Past Tense

German Past Tense 1 – An Overview

German has two types of past - the preterit and the perfect. Today, we'll learn when to use which and why spoken past and written past might be the better names.

German Past Tense 2 – Spoken Past

All about the perfect in German, also called spoken past - when to use it, how to form the past participle, aka ge-form and when to use "sein" and "haben".

German Past Tense 3 – The Preterit

In this episode, we'll learn the rules for the regular preterit and go over the irregular forms of the most common verbs. With lots of examples.

When to Use Preterit and Perfect in German

The German version of "simple past" is used with only about two dozen verbs in daily life - haben, sein, the modals and verbs like gehen or finden.

German Past Tense 5 – Exercise

In this exercise, we'll practice when to use the spoken past and when to use the preterite in idiomatic German. It's hard, but it's fair and kind of sexy.

Practice German and Speaking – New Version

  Hello everyone, and welcome back to your favorite German learning website. So many of you probably remember that I partnered up with EF languages for their speech recognition system, and that I am working in integrating that more and more here. I think speaking actually gets WAAAAYYY too little attention in all the various online courses and systems. I mean, ten years ago, the tech wasn’t really evolved enough, but we’re in 2021 now and there’s really no reason that “fill in the gap”, “multiple choice”  or “order word boxes” should be the backbone of exercises these days. I mean, they do have their place, no doubt, but there’s a lot of potential in making people actually speak. I created two little workouts with the EF exercise toolkit earlier this summer, and you seemed to have liked it as an idea. But there were a lot of small functionality and design thing that were missing or that I wanted to change, to make it a REALLY nice quiz experience. And so I went all Thanos, like “Fine, I’ll do it myself.” and I  actually started programming and over the last few weeks I integrated the speech recognition into the normal … <a href="https://yourdailygerman.com/meaning/past-tense/">Dive in <span class="meta-nav">→</span></a> <a href="https://yourdailygerman.com/meaning/past-tense/">Dive in <span class="meta-nav">→</span></a>

Past Tense with “sein” – Speaking Practice

Practice the most important verbs that build their past with "sein" - by SPEAKING. With speech recognition and word for word feedback. Truly epic stuff!