26. Ein schlechter Tag

Wow, this was a lot for one lesson. But in general, you have now seen all the major examples of using preterit and perfect in German. In future lessons, we will continue to talk about expressing the past in German, and you will have more texts that will illustrate how this is done in practice. This is a big topic, but it is also a very important one. Don't worry, it may seem like a lot right now, but with practice, everything will fall into place.

In this lesson block, we will see how to talk about events that happened in the past. This is a big and important topic. This is a first example of how to express past events, and it is called "simple past tense" or, more specifically, "preterit". It is called "simple past tense" because only the verb changes and no auxiliary verb is needed.

In most cases, in spoken German, you will see this construction for expressing past events. This is called "perfect", or sometimes "compound past tense" because it uses an auxiliary verb. Note how "angerufen", which is called the "past participle" form of a verb, is used together with "habe". In this construction, the auxiliary verb can be, in most cases, "haben", or, when talking about movement and change of state, "sein".

The auxiliary verb is conjugated by using the rules for "present tense". "Ich habe .... angerufen" but "du hast ... geantwortet".

The "preterit" and the "perfect" can be mixed together. In spoken language, preterit will be used for the verbs "sein", "haben", and the modal verbs. For other verbs, typically, the perfect is used. Note that in written communication, preterit is used more than in spoken communication. So in texts, you are more likely to see preterit.

Preterit can, of course, be used for any verb. Here we can see preterit used with the verb "aufwachen" (to wake up). You can also use perfect for any verb. For example, instead of "Ich war" (preterit) you can say "Ich bin gewesen" (perfect), but the last form is not very common.

Here we can see the preterit of a modal verb müssen.

The past participles can be identified (but not always) with the "ge" element that is typically added in front of the verb stem. When a verb has a separable prefix, then "ge" is inserted between the prefix and the verb stem.

The verb haben is very often used with preterit. You can also say "Ich habe gehabt" in perfect, but "Ich hatte" is much more common.

The verb fahren (to drive) is a movement verb. So the auxiliary verb used with this verb is "sein", not "haben".

Es gibt can be translated as "there is". Es gab can be translated as "there was". The verb is geben (to give), and "gab" is a preterit of the verb "geben".

feststellen (to find out, to establish) is a verb with a separable prefix. In this example, we can see that in preterit, the separable prefix is separated and goes to the end of the sentence, just like in present tense.

We can see the preterit here again, this time for the verb "funktionieren" (to function).

Modal verbs very often use another verb, as you can see in this sentence. This other verb remains in the infinitive when speaking about events in the past, just like in the present tense.

gehen is a movement verb, so it uses the auxiliary verb "sein" in prefect, not "haben".

einschlafen means to fall asleep. This is not a movement verb, but it indicated a change of state, so it used the auxiliary verb "sein" in prefect, not "haben". Although most verbs use "haben" as the auxiliary verb in the past, you will need to learn which verbs use "sein" as the auxiliary verb when expressing events that happened in the past.