German · Chapter 7 · Lesson 15 · Grammar primer
The simple past: konnte, sagte, ging
The past German writes in: modals drop the umlaut, weak verbs add -te, strong verbs change their vowel. The tense every story and novel is told in.
The short version
Say war and hatte, even when you speak
German speakers tell stories in the perfect tense, but war and hatte are the exception: they use the short simple past forms everywhere, even in casual talk. Ich bin müde gewesen is correct, but ich war müde is what people say. Learn these two forms before any other past tense.
Ich war müde und hatte keine Zeit.
Past modals drop their umlaut
The infinitive of können has an umlaut, but the simple past does not: ich konnte, not ich könnte. The same goes for müssen (musste), dürfen (durfte) and mögen (mochte). The umlaut form könnte is a different tense and means could in the polite, hypothetical sense.
Ich musste gestern arbeiten.
That's the gist. The full article goes deeper - more examples, the edge cases, the why - and the practice below scores like a vocabulary session and earns the same XP.
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