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Like many languages, Dutch also uses regular verbs, which have a more or less uniform set of conjugations that allows you to use the correct suffixes without learning all possible iterations on their own. They work more or less the same as they do in English, although the suffixes are often different. Here’s exactly how they work.

What are regular verbs?

Regular verbs (Dutch: regelmatige werkwoorden), like in many languages, are verbs that are conjugated by using a simple set of rules that can be applied to many words without needing to learn every possible option. In Dutch, these are also called weak verbs (zwakke werkwoorden), which I, as a kid, used to remember by imagining they were too weak to change their form on their own, and therefore had to comply to the rules. Irregular verbs are strong verbs (sterke werkwoorden), because they do have the ability to break free from the basic set of rules. I’m not even sure if this is the actual explanation for these names, but it sure worked for me.

Stem

Regular verbs in Dutch always end in -en. To begin the conjugation, we’re going to need to find the stem of the verb, which is easy enough: we simply get rid of this -en suffix and go with what we have left. The exception to this rule is if we end up with a stem that ends in two of the same consonants, in which case we get rid of one of those, too.

werken – stem: werk (to work)
lachen – stem: lach (to laugh)
bellen – stem: bel (to call/ring)

For many words, this stem is the same as the first person singular form in the present simple, but this is not always the case, and it can even determine how some of the conjugations end up, so keep in mind to always use the stem for your conjugations, and not the first person singular form.

Let’s start with the most regular ones of all regular ones: verbs of which the stem is actually the same as the first person singular form in the present simple. Afterwards, we’ll get into the slightly weirder options some more, but for now, we’re sticking with the simplest possible option. We’ll use werken (Eng: to work) as our example, with werk being its stem.

Now, it’s a matter of applying the basic set of rules. I’m not going through all the tenses in this post, but we’ll do the most common ones, starting with the present simple. In English, the present simple is the same as the stem, except for he/she/it; in Dutch, there’s a bit more to it.

Basic conjugation scheme for Dutch regular verbs

• * U is a formal form of “you”, one you can use to speak to elder people or people you don’t know. It can be both singular and plural, but it’s always conjugated in the same manner. More about it can be found here. 
• ** All of these work the same when the sentence is a question, albeit with some inversion, except for je/jij. In questions, je/jij uses only the stem, without the added -t. More about that can be found here. 

When we apply these rules to the verb werken, we get the following table:

Past simple

Dutch also knows a past simple, although it’s used slightly less often than it is in English – we sometimes prefer the past participle. Still, it’s around all the time, so let’s see how it works.

* Here’s where the fun starts. As you can see, both te/de can be used for singular, and ten/den for plural forms. This has everything to do with the last audible letter of the stem. Luckily for you, I’ve made a post about it. Unluckily for you, it’s quite the extensive rule – in fact, it’s the most notoriously annoying and easily the most hated rule by Dutch speakers themselves. Still, it’s very important, and it actually works, so you might want to go have a look.

For werken, the table ends up like this:

The past participle

The third commonly used conjugation is the past participle. These are made by using the following formula:

ge + stem + d/t

The same double vowel rules apply to the stem as they do in the other conjugations (see below), as well as some other rules regarding the last letter of this “updated” stem, and whether to use a d or t is also determined by the rule we mentioned in the paragraph about the past simple – again, more on that can be found in this post.

The past participle uses an auxiliary verb to complete the full conjugation, similar to English.

The double vowel contraption

If you’ve been learning Dutch for a while, you will have come across quite a bit of double vowels, as in: two of the same vowels in a row. Sure, they exist in English too (see? see again??), but in Dutch, they’re much more common (they even make up half of my name!), and they sometimes seem to disappear or reappear at will.

This has everything to do with the pronunciation of long and short vowels. If a second vowel is needed to change the pronunciation of a word, we put it in, but as soon as our pronunciation rules tell us they aren’t needed in a particular word or specific form of that word, we immediately take them out again. This is why plural forms of some words don’t have a double vowel, while the singular form does, and this is also applied to verbs.

That’s one of the reasons why sometimes, or even oftentimes, the stem of the word isn’t the same as the first person singular. I’m not going to explain how these pronunciation rules work in this article, but I will show you a verb that does get the double vowel addition and subtraction.

The verb is maken (Eng: to make), and it’s pronounced with a long a sound. The stem, as per our rules, is mak. The full conjugation table for the present simple ends up like this:

As you can see, the singular forms do get the extra a, whereas the plural forms don’t need one within our laws of pronunciation, and therefore don’t get one. The extra a is solely there for pronunciation purposes: makt would be pronounced with a short vowel sound, which in this case would be wrong, but maken is still going to be pronounced with a long vowel sound, just like the full verb, and therefore doesn’t need the extra a.

Long story short

Dutch conjugations of regular verbs work somewhat similar to how they work in English, while they differ on other parts. The takeaway from this entire post is that when you know the basic rules, and the exceptions to them, you can calculate every form of the verb you need in a specific situation, even if you’ve never seen or heard the word before.

This obviously isn’t the entire list of possible conjugations, but these are the three most common ones, and they’re the ones you’ll need to hold a normal conversation in Dutch. Keep in mind that the stem of the word is used to determine whether a d/de/den or t/te/ten is added, and that the first person singular doesn’t necessarily have to be (and in fact often isn’t) the same as the stem. Learn the rules, and you’ll never have to look up whether you have lekker gewerkd or lekker gewerkt ever again.