German Verb Tenses

German Verb Tenses

We have mentioned various qualities of verbs, such as mood, voice, or tense. In the indicative mood (used for making statements or asking questions), tense is important - when did, or will, the event happen?

First, there is very good news. Do you know how many tenses you use in English? Count!

 

Sometimes you may even need to say:

 

Present and past are simple (tense is expressed by an ending or other change), but the rest are compound (tense is indicated by the use of an auxiliary plus the past participle).

Now, listen to this: In spoken German, one uses only the present and the 'perfect' tense.

 

The 'progressive' and 'emphatic' formations simply do not exist in German. German does have past and future tenses, but they are almost never used in speaking. Since we emphasize, in this beginning course, spoken German, we believe you can get away with using only the present and the perfect tense, with some important exceptions.

The past (often also called preterite or simple past) has become kind of an 'epic' tense in German: it is used in narratives like novels, stories, fairy tales, and others. However, you do need to know and use the simple past of the auxiliaries haben and sein, and the modal verbs like können and müssen, which also act as auxiliaries. These forms are used all the time in speech, and will be presented in this chapter (and they're all irregular).

You will have to learn the forms of the past tense of the weak and strong verbs at some point too, but not for a while. If you do not intend to become a teacher of German you only have to be able to recognize the past tense of most verbs in the texts you will read.

How about the future? Well, the German future is kind of a dying tense. You see, languages are like living organisms. They have parts that regress and become obsolete, because their function has been taken over by other means. You remember the following sentences in the first chapter:

• Andreas: Was machen wir morgen?
• Anna: Erst gehen wir auf den Markt.

In English, you would choose between the present progressive and the future tense.

• What are we doing tomorrow? First we are going to the market.
• What shall we do tomorrow? We'll go to the market first.

The adverb morgen (tomorrow) indicates clearly that Andreas and Ann are talking about the future. The adverb gives the context for the time of the action.

Therefore, you may just forget about the progressive, the emphatic, the future and the past. Focus on the present and the perfect. These forms, however, you should know really well.