KS4 · German · Year 10
Das Ruhrgebiet: perfect tense irregular verbs, imperfect tense, 'früher'
Travel and tourism: Reiseziele
Learn it. Recall it. Make it stick.
IllumED Slides
IllumED · 1/10
Your learning goal
I can confidently use a range of verbs in the perfect and imperfect tenses, and apply this knowledge to listening, reading, and translation tasks with a historical context.
1 of 10
Das Ruhrgebiet: perfect tense irregular verbs, imperfect tense, 'früher': slides adapted from the imported teaching text; recall questions created from its keywords, learning points and common mistakes. Self-check practice, with no automatic grading or XP. Answers stay on this page and are cleared when you leave.
Original teaching resources
The original illustrated PowerPoint is available as well as the IllumED text slides. It retains the publisher’s design and credits.
Download original PowerPoint ↓What you’ll learn
I can confidently use a range of verbs in the perfect and imperfect tenses, and apply this knowledge to listening, reading, and translation tasks with a historical context.
Key learning points
- Form the perfect tense with ‘haben’ or ‘sein’, plus a past participle, placed at the end of the clause.
- The imperfect tense is a single-word past tense, using endings attached to the verb stem. It is mostly written.
- Strong verbs have irregular stems in the imperfect tense. The past participles of some verbs are also irregular.
- The imperfect tense forms ‘hatte’, ‘war’, and ‘es gab’ are often used in spoken as well as written German.
- Use ‘früher’ with a past tense to mean ‘in the past’ or ‘used to’.
Words to know
- perfect tense
- past tense formed using either ‘haben’ or ‘sein’ with a past participle, which goes to the end of the clause, e.g., 'ich habe das gemacht'
- imperfect tense
- single-word past tense, used mainly to narrate past events in writing, e.g., 'ich machte'
- past participle
- verb form that forms the perfect tense, together with 'haben' or 'sein', e.g., 'gemacht', 'gesehen'
Common mistakes
The imperfect tense is only ever written.
Whilst the imperfect tense is mainly used to narrate past events in written German, some forms are regularly used in spoken German, such as 'es gab', 'war' and 'hatte'.
For parents, carers and teachers
- LC1 includes a large amount of Higher-tier grammar (irregular verb stems in the imperfect tense).