English irregular verbs: the ones worth memorising
English grammar is mostly regular, which makes the exception stand out: a few hundred verbs do not take -ed in the past, and their forms simply have to be known. The reassuring part is that the ones you actually need are few and very frequent: go/went/gone, have/had/had, take/took/taken. They repeat constantly.
Two forms to know per verb: past simple and past participle
An irregular verb has two forms worth drilling beyond the base: the past simple (I went) and the past participle, used in perfect tenses and the passive (I have gone, it was taken). Some verbs collapse both into one shape (said, said); others keep them separate (went, gone), and that separation is exactly where mistakes happen.
The three patterns behind the chaos
Irregular verbs are not entirely random. Most fall into families. Verbs like sing/sang/sung and drink/drank/drunk change a vowel by pattern. Verbs like put/put/put and cut/cut/cut never change at all. Verbs like buy/bought/bought and bring/brought/brought merge past simple and participle. Spotting the family makes new verbs easier to guess and remember.
Frequency beats coverage
You do not need all ~200 irregular verbs at once. A short list of high-frequency ones (be, have, do, say, get, make, go, know, take, see, come, think) covers a disproportionate share of real speech and text. Learn those cold before chasing rarer verbs like strive or forsake.
One slip that sticks: mixing simple and participle
The most common learner error is using the participle where the simple past belongs, or vice versa: I have went instead of I have gone, or I seen it instead of I saw it. Because the two forms are graded and drilled as separate cards, this is exactly the confusion spaced repetition is built to fix.
How Verboteca handles it
Each English verb in Verboteca has its base form, third person, -ing form, past simple and past participle as separate cards, so you practise the exact piece you are shaky on. A1 covers the present forms (-s, -ing); Premium adds the past simple and participle for the full irregular set.