German present tense — the endings and the seven vowel changes

The German present tense is one table of endings and a handful of verbs that bend the vowel. It also does more work than the English present: ich spiele covers "I play", "I am playing" and "I do play". There is no continuous form to learn.

The endings

Take the infinitive, cut off -en, and add these.

Three of the six are identical to the infinitive — wir, sie and the polite Sie. That is half the table for free.

er and ihr look the same. ihr macht and er macht are spelled identically. The pronoun in front is the only thing that separates them, which is why German drops pronouns far less often than Spanish or Italian.

When the stem makes the ending unpronounceable

If the stem ends in -t, -d, or an awkward consonant cluster, an e goes in before the ending so you can say it.

And if the stem already ends in an s sound — -s, -ß, -z, -tz — the du ending loses its own s, because you cannot say two in a row.

du heißt, du tanzt — not heißst, not tanzst.

The vowel changes

A group of common verbs changes its stem vowel in du and er/sie/es only. Everything else stays regular. There are three patterns.

a becomes ä

e becomes i

e becomes ie

The changes never touch ich, wir, ihr or sie. ich fahre, wir fahren, ihr fahrt — all normal.

The three that are properly irregular

These do not follow anything and have to be learned outright. They are also the three most common verbs in the language, so you will have them within a week.

The six modal verbs are irregular too, in their own way — see German modal verbs.

The present tense is also the future

German usually talks about the future using the present, with a time word doing the work.

Morgen fahre ich nach Berlin. — I am going to Berlin tomorrow.

werden plus an infinitive exists and means the same, but it sounds more formal or more emphatic. If you have a morgen or a nächste Woche in the sentence, the present tense is what a German speaker will say.

What to actually memorise

The six endings, sein and haben, and the fact that vowel changes only ever hit du and er. The rest — the extra e, the disappearing s — sorts itself out because the alternative is unpronounceable, and your mouth will find that before your memory does.