Just like in English, some German verbs are “strong verbs” (including some in our list) and they show the past by a changing a vowel in the “stem” (the part that’s left when you take off the -(e)n at the end): I give > I gave ich gebe > ich gab. Just like in English, German verb endings sometimes change (“conjugation”) to show who is doing the action (I live, he live s ich leb e, er leb t), when (I live d ich leb te). In German, infinitives usually end in – en and sometimes just -n: geh en (to go), sag en (to say), könn en (to be able/can), sei n (to be), klingel n (to ring). In English that’s the “to” form: to be, to go, to say. The dictionary form of the verbs is the “infinitive”. There’s good news as you start learning (or revising) the most useful German verbs: many are very similar to the English equivalent. After all, beyond pointing at objects and naming them, you won’t get far in German without some “action”! 🙂 The most common German verbs – words expressing an action like “to eat” or a state like “to be” – should be at the top of your list. Here are a few compound German words to start learning.Learning the most frequent German words is makes tactical sense when you’re starting to learn the language.

A compound word is formed when two words (or sometimes even more) are used together to create a new meaning. Nevertheless, German is known for its very long, compound words. However, a recent analysis of the Dudenkorpus, an electronic collection of texts, counted no less than 17.4 million base forms (different words in uninflected form). Around the 2000s, the German language was estimated to have 300,000 to 400,000 words.

German words in english lexicon