20 Most Useful Verbs Flashcards
To be, to have, to want, to go: the twenty verbs that power the majority of everyday sentences. Pick your language — every deck is free to read and free to study with spaced repetition.
Why these twenty verbs carry the language
A small set of verbs — be, have, go, want, can, do, say, see — does a staggering share of the work in every language; linguists estimate the twenty most common verbs appear in the majority of everyday sentences. Learn them and you can start assembling real thoughts, even with rough grammar: "I want coffee", "we go tomorrow". The decks above give you that core twenty across six languages. Fair warning that they are also where irregularity lives — "to be" misbehaves in every language — so learn the infinitives here first, and let the conjugations come gradually through use rather than tables.
Study them so they stick
Reading a word list once is recognition, not knowledge. Pick your language above, read through the deck, then save it to a free account and let spaced repetition schedule the reviews — a few minutes a day and the whole set moves into long-term memory. Curious how that works? Our guide to the spaced repetition algorithm explains it in plain English.