Free taster
5 of 6 sections open
Die 15 wichtigsten Verben — Your Master Keys
🗝️ Die 15 wichtigsten Verben — Your Master Keys
These 15 verbs will appear in almost every German sentence you read or write across your GCSE. They are not random vocabulary — they are the skeleton of German communication. Master them and the language starts to unlock.
Die 15 Kernverben
These 15 high-frequency verbs form the backbone of AQA German (8662) Foundation and Higher. Learn to recognise and produce them in the present tense — they appear in reading, listening, writing, and speaking tasks.
Earn the mark scheme marks
💡 Exam Tips & Common Errors
- fahren vs gehen: always use fahren for vehicles (bus, car, train), gehen for on foot. Mixing them up is a major source of AO3 errors.
- Vowel-change verbs: learn the er/sie form alongside the infinitive — that is the form that changes. The ich and wir forms stay the same as the infinitive stem.
- Regular vs irregular: gehen, machen, sagen, denken, fragen are all fully regular — never add an umlaut to these. Only fahren, geben, nehmen, sehen (and others) have stem changes.
- wissen: the only verb in this list whose ich-form and er-form look the same — both are weiß.
❌ Common error: Er gehst in die Stadt.
✓ Correct: Er geht in die Stadt.
Why it costs marks: gehen is a regular verb — only verbs like fahren, geben, nehmen, sehen have vowel changes in the du/er/sie forms. Writing er gehst (adding -st to er) or er gäht (inventing an umlaut) signals a misunderstanding of which verbs are irregular. This directly affects your AO3 (grammatical accuracy) mark.