This exam tips covers Exam Tips & Common Errors within The core German verbs for GCSE German. Revise The core German verbs in The Core German Verbs and the Present Tense for GCSE German with 10 exam-style questions and 16 flashcards. This topic shows up very often in GCSE exams, so students should be able to explain it clearly, not just recognise the term. It is section 4 of 4 in this topic. Treat this as a marking guide for what examiners are looking for, not just a fact list.
💡 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.
Practice questions for The core German verbs
What does the German verb 'gehen' mean in English?
What is the German verb for 'to see'?