Free German tool
German verb conjugation, cut to B1
A full conjugator gives you every tense in the language for any verb. You need four things: the present tense with its vowel change, the Perfekt with the right helper verb, where the prefix goes, and the seven past forms you are ever asked to write. Type a verb and get exactly those, plus the guide that teaches the pattern behind it.
Whatever you type stays in this tab. Nothing is saved, sent or counted, and closing the tab clears it. If you follow one of the links out to another site, that site sees the verb; we do not send it.
The conjugator needs JavaScript. The endings, the participle rules and the verb bracket are all written out in full further down this page, so you can still work out the regular forms by hand.
Step 1 of 2
Type the German verb, or its English meaning, and pick it from the list. All 395 verbs the course teaches are here.
Every form of
Opens in a new tab on another site. The word goes there only when you open it.
Testing hides the forms until you ask for them. Say the du form, the er form and the Perfekt out loud first — that is the order the exam asks for them in.
The forms
—
Say it out loud first: ich …, du …, er …, then the Perfekt. Then check.
Present tense
| Person | Form |
|---|
Perfekt — the past you actually write
Präteritum
The verb bracket
The course's own example
…
What this tool covers, and what it leaves out
It holds the 395 verbs a B1 course teaches — not every German verb, and that is the point. Every verb here comes with the chapter it belongs to, so a lookup tells you not just the form but whether you were supposed to know it yet.
It shows the present tense, the Perfekt, and the Präteritum for21 verbs. It does not show the Plusquamperfekt, Futur II, Konjunktiv I, or a full Konjunktiv II table, because none of those is scored at B1 and none of them is in the course. Leaving them out is the decision, not an omission: a learner who spends a week on hätte gemacht has spent a week on something the exam will not ask for.
The present tense: six endings, and one thing that changes
Cut -en off the infinitive and add the ending for the person. That is the whole system, and it holds for most of the verbs in this tool.
| Person | Ending | Example |
|---|---|---|
| ich | -e | ich wohne |
| du | -st | du wohnst |
| er / sie / es | -t | er wohnt |
| wir | -en | wir wohnen |
| ihr | -t | ihr wohnt |
| sie / Sie | -en | Sie wohnen |
Two adjustments follow from how the words sound. A stem ending in -d or -t slips an e in so you can hear the ending: du arbeitest, ihr arbeitet. A stem ending in -s, -ß or -z already has the s sound, so the du form just takes -t: du heißt, du sitzt.
Then there are the 59 verbs in this tool that change their vowel — e→i, e→ie, a→ä, and au→äu in laufen — and they change it in the du and er/sie/es forms only: ich spreche but du sprichst, ich fahre but er fährt. Every other form keeps the vowel of the infinitive, which is why the tool marks the two changed forms and leaves the rest alone.
The Perfekt: the past you actually write
For everything you say and write about the past, German uses the Perfekt: a helper verb in second position and a participle at the end. Ich habe drei Jahre bei einer Firma gearbeitet. The helper is haben unless the verb is one of the 40 movement-and-change verbs that take sein: Heute bin ich zehn Minuten früher gekommen. The tool tells you which helper a verb takes, because that is the part learners guess wrong.
The participle follows five cases, in this order:
| If the verb… | The participle | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Ends in -ieren | No ge-, and -t at the end | telefonieren → telefoniert |
| Fixed prefix (be-, ver-, er-, ent-, emp-, zer-, miss-) | No ge- | verstehen → verstanden |
| Separable | ge- goes between the prefix and the stem | anrufen → angerufen |
| Regular | ge- in front, -t at the end | arbeiten → gearbeitet |
| Anything else | A form to learn with the verb | sprechen → gesprochen |
The order matters. vor·bereiten is separable, so you would expect vorgebereitet — but the stem underneath it, bereiten, carries its own fixed be-, and a fixed prefix wins. The participle is vorbereitet.
The Präteritum: seven forms, and a reading list
This is where a B1 learner saves the most time. You will write exactly seven verbs in the Präteritum: war, hatte, konnte, musste, wollte, sollte, durfte — sein, haben and the modals. Every other verb reports the past in the Perfekt, in speech and in every exam letter. That is not a shortcut; it is what German speakers do.
You will still meet other past forms in reading texts, and the tool shows 14 of them — ging, kam, gab and the rest — labelled read it, don't write it. Recognise them in a newspaper text, then say the same thing yourself with ich bin gegangen.
The verb bracket: what separable and modal verbs do to a sentence
German sentences hold their verb in two pieces. One piece sits in second position; the other waits at the very end, and everything else fills the space between them. Once you see it, three different-looking rules turn out to be the same rule.
- A separable verb drops its prefix at the end: Ich stehe um sechs auf. There are91 of them in this tool, and the course's own word list writes them with a dot — auf·stehen — so you can see the break before you meet it.
- A modal verb sends the other verb to the end as an infinitive: Sie müssen viel Wasser trinken.
- The Perfekt does the same with its participle: Gestern habe ich in Frankfurt gearbeitet.
The tool draws that bracket for the verb you looked up, with the gap left open, so you can drop your own words into it. If you want the full rule, read separable verbs and word order, then modal verbs, then what can stand in position 1.
Where the forms come from
Every verb, its er/sie/es form, its Perfekt and its example sentence are copied from the course's own word list, and the seven written past forms come from the chapter that teaches them. The remaining present-tense forms are built with the regular endings above — and the du form is built on the same stem the course's er/sie/es form shows, so a vowel change you see here is the course's and not the tool's. No irregular form is ever guessed: where the list has no form, the verb is left out rather than invented.
If you want the grammar behind a pattern rather than one verb's forms, start with stem-changing verbs in the present, the Perfekt, Perfekt against Präteritum and reflexive verbs. The numbers, dates and times trainer and the der/die/das checker cover the other two things beginners look up mid-sentence, and the grammar path puts all of it in order.
What this tool is not
It is not a dictionary and not a general conjugator. A verb outside the course's 395 will not be found, and the tool says so rather than guessing at a form. It has no audio, so it cannot tell you whether your sprichst sounded right. It shows the standard written forms only, and it will not correct a sentence you write — it gives you the pieces and the pattern, and the sentence is yours.