Tag Archives: tense
German tenses in use: Perfekt Posted by Sandra Rösner 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…
German tenses in use: Präteritum Posted by Sandra Rösner 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…
Tense: Present – Das Präsens Posted by Sandra Rösner 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…