Fifty verbs for building your German vocabulary – part one

This is part one of the vocabulary series on the OK+ channel: fifty German verbs to hear and repeat in one sitting. The verb is the pillar of the German sentence — whoever owns a hundred verbs says several times more than whoever owns a hundred nouns.

This page carries a reference table of the twenty-five verbs that recur most in everyday speech, to review after the video and return to whenever you need it.

Why a store of words is built by volume, not by rule

Grammar organises what you already know; it does not produce what you do not. Someone who still cannot speak in the street after a year of study is usually short of words, not of rules. That is why this series comes in batches: fifty words at a time, heard, repeated and used, rather than analysed and explained. Anyone measuring their own progress knows that the distance between one level and the next is counted in words before it is counted in anything else.

Twenty-five verbs no speaker can do without

How to fix a word so it does not slip away

• Listen to the part once through, then again while pronouncing along with it, not after it
• Split the fifty over five days, ten a day — a single large batch is forgotten whole
• Review yesterday's words before starting today's; two minutes are enough
• Write one sentence per word taken from your own life, not from a book
• Review the whole part after a week and again after a month — spacing is what moves a word into long-term memory
• Anything forgotten twice goes on a small separate list and is reviewed on its own

Frequently asked questions

Should I learn the verb bare or conjugated?
Bare first, then fix one form with ich and one with er. Those two forms are enough to start speaking.

How many verbs a day?
Ten with daily review beats fifty without. The measure is whether you can recall yesterday's before starting today's.

Verbs first or nouns first?
Verbs. A sentence missing a noun can still be understood by pointing; a sentence missing a verb does not stand at all.

What comes after this part?
Part two, with fifty more verbs, then the nouns in parts three and four. The links are at the foot of this page.

Watch the video

The video is on the OK+ channel on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHmrCxlRhMg

Also on OK+

• Fifty verbs for building your German vocabulary – part two
• Learn German A1 – lesson 1

A tool that shortens the road

The OK Plus DE app gathers German administrative calculators and form templates in one place, free, ad-free, in seven languages. Android and iPhone, from the same page:
Get the OK Plus DE app