ed at the end of the word! They look the same in the past and are easy to form. Regular verbs always follow the same pattern. To study irregular verbs, first you should understand what irregular verbs are. Knowing the history of irregular verbs is interesting, but it doesn’t help you learn them. Try FluentU for FREE! How to Recognize an Irregular English Verb Little by little, the original sentence is changed until it comes out completely different after it has made its way around the circle.Īs Harvard professor Steven Pinker puts it: “Every time we use an irregular verb, we are continuing a game of Broken Telephone that has gone on for more than five thousand years.”ĭownload: This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that youĬan take anywhere. This is a game where everyone sits in a circle, one person chooses an English sentence and whispers it to the person sitting next to them, and then, one by one, everyone whispers the same sentence in their neighbor’s ear. Over the years, these verbs and how we used them changed, and we ended up with our much simpler modern language. Many years ago, Old English had twice as many irregular verbs as modern English. Irregular verbs are a pain because there isn’t one rule you can learn for them. Most words in the English language follow the rules: today I use, yesterday I us ed. Over 180 English verbs are called irregular verbs, and they break all the rules. Just when you finally think you understand English grammar and all the different tenses, you discover irregular verbs. By Yuliya Geikhman See Our 8 Top Tricks That Make Irregular English Verbs Easier to Learn
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