Introduction to irregular verbs | The parts of speech | Grammar | Khan Academy

Hello, Garans.

Today I want to start talking about irregular verbs. That is to say, verbs that are a little weird. You know, we have this idea of a regular verb that we can conjugate in all tenses, and it's just going to behave in a way that we expect. Like, for example, the verb "talk."

Right? So if we take a regular verb and we put it in the past, the present, and the future, this is what it's going to look like: present tense "talk," future tense "will talk," past tense "talked" with that "ed" ending. But there are plenty of verbs in English, as you have no doubt discovered, that don't follow that basic rule: present tense, this one form of the verb; and the past tense, the "ed" is just tacked onto it, and then the future with "will" tacked onto the front.

And there are plenty of words in English, as you have no doubt discovered, that don't behave that way at all. So let's take another—let's take an irregular word like "run." Present tense "run," future tense "will run," past tense "ran." Oh, weird! Super duper weird!

Now, there are a lot of irregular verbs in English, but you're listening to someone with a grammar book the size of a car. So I think between the two of us, we can figure this out together. But for now, let's just focus on four verbs: to be, to have, to do, and to say.

So let's take these verbs and make them work for a bunch of different people in different times. So in the first person, when we're talking about ourselves, when I'm talking about myself in the present, I would say, "I am, I have, I do, I say." If we're talking about someone else in the present, in the singular, we would say, "She is, she has, she does, and she says."

So the third person singular is different in the way that these words are pronounced. So "am," because this is an entirely different word; "have" doesn't become "haves," it's "has," and "do" doesn't become "dos," it becomes "does." We actually change the vowel sound here, just like "say" doesn't become "says." We don't say "she says"; in standard American English, we say "she says."

In the present tense, we are, we have, we do, we say; and in the past tense, in the first person, these four verbs form the following: I was, I had, I did, and I said. And in the plural past, it was: we were, we had, we did, and we said. These four verbs are some of the strangest ones in English, but they're the most important.

In another video, I'm going to go through some broad rules that govern the rest of the irregular verbs in English. You can learn anything, Dave it out.