KS3 · German · Year 8
Narrate a new experience: perfect tense with 'haben'
New experiences: perfect tense with 'haben' and 'sein'
Learn it. Recall it. Make it stick.
IllumED Slides
IllumED · 1/10
Your learning goal
I can use the perfect tense with 'haben' to understand and narrate a short sequence of past events.
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Narrate a new experience: perfect tense with 'haben': 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 use the perfect tense with 'haben' to understand and narrate a short sequence of past events.
Key learning points
- The German alphabet has 26 standard letters, like English, and four additional characters [ä], [ö], [ü] and ß.
- The umlaut letters [ä], [ö], [ü] sound very different from [a], [o] and [u] and require practice.
- Sentence building is the process of creating meaningful sentences using knowledge of both vocabulary and grammar.
- The perfect tense with most verbs uses the present tense of the verb ‘haben’ together with a past participle.
- For strong past participles, ge- and –en sandwich the stem; the stem may have a vowel change, too.
Words to know
- umlaut
- pair of dots ( ¨ ) placed over the vowels a, o, u in German to indicate a change in pronunciation
- sentence building
- creating meaningful sentences using knowledge of both vocabulary and grammar
- perfect tense
- 2-verb tense that describes completed actions in the past e.g., 'I said', 'she played'
Common mistakes
If a verb is 'strong', its past participle always has a vowel change.
In German, a strong verb has a stem change in one or more tenses. Some strong verbs have a stem change in the present tense but not in the perfect tense, e.g., 'sehen' - 'er, sie, es sieht' - 'hat gesehen'.
For parents, carers and teachers
- It is always helpful to encourage pupils to challenge themselves to complete speaking and writing tasks from memory, checking their notes only when they need to, and making a note of the trickier words they haven't yet mastered.