KS3 · German · Year 8
What you did when on Sylt: perfect tense, telling the time: half past the hour
Past events: perfect and imperfect tenses, adjective agreement and comparatives
Learn it. Recall it. Make it stick.
IllumED Slides
IllumED · 1/9
Your learning goal
I can talk about what happened in the past and give the time it happened using ‘halb’ to mean half past.
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What you did when on Sylt: perfect tense, telling the time: half past the hour: 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 talk about what happened in the past and give the time it happened using ‘halb’ to mean half past.
Key learning points
- [y] commonly sounds like [ü], e.g., 'typisch'. In English words like 'Yoga' and 'Baby', [y] is pronounced as in English.
- Words ending in -ic/-ical in English often end in -isch in German, e.g., 'typisch'.
- There are three different ways to say 'you' in German: 'du', 'Sie' and 'man'.
- The perfect tense is made up of a part of ‘haben’ or ‘sein’ in the present tense, and a past participle.
- Half past the hour is expressed as half to the next hour in German, e.g., 9:30 is ‘halb zehn’.
Words to know
- [y]
- pronounced as in 'typisch'
- perfect tense
- a verb tense that describes completed actions in the past, e.g., 'I said', 'she played'
Common mistakes
Giving the time as half past the hour works the same in German as it does in English, e.g., ‘halb neun’ is 'half past nine'.
In German, half past is expressed as half of the next hour, so 'half past nine' is 'halb zehn', or 'half way to ten', the next hour.
For parents, carers and teachers
- The context of this lesson is a visit to Sylt. Teachers may wish to further explore the cultural aspect of holidays in Germany with students by sourcing videos online.