German · Chapter 7 · Lesson 3 · Grammar primer
Historical present and frueher
Prescribed by the AQA specification.
The short version
German has no 'used to' form, just früher + perfect
Rather than a special grammar form, German signals a past habit with one adverb, früher (or damals), in an ordinary perfect-tense sentence. Take früher away and the habitual meaning goes with it: Ich habe Fußball gespielt just means I played, or have played, football, with nothing to say the habit has ended.
Früher habe ich jeden Tag Fußball gespielt.
A present-tense verb next to a past date is telling a story
German narratives, museum captions and jokes often switch to the present tense for vividness even though the events described are long finished. Spot a date in the past sitting beside a present-tense verb and read it as a stylistic choice, not a claim about right now.
1990 fällt die Mauer.
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.
Read the full article · 8 min readPractice
Practise this lesson
10-question session
One question at a time, mixed across the exercises in this lesson. Miss one and it comes back round before the end. There are 13 in all: practise more afterwards if you want them.
Lesson 3 of 21 in this chapter