Irregular Verbs | SIMPLE PAST

Although irregular English verbs may seem more difficult to learn and use, we recommend that you constantly practice each of their forms until you can learn them by heart. Irregular verbs are called that because, unlike regular verbs that only modify their ending, these completely change their stem.

The stative verb “be” in the simple past tense is used to describe unchanging past conditions (e.g., “My father was a good man”) and temporary past situations (e.g., “The children were tired”). Unlike other verbs in the simple past, “be” changes form depending on the subject, as shown in the table below.

verb to be in simple past

Some verbs are irregular in the simple past. Here are the most common ones.

to go
He went to a club last night.
Did he go to the cinema last night?
He didn't go to bed early last night.

to give
We gave her a doll for her birthday.
They didn't give John their new address.
Did Barry give you my passport?

to come
My parents came to visit me last July.
We didn't come because it was raining.
Did he come to your party last week?

Lectura facilitada

We could say irregular verbs are verbs that “follow their own rules.” Regular verbs follow the standard grammar rules of modern English in adding “-ed” or “-d” to form the past tense and past participle forms. Irregular verbs, however, use completely original words for their different verb forms when they’re the main verb of a sentence.

To show you what we mean, let’s “dance” and “sing” This pair is a good example to see the differences: “dance” is a regular verb, but “sing” is an irregular verb.

To conjugate “dance,” there’s no big surprise or trick; you just use the same formula as with most other verbs. To create both the simple past tense and past participle forms, you simply add “-ed,” or in this case only “-d” because the base form ends in e already.

danced

“Sing,” however, is irregular, so the normal rules don’t work. You can’t use “singed” because that’s an incorrect form for this verb. Instead, “sing” has both a unique past tense and also a unique past participle form. The only way to know how to conjugate “sing” is to memorize its special forms.

sing

In practice, you end with conjugations like these:

We sang and danced all night.

Audio

Apoyo visual

irregular structure