In Dutch, changing a verb into the past tense can be tricky. Instead of just adding something to the end, the whole word often changes. Take the Dutch verb helpen (“to help”). You might expect the past tense to be helpte. Logical, right? In Dutch, many verbs form their past tense in a regular way: you take the stem of the verb (basically the part without -en at the end) and add -te or -de, depending on the last sound of the stem. For example: werken (“to work”) → stem: werk → past tense: werkte.
But the real past form of helpen is hielp—a big vowel change that doesn’t follow the usual pattern. It’s a curveball even for native speakers, and especially for children who are still figuring out how their language works. That’s a big leap! So how do children figure this out?
That’s what we wanted to find out. And thanks to a massive study involving over 38,000 Dutch-speaking children, we got some answers.
The Big Question
Children make mistakes when learning grammar—it’s part of the process. But why do some past tense verbs seem harder than others? And are children using patterns, like similar-sounding words, to help them learn? Or are they just learning what they hear most often?
What We Did
We looked at how children aged 8 to 12 formed the past tense for 190 different verbs that they had to enter on a website, considering how frequently these verbs are being used in everyday life. This is the age where children still sometimes say things like helpte instead of hielp—so it's the perfect time to study how learning is happening.
What Makes a Verb Difficult?
Not all verbs are created equal when it comes to learning their past tense. Some just stick better in our minds because we hear them a lot. Others sound like other verbs, which can either help or confuse us. And sometimes, it depends on what the verb means—like whether it describes an action that clearly ends, such as “break,” or something more ongoing, like “know.”
These little differences can make certain verbs easier or harder for kids to learn—and even for adults to remember!
What We Found
The biggest factor was how often children hear the correct past tense form in everyday life. The more they hear words like hielp or geholpen, the better they get at using them themselves.
Interestingly, having similar-sounding verbs around didn’t really help, for instance, knowing the past tense of melken (“to milk”) didn’t help children figure out helpen (“to help”). And whether the action had a clear ending also didn’t make much difference either: children were just as likely to struggle with brak (“broke”), which has a clear end, as with wist (“knew”), which doesn’t.
So, it turns out that some of the ideas people had about what makes verbs easier to learn might not be as important as we once thought.
So What Does This Mean?
Children learn best from hearing correct examples again and again. It’s not about guessing based on sound-alikes or relying on hidden rules—it’s about exposure, at least for Dutch.
In short, practice—and plenty of it—really does make perfect when it comes to tricky grammar.
At the moment, most child language learning research is on just a handful of languages, and even Dutch hasn’t been studied enough. As researchers work to gather data on a wider variety of languages, these findings for Dutch-learning children provide a strong start for understanding how children go about learning languages with similarly complicated verb patterns. And with over 38,000 young learners helping out, we’re now a lot closer to figuring it out.
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