KS4 · German · Year 11
Salzburg, Österreich: imperfect tense, extended writing (Edexcel)
Travel and Tourism: Wiederholung: Menschen und Orte
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IllumED Slides
IllumED · 1/9
Your learning goal
I can use the imperfect and other tenses to complete exam-style writing tasks on the topics of holidays, people and places.
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Salzburg, Österreich: imperfect tense, extended writing (Edexcel): 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 imperfect and other tenses to complete exam-style writing tasks on the topics of holidays, people and places.
Key learning points
- Weak verbs form the imperfect tense by adding these endings to the verb stem: -te, -test, -te, -ten, -tet, -ten.
- Strong verbs have irregular stems in the imperfect tense, with vowel changes and endings: -, st, -, en, t, en.
- The imperfect tense of ‘sein’, ‘haben’, modal verbs and 'es gab' are commonly used in spoken as well as written German.
- Use ‘früher’ with a past tense to mean ‘in the past’ or ‘used to’.
- The BORDER acronym is a useful tool to respond fully and accurately to bullet point writing prompts.
Words to know
- imperfect
- German single-word past tense used mainly to narrate past events in writing; for example, 'war', 'hatte', 'gab', 'fand'
- BORDER
- acronym used to respond fully and accurately to bullet point writing prompts
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
- Learning cycle 1 contains some higher-tier imperfect verbs as vocabulary items. Higher-tier writing tasks use the imperfect, but the perfect is valid (apart from 'war', 'hatte', 'gab'). When reviewing extended writing, students might like to use different highlighters to check for required elements.