The term strong was coined with reference to the Germanic languages, but has since been used of some languages from other families whose inflections have similar characteristics.
"Strong" versus "irregular"
In the Germanic languages, a strong verb is one with an internal vowel change in the past or preterite tense. Strictly speaking, this is not the same thing as an irregular verb, since strong verbs follow certain patterns (more visible in the older Germanic languages that have larger numbers of them), and an irregular verb does not necessarily involve any vowel change (for example, "have" - "had" is irregular but not strong, while "ought" is defective, because it exists in only one tense).
Adjectives and nouns
A strong adjective or noun is defined according to the stem of the declension, and is not directly related to the notion of a strong verb; strong adjectives and nouns do not exist in modern English.
Verbs in German are more diverse than in English; in this page we will learn their categories, and the most used tenses in German, note that this page is including only the important information you should know about in German verbs, and it doesn’t include details about each category or each tense.
Strongverbs change in the singular second person familiar and third person forms, for example the verb nehmen “to take”, look at the side of the table.
For the irregular verbs, they’re tricky too in forming their stem, sometimes the stem doesn’t look like the original verb at all, just like “I go” and “I went”, but these German irregular verbs change the vowel in the stem and, in addition, they take weakverb endings in the past tense.
The six strong classes were differentiated by their ablaut series, the series of vowels each took in the present (and infinitive), the preterit singular, preterit plural, and past participle.
Verbs were presented to the network once for every 10 occurrences in the concordance; verbs that were not found in the concordance were given a frequency of 1.
Weakverbs with high type frequency, with exceptions to be discussed shortly, were learned with weakinflections, and even after 5 generations, 80% of the high frequency strongverbs were inflected correctly regardless of the phonological consistency of their inflectional class.
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