Im soooo confused with german verbs!?

Question

what are the categories that verbs split into? Does it depend on what they end in e.g. en or is it other things as well? What is the perfect tense? Also, what is an infinitive?! Just tell me as much as you know please! thank you...

Answer 1

okay here it goes:

most verbs end in EN, those are the regular verbs, for example: "kaufen, sehen, lernen, gehen"  

then you have some irregular verbs like "sein" (to be) " but be careful! most irregular verbs look like a regular verb. thats nasty. like, LESEN (to read) is irregular.  

the german past tense for regular verbs should be:

sagen (infinitive), sagte (past tense), hat gesagt (present perfect)

the perfect tense is: i have slept ICH HABE GESCHLAFEN

and infinitve always ends with EN

i hope that helped a little

  

Answer 2

Because of your questions, I'm guessing you are a beginner.  If not, sorry!

*  An infinitive is the form of the verb that ends in (e)n and has no one performing the action.  It's the form you'll see in the dictionary, the "name" of the verb as it were.  It is usually translated as "to ~":  to go=gehen, to speak= sprechen, etc.  You c=have to change the -en to -e, -st, -t, ...etc, to go with the various subjects

* There are several "perfect" tenses, present perfect, past perfect, future perfect.  All that "perfect" means in this context is that the verb uses the past participle.  Don't freak out--that's just the equivalent of the English word you would use after "I have"--spoken, seen, baked, etc.  When a German textbook uses the designation "perfect" by itself, it means the present perfect:  present tense of the helping verb + the past participle:  er hat gespielt (he played or he has played)

* German vebs can be split into weak, strong, and mixed, but you can't really tell by looking at them.  Weak means regular--they follow all the rules for conjugation.  Examples include spielen, machen, wohnen.  Strong verbs are irregular.  You may know some of them as "stem-vowel-changing verbs" like essen (ich esse, du isst, er isst, ...) or tragen (ich trage, du trägst, er trägt, ...)  

Mixed verbs are like weak verbs in some ways and like strong verbs in other ways.

This link will explain a lot of the things I went over very quickly above:  http://german.about.com/library/verbs/bl...  You should go back to the beginning of this online course and look at the index (http://german.about.com/library/anfang/b...  Almost everything that you are confused about will be explained here!

This link will actually conjugate many verbs for you, but it doesn't explain anything:  http://www.verbix.com/languages/german.s...

There is a rather bulky book called 501 German Verbs (http://www.amazon.com/German-CD-ROM-Barr... that is just that:  501 German verbs all written out in all their forms.

Langenscheidt makes a handy little thing called a Verb-fix (http://www.langenscheidt.de/katalog/tite... a little board with wheels or sliders that produces the conjugations for lots of verbs.

Hope that helps