Learn Dutch: verbs, vocabulary and telling time

About a hundred well-conjugated verbs are enough to say in Dutch what you do and what you did. Verbito lets you practise them for free and without an account, along with basic vocabulary and telling the time.

How Dutch verbs are conjugated

In the present tense almost every form comes from the stem, which is the ik form. The stem of lopen (to walk) is loop. Jij and hij add a -t (jij loopt, hij loopt), and the plural is the same as the infinitive: wij, jullie and zij lopen.

Regular verbs form the past tense with -te or -de: werken → werkte, wonen → woonde. They take -te when the stem ends in t, k, f, s, ch or p (the consonants of the word 't kofschip) and -de otherwise. Irregular verbs, also called strong verbs, change their vowel instead (lopen → liep, schrijven → schreef), and you have to learn them by heart. Here is the full list.

Common mistakes

Dutch has two articles, de and het, and no reliable rule tells you which one a word takes: it's de tafel but het huis. Learning every word together with its article saves a lot of guessing later.

When a sentence starts with something other than the subject, the verb moves in front of the subject: Vandaag loop ik, not Vandaag ik loop.

In questions with jij the -t disappears: Loop jij vandaag?

And half vier is 3:30, not 4:30. This is how telling time works in Dutch.