This is another language list. Recently many of my talks have been looking at things ‘we take for granted’ in English teaching, like giving instructions or working in pairs. I also have a talk that looks at the whole area of teaching irregular past tense verbs. It’s actually more interesting than I thought! Here are six things I found.
1 It’s the most common list in English teaching
OK so I have no conclusive proof of this, but it’s a pretty strong hunch. The irregular verb list is SOO common in ELT. You see it on posters in classrooms, on promotional bookmarks for academies, on the back pages of many coursebooks. If you look up irregular verb list in the app store you get pages and pages of apps to help you learn this. I can’t think of another list that is as beloved, or despised, as this one.
2 There is no one agreed ‘way’ to teach or learn them
I’ve long searched for a secret way to teach the irregular verb list. My go-to suggestion for students was usually ‘well, you’re just gonna have to memorize this the old-fashioned way’. You could argue that students could pick them up ‘naturally’ and learn a few at a time. There are ways of grouping the irregular verbs (e.g. by sound: caught, taught, fought… flew, grew, threw) but I haven’t tried these much. For some reason though, students often learn them in groups of three. Like ‘go-went-gone’, or ‘put-put-put’. I find they do this even if we are just ‘doing’ past simple and not past participle. Maybe there is something mnemonic about learning the three forms at the same time.
3 There aren’t that many
For such an omnipresent list of words, it’s not a big list. Most web sources I looked at have around 200. The upper limit is listed on Wikipedia’s page is 600 (and they include rather unusual ones like beget-begat, as well as counting things like deal-dealt and redeal-redealt as separate ones). Another study I found says that only around 3% of English verbs are irregular. Most students only really need 100 to 150 irregular verbs to function pretty well. That is one bit of good news I tell my students when we come to this: there aren’t that many! You can do it!
4 New verbs are ‘never’ irregular
I’m not much of a fan of Stephen Pinker’s more recent work, but his 1999 book Words and Rules was a great read. Around that time he also wrote an article about irregular verbs, where he pointed out that new verbs that enter the language are always regular. We googled something (not geegled, or google, or gagle). Think of the past tense of these other ‘new’ verbs: doomscroll, ghost, retweet, deplatform… all regular. More good news for students: that list is not getting bigger.
5 Some regular verbs used to be irregular
Over time, certain verbs that used to be irregular are now regular. Did you know that the past tense of study used to be stode? Or that the past tense of help used to be holp? Like many other things in English, some verb forms changed.
6 Irregular verbs are becoming regular
Even more good news! Not only is the irregular verb list not getting bigger, it’s getting smaller! The study I cited above (this one) looked at how irregular verb forms ‘die’ over time. Their conclusion is that the less frequent a verb with an irregular form is, the more people will begin to default to the regular form. Think of these verbs: slink, wring, wed. Is is slinked, or slunk? Wrung or wringed? Wedded or wed? These are verbs that may be slowly undergoing that change, partly because they aren’t in fact that common.
Taking the (very) long view of English learning, we could say that the irregular verb list now seems less of a terrifying monster and more of a fading, slightly eccentric, relative. It’s shrinking, it's becoming less weird, and eventually it might just decide to behave like everyone else and join the regular verb family.