How to teach irregular verbs: games and activities that make the forms stick

Most learners meet irregular verbs as a three-column list, alphabetical, from arise to write. It's tidy, and in our view a poor teaching order. Arise and abide come first, go and get come halfway down, and nothing shows the learner that sing, ring and drink all change the same way.

Here is a better order, the patterns that make the list shorter than it looks, and a sequence of activities that takes a verb from "I recognise it" to "I said it without thinking". Most irregular verb games online give you a ready-made set to play. This is about building the lesson they slot into.

Start with frequency, not the alphabet

The irregular verbs a learner needs first are the ones they'll say every day. That set is small, and almost every verb in it is irregular:

be, have, do, say, go, get, make, know, think, take, see, come, give, find, tell, feel, leave, put, bring, keep

Twenty verbs. An A2 learner who has those in the past simple can tell most of the stories they want to tell about last weekend. The rarer verbs (bid, bind, cling, forsake) can wait until a text throws one up, and some of them are on their way out of the language anyway.

A look from linguistics

A team at Harvard tracked 177 Old English irregular verbs over twelve centuries and found that only 98 are still irregular today, because "a verb that is 100 times less frequent regularizes 10 times as fast." Common verbs keep their odd forms because speakers hear them too often to forget, while rare ones drift to -ed. Your learner runs the same process in a single lifetime: went sticks because they meet it daily, and strove won't stick from a list.

Lieberman, Michel, Jackson, Tang & Nowak, Nature (2007).

Group the rest by sound pattern

Once the high-frequency set is in, teach the rest in families. A learner who knows one verb in a group can guess the others, and guessing from a pattern is retrieval, not rote.

Pattern	Examples	Teaching note
No change	cut, cut, cut · put · set · let · hit · cost · shut · hurt	The easiest win. Mostly short verbs ending in t
Past = participle, ends in t	send, sent, sent · spend · build · lend · feel, felt · keep, kept · sleep · leave, left · mean	One new form to learn, not two
-ought / -aught	buy, bought · bring · think · fight · catch, caught · teach	Pronounced the same; spelling is the hard part
i, a, u	sing, sang, sung · drink · swim · begin · ring	The pattern learners enjoy finding
-ew, -own	know, knew, known · grow · throw · blow · fly, flew, flown	Show and snow look similar but follow different patterns
Participle in -en	speak, spoke, spoken · break · choose · write · drive · take · eat	The participle is the one learners forget
One-offs	be, was/were, been · go, went, gone · do, did, done · see, saw, seen · come, came, come	Already covered if you started with frequency

Give the learner the first two families as a sorting task and let them find the pattern. Then hand over the rest of a family and ask them to predict the forms before they check.

Treat the past participle as a separate job

The past simple and the past participle are needed at different times. A learner can tell a story with went, saw and ate long before they need have gone, have seen, have eaten. Teaching all three columns at once doubles the load for a form they can't use yet.

Teach base and past first, at A2. Bring in the participle when you teach the present perfect or the passive, and teach it with that grammar ("I've never eaten octopus", "It was written in 1950"), so the form arrives with a reason to use it.

Climb a six-step sequence from recognising to using

Each step asks a little more of the learner than the last. Recognising a form among options is easier than producing it from a blank, and producing it in isolation is easier than producing it mid-sentence while thinking about meaning.

Step	What the learner does	Activity	Live or homework
1. Notice	Sort verbs into pattern families	Quiz (pick the family)	Live, talking through the choices
2. Recognise	Match base form to past form	Match Pairs	Either
3. Produce	Type the past form from the base form	Type the Answer	Homework, so you see the results
4. Participle	Complete have + participle sentences	Complete the Sentence	Either
5. Use	Answer personal past questions out loud	"What did you do last…?" chain	Live
6. Re-test	Same set, a week later	Back to step 3	Homework

If your tool lets you switch one set of verbs between formats without typing it in again, steps 2, 3 and 6 are one build, not three. There's more on why the format ladder works in Flashcards vs. Quiz vs. Match Pairs, and on why step 6 matters in vocabulary review that sticks.

In our view, step 3 is where most of the memory work happens, because there are no options to lean on. Here is what it looks like.

Try Type the Answer

Type the verb in brackets in the right tense: present perfect or past simple.

Question 1 of 6

I ___ here since 2020. (live)

Check

Build the same activity from the verbs your learner keeps getting wrong, and the results tell you which ones to bring back next week.

Adapt classroom irregular verb games for one-to-one online

Most irregular verb games were designed for a room full of students, like the ball toss, concentration, bingo and relay in Ellii's set of classroom activities. With one adult learner on a video call, the mechanic still works if you keep the pressure and drop the room.

Classroom game	The one-to-one online version
Ball toss: say the base form, throw, the catcher says the past	Rapid fire: you say ten base forms, they answer with past and participle. Time it, and try to beat the time next lesson
Board relay: teams race to write past forms	Beat your score: the same Type the Answer set as homework, twice in a week, and compare
Concentration / Memory: flip cards to find base and past pairs	Match Pairs on screen, built from this week's family
Bingo: the teacher calls base forms, students mark the past	Listen and type: you say a base form in a sentence, they type the past form in the chat
Story chain: each student adds a sentence in the past	Terrible day: give eight verbs, and the learner tells the story of a terrible day using all eight

Start adult learners with a diagnostic

In practice, adults often arrive with irregular verbs half-learned from school: they know went in a test and lose it in conversation. For them, skip step 1 and run step 3 first as a diagnostic. Whatever they get wrong becomes the set for the week. A learner preparing for a job interview needs led, built, taught and made far sooner than swam, so pull the verbs from the stories they actually need to tell.

Our view is that the order matters more than the game. Frequency first, then families, participles when the grammar needs them, and a climb from recognising to using. Any of the games above will work inside that order.

Sources & further reading

• Quantifying the evolutionary dynamics of language (Lieberman et al., 2007). Nature 449. How English irregular verbs regularise over time, and why the frequent ones survive.
• 5 Fun Activities for Irregular Verbs (Ellii, 2015). Classroom versions of ball toss, concentration, bingo and relay, the games adapted above.