Hello everyone,
and welcome to another part of the best German language online course ever.
Today, it is time for a new episode of the epic HBO series called “German Past Tense”.
If you haven’t .. uhm… watched the first 2 you can find them here:
Part 1 was an overview about German past tense generally functions and a roadmap for what we’ll have to learn, part 2 was all about the Spoken Past.
And today, in part 3, it is time for a look at what I call:
The Written Past
The official name for this in German preterit but preterit is not intuitive at all and it also sounds a bit scary. Like pretorian. Or predator.
But the only dangerous thing about it is how little you need it.
So yeah.. instead of calling it preterit, we’ll call it written past.
Why written past?
Because it’s one of THE main features of written accounts of things, while spoken past is what people use in daily life.
Like, if Harry Potter were to tell Ron what he’s been doing all day while being sick ith a hernia (sleeping, eating pizza, watching a movie, casting spells), he’d use spoken past, in German.
When J.K. Rowling narrates how he did this stuff in her upcoming novel “Harry Boomer – Harry and the Cursed Lumbago”, she’ll use the written past.
Because the written past (aka preterit) is mostly used in novel style narrations.
When you read books in German, you’ll see written past all over the place.
Now, that would be a great system – if German were consistent about it. But it isn’t.
There’s a group of verbs for which the written past is also idiomatic in spoken language.
For some, you can use both forms, for others the written past is the better choice, and then there are the ones you’ll REALLY love:
The ones where the spoken past and the written past are both used, and mean two different things.
But before we talk about that, we’ll learn how to build the forms. And for that, we’ll begin with a look at good ol’ English…
Past Tense in English
When it comes to past tense, we can divide English verbs into two groups. The first group is completely regular and uses a straight forward simple marker for the past: the ending “-ed”.
- cook – cooked
- dance – danced
- learn – learned
- obfuscate – obfuscated
…
And this includes verbs that do have some sort of little modification going on but it’s really just the result of slurring the original regular form over centuries.
- say – said (“sayed”)
- hear – heard (“heared”)
- feel – felt (“feeled”)
- leave – left (“leaved”)
- sleep – slept (“sleeped”)
and I’d argue even words like
- make – made (“maked”)
- bend – bent (“bended”)
…
So, this group (completely regular, plus kind of regular) makes up 80% of all verbs that the English language has to offer.
That leaves about… uh… hold on… uh… “Yo, ChatGPT, if I have 80% how much is left. Research and make no mistakes”..
… 20%. We have about 20% of verbs left and those are the ones that really deserve the term irregular.
Because they all say “Screw endings, let’s change the stem instead.”
Which wouldn’t be so bad, if they used one consistent stem change for all of them. But it isn’t.
- bring – brought
- sing – sang
- do – did
- see – saw
- know – knew
- go – went**
(**went is a mega exception, by the way because it comes from the verb
“to wind”. Brits used the past form of one verb for the past of another.)
If you look for patterns, you’ll probably eventually find some, but they’ll be littered with caveats and exceptions and for the average learner, the changes are really just random and something we have to learn through repetition when we learn English.
Anyway, so we have these two paradigms of marking the past in English:
- Adding an “-ed” (+possibly slurring the word a bit) or
- Changing the stem vowel in some crazy
Now you’re all like “Fine, but what does this have to do with German?”
Well, these two groups of verbs are also a thing of the Germanic languages in general.
In German, we also have these two groups of verbs and if you open a textbook or sit in a course, sooner or later you’ll hear the official names of the groups: weak verbs and strong verbs.
Like, the weak ones are called weak because they do what they’re told. They’re obedient NPC suckers that live by the rules, like the -ed rule in English.
The strong verbs on the other hand do what they freaking want and get crazy tattoos all over their stem. Rock and Roll, yolo.
German has the same two groups of verbs and the way that the past forms are built are really similar. But there are differences too.
Let’s start with the so-called weak ones, the ones that in English get the “-ed” ending.
The Regular Written Past (Weak Verbs)
In German, of course we have to first get the stem, so we have to remove the ending of the dictionary form.
In the dictionary it says kochen (to cook) but the stem is only koch– . That’s what we add our ending to, which in German is not “-ed” but a simple “t”.
I mean, German sounds a bit harsh and the “e” is silent anyway, right? So “t” makes a lot of sense.
But we’re not done yet. German likes endings, so we’ll also have to add an e AFTER the past marker t.
- cooked
- kochte -[___]
Tadaaaah… that’s the past stem and even though it has just as many letters, the German version is two syllables long.
- uuuh-te – [___]
Yeah, I know I sound silly… but that’s the rhythm pattern and it’s already enough to sound like past tense.
Now some of you are probably like “Emanuel… EMANUEL. What’s with the brackets. They’re just one of your unfunny jokes, right? RIGHT?”
Uhm… no. The brackets [___] are there because to finish off the past form, we need to add an ending.
“Whaaaat? But we already added the ending.”
Well, yes.
But we only added the ending for past tense. Now we need to add the ending for the person. Come on guys, don’t look at me like that. I told you German loves endings.
Seriously though, the endings are really simple and they’re almost the more or less the same as the ones we need for the modal verbs in present tense.
| ____ | kochen | können (present tense) |
| ich | kochte – * | kann – * |
| du | kochte – st | kann- st |
| er/sie/es | kochte – * | kann – * |
| wir/sie | kochte – n | könn – en |
| ihr | kochte – t | könn – t |
The only difference is the e for the wir and sie form but hey, if we were to put it there, we’d wind up with “kochteen”, so it’s kind of a “common sense”-difference.
Of course, you can study those endings if you want, but you could also just remember to add st for the du-form and nothing for ich and er/sie/es.
Now, let’s look at some examples and see the rule in real life.
- Thomas hört den Vogel. (Thomas hears the bird.)
Thomas hörte den Vogel. (Thomas heard the bird.)
- Ich analysiere das Problem. (I analyze the problem)
- Ich analysierte das Problem. (I analyzed… )
Again, pay attention to the difference in rhythm between the German version and the English version. One syllable vs. two syllables.
Oh and also note that the structure of the present and the past sentences are exactly.
So we don’t have to do any crazy verb-to-the-end-voodoo like for the spoken past.
More examples.
- Mein Opa erzählte mir eine Geschichte.
- My grandpa told me a story.
- Wir warten auf den Bus. (We are waiting for the bus)
- Wir warteten auf den Bus.
Whoops, what was that? Warteten? That doesn’t only sound funny, it also doesn’t fit with our rule. We learned that the past form is stem + te + person ending; in our case wart + te + n …
- wartten
But now, the past marker is not audible anymore. That’s why there’s an extra “e” between the “t” of the verb itself and the “te”
- wart (1) – e (2) – te (3) – n (4)
- stem (1) – filler (2) – past marker (3) – person ending (4)
This filler-e is used for all verbs where the stem ends in –t or –d and it’s really only there so you can actually hear that the form is past. Which is why I’d say this isn’t really an exception. It’s more like a common sense bending of the rule so it’s actually practicable in real life.
This extra e is always there when the stem ends with a –t or a –d.
- Ich beantwortete die Frage.
- I answered the question.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
All right… what else… uh… yeah, a quick couple of examples with prefix verbs, so we can see that also for those, the structure of present and written past are the same…
- Ich kaufe heute ein. (I do/am buying groceries today.)
- Ich kaufte heute ein. (I did/bought groceries today.)
- Der Regen hört heute Mittag auf. (The rain will stop at noon today)
- Der Regen hörte heute Mittag auf. (The rain stopped at noon today)
Sweet.
So this was the regular way to build the past, which works for about 80% of all verbs. Problem is… just as in English, many of the most common everyday verbs belong to the other 30 perce..uhm… I mean 20.
Written Past of Irregular Verbs (Strong Verbs)
And there really isn’t much to explain or understand. It’s really the same mess as in English. These verbs mark the past with a stem change.
Sometimes, it’s just the vowel:
- schlafen : schlief–
- laufen : lief–
Sometimes it’s a bit more, and you kind of have to be high … uh… really creative and open minded to see a connection.
- gehen : ging- (to go)
- stehen : stand- (to stand*)
*yeah, English present looks like German past here. Definitely confusing.
There are several possible changes and even though there are some patterns, the “look” of the verb won’t tell you with certainty which change it’s going be.
Oh, and it won’t tell you if the verb is irregular at all…. just in case you’re wondering.
- geben : gab- (to give)
- heben : hob- (to lift)
- schwimmen : schwamm– (to swim, irregular)
- stimmen : stimmte- (to be correct, regular)
Now, of course these changes are not entirely random.
There are like 10 or so different stem change patterns so each verb belongs to a certain group. Which means, that, technically, you could learn these groups and their change pattern and then learn for each verb to which group it belongs and then, when you have to build a written past, you apply the stem change of the respective group.
But that’s exactly as boring and cumbersome as it sounds.
If you as me, learning the groups is not necessary.
Thing is… because the English verbs and German verbs are siblings, English can often (not always) serve as a guide.
- come : came : come
- kommen : kam- : gekommen
- see : saw : seen
- sehen : sah- : gesehen
- drink : drank : drunk
- trinken : trank- : getrunken
- give : gave : given
- geben : gab- : gegeben
Sure, they’re not exactly the same but at least they can give you some idea about the direction of the change.
Back in elementary school, when we had to learn the English forms we’d just learn the whole triplet through repetition by sound.
And in German you won’t need that many written past forms anyway, and the ones you do need, you’ll see over and over, so I’d say just learn those directly.
And we’ll go over the most important ones together but fi… oh, wait… there’s a call…. Lisa from Vermont, welcome to the show
“Hey Emanuel, I have a question …”
Sure, go ahead.
“What about the endings? With the regular written past we had to add endings for the persons? Is that the same with these irregular ones? Or do we just use the stem?”
Oh, great question… I almost forgot. Of course the irregular written past gets endings, too.
“Phew… German… never without endings.”
Haha… yeah… but it’s the pretty much the same endings as for the regular written past.
“Oh… that’s good then. Can you do it for a couple of verbs?”
Of course…
| ____ | kochen (regular) | gehen | schlafen |
| ich | kochte – * | ging – * | schlief-* |
| du | kochte – st | ging- st | schlief-st |
| er/sie/es | kochte – * | ging- * | schlief-* |
| wir/sie | kochte – n | ging-en | schlief-en |
| ihr | kochte – t | ging – t | schlief-t |
There’s a small difference with the extra “e” in the wir-form, but again, that’s just one of those common sense modifications.
“Oh… I see. Can you do some real life examples for some of the most important verbs?”
Yeah, we’ll actually go over all of the ones you’ll need but first we need to talk about the third group of verbs.
“Uh… wait, the third group of verbs?”
Yes. I didn’t mention it till now, but German always has to complicate stuff.
“Haha… oh boy. Well, bring it on… “
Mixed written past
The two groups we had so far were regular (with the “te-“) and irregular (with the stem-change). The third group (a very small group) has a stem-change AND a “-te” ending; the best of both worlds. Or was it the worst?
Anyway, take for instance bringen. If it were regular (or so called weak), it should be bringte-, if it were irregular it would have some sort of stem change. Like, say, brang- or something.
The actual form is
- brachte-
So we have a somewhat substantial stem change AND a “-te”. And then it get’s the usual ending to top it all off.
- Maria war betrunken und wir brachten sie nach Hause.
- Maria was drunk and we brought her home.
There are not many of these verbs, but some of them, you really have to know
- Wir dachten, du kommst um 9. (denken)
- We thought you [would] come at 9.
- Thomas wusste genau, wo Marias Handy ist(war). (wissen)
- Thomas knew exactly, where Marias phone was.
- Den Film kannte ich schon. (kennen)
- I knew the movie already.
Why do you need those?
Because they belong to that group of verbs for which the written past is also used in spoken German.
Those verbs and how and when to use which form is what we’ll talk about now.
And by “now”, I mean in the next episode.
For today, I feel like we’ve done enough, even though it wasn’t really that much new information because we know all this from English already.
But we did see the forms for quite a few verbs today, so if you’re not familiar with those, make a list.
YourDailyGerman – Where the students have to make their own list.
Worst learning ever.
Anyways, that’s it for today.
As always, if you have any questions about what we’ve learned so far or some cool suggestions on how to learn the irregular forms, just leave me a comment.
I hope you liked it, and see you next time.
“Thomas wusste genau, wo Marias Handy ist(war).”
Three questions: (1) is that comma required in German? (2). What is the parenthetical ‘war’ doing there? (3) English apostrophizes the possessive s. Is that not done in German?
1) Yes, you have two conjugated verbs. They have to be separated by “and” or “comma”.
2) Both words are possible in German and “ist” can also be understood to mean “was” so it could refer to where the phoen WAS not IS at the time of speaking.
3) No, only after s. So it would be “Thomas’ Handy”
Hi Emanuel,
in einem Seminar hat mein Dozent so gesagt:
“Wie wir gesprochen hatten….”
nicht: “Wie wir gesprochen haben”
Ich war völlig verwirrt da ich immer diese zweite Version benutze.
Was ist der Unterschied und warum ist hier hatten besser passend?(so meinte ein German friend von mir)
Vielleicht gibt es einen Artikel über hatten+past tense?
Danke im Voraus! Deine Artikel sind toll wie immer, bitte mach weiter so :)
There is a small typo above, there is an extra “n” that appeared in the root:
Fixed, thank you!!
No PDF file for this one?
Should be up now.
Lovely. Thanks, Emanuel!
Hey Emanuel,
My question isn’t regarding the written past tense (I’m kind of skipping through this part as to not lose sight of the spoken past too much). But in your sentence:
Wir warten auf den Bus.
How come we’re using den and not dem — like we’re waiting on the bus, there’s no movement?
The sentence means that we’re waiting “for” the bus, not “on” the bus in the local sense. If it were about us sitting on top of the bus waiting, then it would be indeed “auf dem Bus”.
You can find more on that in my article about two-way prepositions :)
Hallo. I have a question uwu. In the examples of the “regular written past”, the last example about the rain, the English translation says:-“The rain will stop today”, but that would be future, and I wonder if in German it’s also literally future or it’s just a way to say it, or if it’s more exactly translated as:-“The rain stops at noon today”? And that also made me wonder:-“How does one construct the future sentence in German?”:D Thanks in advance, Em! uwu
I translated from English to German and it gives the same as in the example, but I still wonder about the future tense uwu
I haven’t talked about future tense yet in detail, because you don’t really need it all that often. German uses present whenever there’s some other indication, like for instance a word like “tomorrow”.
You can find some bits about future in the posts on “werden”.
German uses present tense a lot to talk about the future. English is more strict and uses the actual future tense more. The meaning is the same though.
Oh, I got it. Thank you so much uwu
Thanks for your site!
Quick Q. In the final example, does it matter that you write “Den Film kannte ich…” rather than “Ich kannte den Film…” ?
Not really! Putting “den Film” first makes for a nice tie in, if the film was the center of attention in the sentence before or in the conversation. But meaning-wise, there’s no difference.
Hi
may i know why some word is in uppercase like Opa and Geschichte even though they are not the first word?
My guess is they are all nouns. Am i correct?
Yes, all nouns are capitalized in German. Helps finding your way around in the sentence.
Wait why isn’t there a quiz?
I’ve only recently started adding quizzes, so most of the course doesn’t have them yet :). I’m working on it, but it’ll take a while till I get to this one.
Hey Emanuel! Thanks for the great stuff as always. Your content is fun and always makes me laugh while teaching me how to use German :)
btw, the link to the next lesson is not the correct link and brings me to the previous lesson instead! So, I thought I should inform you about it ;)
Thanks for the great feedback :).
And for the error report also. I’m actually reworking this navigation at the moment so I think I messed up there :)
Why is episode 5 of past tense called “Snuggled”? :D
I’m new here and want to say, first off, great job with this. I have been trying a few different learning methods for German and the predominantly written ones are usually hard for me to get through. I’ve enjoyed this course quite a bit so far and have even laughed out loud at points. So, well done and keep at it. Anyway, I want to make sure I’m not taking this in the wrong direction:
Written:
Maria war betrunken und wir brachten sie nach Hause.
Spoken:
Maria war betrunken und wir sie nach Hause gebracht.
Is that correct?
Almost correct :).
The spoken version is missing the helper verb (…, und wir haben sie nach Hause gebracht.
Other than that, perfect.
Oh, and thanks for the great feedback :)!!
Still, I have a question. Given any present tense verb in German, how can I identify to which group of written past verbs it goes to? Because although I understand now the base rule for the written German past is, I cannot properly sort out which present verb (or infinitive verb) will be a regular, irregular or mixed written past verb. Is there something to help with this, Emanuel? I really appreciate your help.
Well, a good hint is whether the ge-form is regular (ge-stem-t) or not (ge-ste(vowelchange)m-en, for example).
Other than that there is no real way to see it just by looking at the infinitive. –
But why would you want to do that anyway? The ones you need you should (and will) learn by heart quickly, and you won’t need the rest in the beginning. And later, you’ll get them one by one through “osmosis”
Nice! Emanuel, as I learned these verbs, out of curiosity I decided to look at the amount of irregular verbs and it kinda scared at first. But you’re right. Danke.
Thanks a lot, Emanuel. I’ve been for the last three months trying to figure out past in German. No wonder why it felt so “exquisite” to get hold an understanding of it.
the verb ‘to stop’ should be ‘aufhören’ no?
What did I write?
Great article! Just curious, I’m wondering how the spoken/written distinction goes with something like an audio book? Or how about written dialogue in a novel or something?
An audio book uses the register that would be used in a real book. If there’s dialog however that would usually be in spoken past (unless it is supposed to sound ancient).
Ah okay, thank you very much for the response.
hello! is it normal to use in spoken the verbs sein and haben? ich war gestern zu hause. is that best to use for written or will i sound ok too? i lobe your blog by the way :)
With “haben” and “sein” go for written past all the time. So “Ich war zu Hause” is perfect.
Hi there!
It’s an extremely fine point, but the present tense of our bastardized “went” was originally “wend” — a verb that is no longer used except in fossilized phrases like “to wend one’s way”. The verb “wind” is separate, still in use, and has the past tense of “wound”.
Thanks for the blog! Great resource.
Hi, Emanuel! Thanks for the lessons and your good sense of humor :) You’ve gave me a free account and I really appreciate it, many thanks to all of you, who made it possible! This blog is not only very useful, but also motivates to study German…and English)
Hey, question about the mixed written past like kennen/denken/wissen, ect… in your examples “Ich kannte” would it become “Wir könnten” or “wir kannten”? “Thomas wusste”/”Ich(er/sie/es) weißte”?
The vowel stays consistent once it is in past, so it is “wir kannten” and “ich wusste”. “Könnten” is a form of “können”.