German Language Blog
Menu
Search

Tag Archives: tense

German tenses in use: Perfekt Posted by on Dec 16, 2011

The Perfekt is commonly used in spoken German to refer to the past.   Formation: You generally form active sentences in the Perfekt by using a conjugated form of the auxiliary verbs ‘sein’ (to be) or ‘haben’ (to have) and the past participle of the verb. Here are the conjugations of sein and haben…

Continue Reading

German tenses in use: Präteritum Posted by on Dec 14, 2011

The Präteritum is equivalent to the English Simple Past tense, so to speak. But usually, the Präteritum is not used in everyday language in German. It is rather used as a literary language. Germans commonly opt for the Perfekt in their speech in order to refer to the past – which will be discussed in…

Continue Reading

Tense: Present – Das Präsens Posted by on Jun 8, 2011

Learning tenses of a language can be a thorn in one’s side, but learning these rules is crucial to an effective study, since tenses display essential word orders, which enable you to handle a language more freely. There is only one present tense form in German and this one corresponds to all three forms that…

Continue Reading

Newer posts