In 1977, the German linguist Hans Glinz conducted a study in which he extracted the most common 25 verbs from a text corpus of 100 000 words (from: Granzow-Emden, M., Deutsche Grammatik verstehen und unterrichten, Tübingen, 2019.)

The list he came up with contained the following verbs:

SEIN; WERDEN; HABEN; KÖNNEN; MÜSSEN; WOLLEN; MACHEN; SOLLEN; LASSEN; KOMMEN; GEBEN; SAGEN; GEHEN; SEHEN; STEHEN; NEHMEN; WISSEN; MÖGEN; HALTEN; BLEIBEN; LEBEN; LIEGEN; TUN; SPRECHEN; DÜRFEN (the ones in bold are in the tables below)

Other lists using bigger corpora, or more recent ones, come up with slightly different verbs and orders, but those above always seem to be among the first 30.

Granzow-Emden’s issue in his chapter about verbs is with how school grammars define them semantically as words describing activities, states or processes – a practice he believes to be of limited use, and even confusing and misleading when describing the structure of language. This point, as important as it is, will not concern us here, though you can see how frequent verbs are that do not decribe actions, activities or states like e.g. MÜSSEN, DÜRFEN, KÖNNEN (must/have to; be allowed to do sth or simply ‘may’, depending on context; can/be able to). The two most frequent verbs that also function as auxiliaries in more complex verb structures – HABEN and SEIN – also defy clear semantic definitions, as do other multifunctional verbs.

The exact order is not important, important is the fact that some words (whatever word class we put them in) are more frequent than others. When learning a language it makes sense to focus on the most frequent words and their strongest collocations, sometimes memorizing whole phrases due to their commonality. As mentioned many times before, don’t attempt to learn single words on their own – the endeavour has proven to be of little efficiency when learning a language you would also like to speak (for reading only it might be okay).

Verbs are at the center of utterances and sentences (the difference between the two will be explained) and in German they are inflected according to the noun phrases they complement. The examples here are with the pronouns that can substitute noun phrases in subject position. They are in their ‘simple present’ forms; the so-called ‘Präsens’ – ‘so-called‘ because the form is not exclusively used for present time reference):

We might tend to look for regularities to formulate rules we can adhere to that we hope or believe will help learning the different forms. I tend to advise against that, because, as you might see, the endeavour is futile. Though there are some observations we can make, if we tried to formulate rules of regularities, we would quickly come up against many examples that would not (quite) fit the rule. I’m positive that you will develop a feeling for the tendential regularities (like the observation that with DU all forms seem to end in -st).

Instead, let’s look at examples in context, put them on cards and learn them in chunks. For this purpose, I have provided flashcard sets. I will gradually add more and more until the first 25 verbs are covered. Other than that, being as commonly used as they are, listen to as much language as you can and hear them in action. And read stories or texts slightly above your level. And again, I can’t stress this enough, success depends on how much you expose yourself to the language. It needs time and patience.

Above are 14 verbs. Let’s put together a few more that tend to come up in class regularly and then put them in contexts of use.

The thing with these tables is that they include combinations less common than others. For instance, you will find that combinations with ‘es’ are less frequent or constitute expressions of more idiomatic character. Combinations with the second pronoun DU and its plual form IHR (both ‘you’ in English) more likely occur in questions; we don’t tend to make statements about our opposites.

You will see that we will be covering a lot of language with only the 21 verbs from above. Language can feel overwhelmingly huge quantively, and it is. That’s why it takes children years to develop their native languages. By the age of eight or ten, most structural options will have been developed (assuming their language environment provides sufficient, natural language input), but the development of vocabulary goes on. Beyond the intitial needs of basic communication, language development is knowledge development – i.e. education. How far we take our journey will be individually different and depend on interests, needs, and maybe at times chance and coincidence. Therefore, the process is only to a certain extent predictable. At some point you have to go it on your own.

The Verb WERDEN (A1/A2) |

The Verb WISSEN (to know) |

Das Verb MACHEN |

Flashcard sets for memorizing conjugated forms of words listed above (you might want to consider making your own cards as the list might not necessarily reflect your priorities or needs and the sets are still in progress)

German: Conjugated verbs – SEIN Flashcards | Quizlet

German: Single verbs conjugated – HABEN (statements and questions)

Verb oder Hilfsverb? Flashcards | Quizlet

German – Single verbs conjugated: MÜSSEN Flashcards | Quizlet

German – KÖNNEN Flashcards | Quizlet

The first most frequent 25 German verbs Folder | Quizlet (still under construction, not yet complete)

And just for fun, go to sporcle – Essential Verbs (German) Quiz and find out how many of those listed in the quiz you already know.