3.2 sein, haben, werden — Epoché
What you will be able to do Write out the present tense of sein , haben and werden without hesitating, and say which of the six rows of each is the one that will catch you out. Use werden for "to become" — a verb English no longer has in ordinary use — and recognise the two other jobs the same verb does later in the course. Say that you are hungry, thirsty, afraid, right or lucky the way German says it, with haben and a noun, instead of with the adjective English uses. Build "there is" and "there are" with es gibt , in the singular and the plural alike, and say what follows it. Prerequisites : 3.1 — the six endings of the regular present, because you cannot see what is irregular until you know what regular looks like. The most frequently spoken verbs in any language keep their irregularity, because a form said fifty times a day is never smoothed into line. English be is the extreme case — am, is, are, was, were, being, been , from at least three unrelated roots — and German sein is its cousin and just as battered. Three verbs come before everything else in German. Sein and haben are the helpers: almost every past tense you will say is built from one of them plus a participle. The third, werden , has no everyday English equivalent. It means "to become", it builds the future, and it builds the passive. Only ten forms in this lesson have to be memorised outright; the rest follow the regular pattern. But these ten cannot be avoided or paraphrased. Why these three come next With only the regular present you can describe habits and plans, but you cannot say what something is , what somebody has , or talk about the past. These three verbs close all three gaps. German forms its ordinary spoken past with a form of haben or sein in the second slot and a participle at the very end. English does something similar with have , but prefers its one-word past — I saw, I went . German speech has largely given up the one-word past outside a small group of verbs, so the helpers are the load-bearing wall of the tense system. Werden is here for a different reason. Learners who do not meet it early paraphrase it with sein , which is grammatical and means the wrong thing. "He is a doctor" and "he is becoming a doctor" are different claims, and German uses two different verbs for them. Table Three tables, one verb each. Read each one down its own column until you can say it without the page, and only then compare. Person Present — sein , to be 1 sg ich bin 2 sg du bist 3 sg er, sie, es ist 1 pl wir sind 2 pl ihr seid 3 pl sie sind Person Present — haben , to have 1 sg ich habe 2 sg du hast 3 sg er, sie, es hat 1 pl wir haben 2 pl ihr habt 3 pl sie haben Person Present — werden , to become 1 sg ich werde 2 sg du wirst 3 sg er, sie, es wird 1 pl wir werden 2 pl ihr werdet 3 pl sie werden Of the eighteen cells above, eight are simply the regular endings on a stem: all of haben except two cells, and all of werden except two cells. Only the first verb has to be learnt outright, and even there the first and third plural are identical, as always in German. How to read the endings Take the three tables in order of difficulty, the reverse of the printed order. Werden is almost regular. The stem is werd- with the ordinary endings, and because it ends in -d , the second person plural takes the inserted vowel from last lesson. Only the second and third persons singular depart: they change the stem vowel e to i , du wirst loses the d before -st , and er wird keeps the d but takes no -t ending. That is your first sight of the stem change that lesson 3.3 is about. Haben is regular with two contractions. The stem is hab- , and in the second and third persons singular the b has dropped out over the centuries. English did the same to the same verb: has from an older haves , and hath from haveth . Sein is not regular anywhere. It joins what were once three separate verbs. bin and bist come from one root, the b- of English be ; ist , sind and seid , and the infinitive sein , from another, the s- of English is ; and the past war , which you meet later, from a third, the w- of English was . There is no stem to look for. Learn the six words as six words, the way you learnt am, are, is . The second person plural deserves its own warning. seid sounds exactly like seit (since), the pair from lesson 0.5; only the spelling separates them, which makes it the form learners most often write wrongly. A second habit: with an irregular verb, learn the third person singular first . It is the form you hear most, because most of what people say is about somebody else, and it is the form dictionaries of irregular verbs list. Learners who start from ich and conjugate down the table every time are slow enough to be audible. German has where English is English describes many bodily and emotional states with be plus an adjective: I am hungry, I am thirsty, I am afraid, I am right, I am lucky . German uses haben plus a noun: I have hunger, I have thirst, I have fear, I have right, I have luck. (Being cold is different: standard German says mir ist kalt , a construction for later.) The nouns take no article in these expressions, which is unusual in German and signals a set phrase. Because the second element is a noun, German intensifies it with different words from those for adjectives; pick them up as you meet them. German does have adjectives for hungry and thirsty, and a sentence built on them is correct, but Hunger haben and Durst haben are the everyday way to say it, and for fear, being right and luck the noun with haben is the normal form. Learn the phrases now while they are few. English has fossils of the same construction: "I have need of it" is the older way of saying "I need it". German simply kept the pattern English mostly dropped. The third verb English lost English once had a verb for "to become" that worked like the German one. It survives in woe worth the day in older writing, and in the noun weird , which originally meant that which come