7/26/2019 115 2 Regular Verbs REVISED

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Regular verbs

Conjugation of the regular verb. You will learn how to conjugate regular verbs in the present tense.

Here, you see some sentences with conjugated verbs, like woonin Ik woon in Groningen, werk

in wij werken hier, and werktin zij werkt niet.

A few more examples. [SPEAKING DUTCH]

Ik houd van sport.

Ze studeert daar.

Zij wonen in Denemarken.

You may already know some verbs, like these common ones. [SPEAKING DUTCH]

werken,

wonen,

studeren,

spreken,

lopen.

How should we conjugate these verbs to ensure subject verb agreement? We start with the infinitive

form, mostly ending on E-N. Next, we remove this ending, leaving us with the stem of the verb.

Finally, we add the appropriate personal ending.

Here, we see the verb werkenand the stem is werk. For the first singular person pronoun, we

just leave it that way. But for the second and the third person, we add T. So-- "ik werk",but "jij

werkt", "u werkt", "hij / zij / het werkt".

In a scheme, first the ik, just the stem. Second, jij en je. That's stem plus T. Third, hij, zij, het.

Also stem plus T.

And now for the easy part, the plural forms. As you can see, we only use one form for all plural

subjects. This is the stem plus E-N, which in fact is simply just the infinitive.

One final point about the verb. When the verb precedes the pronoun jijor je, the T is eliminated.

So Jij werkt in Den Haag, normal conjugation, but Werk jij?, or Nu werk jij in Den Haaghere

you see that the T after the stem has disappeared. This is only the case before the pronoun jijor

je.