Past tenses

Or strove?

www.verbix.com/webverbix/English/strive.html

eek, I'm off to bed

Striven and strived may both be used as the past participle ?? he has strived/striven to achieve success. However, strived or strove are used for, e.g. she strived/strove against the odds to win the cup.

Maybe it's down to how clumsy it sounds to your ears. I use striven or strove, because they sound less hard.

I would never use 'strove', it doesn't sound right to me!

"He strove to overcome his disability"
Sounds OK to me , but "I have striven" .
Why not use "try"

'Strove' sounds as if someone is 'try'ing even harder!

I sometimes think I must sound quite archaic at times, I said I was loath to do something to a crowd of friends and only one knew what it meant.

Just applying The Alea Law of Minimum Effort.

Good suggestion, Alea. Or, 'tried hard'.

Though I worry a bit that using simple, frequently used, words instead of older, less familiar, words diminishes the richness and variety of the English language and makes older writings very inaccessible to people.

Not that I am in any way an advocate of convoluted language just for the sake of it. There's a fine line to be drawn somewhere.

I would use 'strove'

strove

What do I know!

Two different tenses - "I strove...", but "I have striven..."

I quite like sounding archaic at times - "five-and-twenty to the hour" for example, which was how it was said in my family, sounds that little bit more elegant than "twenty-five to..."

PS and a third - "I had striven..."

He strives (present)
He strove (in the past and has possibly stopped striving)
He has striven (in the past and is possibly still striving)

Never "he strived" without the "has" (false and ungrammatical past tense - but hey ho, false and ungrammatical constructions are proliferating, so it could be the definitive past tense this time next year)

Shakespeare used both strived and striven. I reckon you can use either.

He has/had been striving.

And of course what is acceptable in the USA is not in the UK- which grammar is correct, got or gotten?

It is a delight to hear natives struggling with this- I'll tell my 14/15 year old French and Swiss students- they will be tickled pink at that!

As foreign students of English we had to learn looooooong lists of irregular verbs as threesome, 'see, saw, seen', 'strive, strove, striven', etc, etc, etc,

Strive is similar to drive.
We say "I was driven" or "I drove." Also "driven" describing somone who is fanatical.
Looks like striven could be the passive form?
So I would say the simple past is strove. Rather archaic.

I was thinking about 'strive' and 'drive'

I suppose you can say 'I strived to achieve a reasonable speed'
But not 'I drived at a reasonable speed'

(ooh, both strived and drived are underlined in red!)

I wouldn't refer to these as irregular verbs , but rather "strong, weak and mixed" verbs. Many English native speakers are not aware that ther are categories, but German speakers in particular recognise patterns of vowel changes.
We are so illogical though,
I drink, I drank but I have drunk.
I swim, I swam, I have swum
And then we get
I think, I thank thought I have thunk (oops) thought!

Hey how about "shrive"?
I make pancakes on Shrove Tuesday because by Ash Wednesday I will be shriven

Alea

I won't be shriven, I'll be fat!!

Reading through I don't think I've ever used the word. Perhpas I don't strive enough!

Granjura is right. Foreign students especially those taking the Cambridge Advanced certificate of English will have learned striven.

And 'strove'

Janerowena - How about loth, or am I getting it mixed up with sloth. I loathed something but also I am loth to do x.You are prob right with loath. Need to look it up.