Once you get to the stage where you are starting to attempt to form sentences in German, you’ll start to need verbs.

Note: This whole page only covers present tense. If you are interested in some good resources on other tenses, you are in the wrong place. (… as of June 2009. Give me another 6 months.

The most useful thing that I have found to date is the consistency in the way that verbs change depending on the subject. Using the verb “haben” as an example, note the bold italic letters.

haben – to have (have, have got, own, possess, wield.. etc.)

This is worth memorising:

• Ich habe
• du hast
• Sie haben
• er, sie, es hat
• wir haben
• ihr habt
• sie haben

And this is the other bit worth memorising:

1. If you are using “du”, then the verb almost always ends in st. Eg. Du hast,  du laufst
2. If you are using “Ich” then they usually end in e. Eg. Ich habe, Iach laufe
3. If you are speaking about someone else specifically, it’s er, sie or es and you usually use t. Eg. er hat, sie lauft
4. Remember that all the Sie’s, (I.e. Sie – formal “you”, sie – she and sie – they) are the same, so you can go off the change for er, sie, es.

Obviously there is a whole lot more to it than this, but if you can remember these little hints as you speak, then you’ll guess about 70% right when you have to grab a new verb that you have just learnt and mash it into a sentence.