ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the use of past tense in the German grammar. In German, the past tense, also known as the ‘simple past’, ‘imperfect’ or ‘preterite’, is usually used to refer to events in the past, particularly when narrating a story, and is mostly associated with the written language (e.g. novels and news reports referring to past events). In spoken German, however, it is more common to use the perfect tense to refer to past events. The past tense of regular verbs is formed by removing the -en ending from the infinitive and adding -te. This gives the past tense stem. Most commonly used verbs in German are irregular, which means that their past tense stem differs from that of regular verbs. Verbs with prefixes (separable and inseparable) which are derived from irregular verbs follow the same past tense patterns as the original irregular verb.
