KS3 · German · Year 9
What you did for and with others: perfect tense
Desires, plans and priorities: 'möcht-' future and use of infinitive
Learn it. Recall it. Make it stick.
IllumED Slides
IllumED · 1/9
Your learning goal
I can use the perfect tense to say what happened between people in the past.
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What you did for and with others: perfect tense: 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 to say what happened between people in the past.
Key learning points
- Reading is a good way to strengthen word knowledge and can be done in a range of ways.
- The perfect tense is formed with a present tense part of 'haben' or 'sein' and a past participle.
- Many past participles are formed by adding ge- to the start of the verb stem and -t to the end.
- For verbs starting with be-, er- and ver- , the past participle does not have the prefix ge-.
- Strong verbs in the perfect tense form the past participle by adding -en; they often have a vowel change too.
Words to know
- perfect tense
- a verb tense that describes completed actions in the past, e.g., 'I said', 'she played'
- strong verb (perfect tense)
- a verb whose past participle adds ‘en’ and often changes the stem vowel, e.g., 'gesungen'
Common mistakes
All German past participles have the prefix ge-.
German verbs starting with be-, ver- and er- do not have the prefix ge- added for the past participle, e.g., 'besucht' - 'visited' or 'verdient' - 'earnt'.
For parents, carers and teachers
- Teachers might wish to highlight for students the importance of using a range of strategies for practising vocabulary, as demonstrated in the first cycle of this lesson.