German Simple Past (Präteritum): war, hatte and the Written Past

The German simple past, the Präteritum, is the past tense of the printed page: novels, news reports and fairy tales. In conversation Germans use the perfect tense instead, except for war, hatte and the modal verbs. The AQA GCSE German specification includes the simple past of haben and sein.

Here is the whole system on one screen:

War and hatte: the two you need first

Sein and haben have their own simple past forms, and they are the most useful ones in the language. Notice that ich and er / sie / es are the same word, with no ending at all.

Some everyday sentences:

• Ich war gestern zu Hause. - I was at home yesterday.
• Das war gut. - That was good.
• Er war nicht hier. - He was not here.
• Wir hatten keine Zeit. - We had no time.
• Sie hatte zwei Kinder. - She had two children.
• Hattest du Angst? - Were you afraid?

Speakers use these two even when everything else in the story is in the perfect. Ich war müde is the natural way to say I was tired; the perfect version, ich bin müde gewesen, is correct and common in the far south and Austria, but sounds roundabout in most of Germany.

Modal verbs in the simple past

The modals are the third group that survives in everyday speech. They are regular in their pattern, stem plus -te, with one change: an umlaut in the infinitive disappears.

Mögen also changes its consonant, g to ch. The other persons add the ordinary endings: du konntest, wir wollten, ihr musstet. As in the present tense, the other verb goes to the end as an infinitive:

• Ich musste gestern arbeiten. - I had to work yesterday.
• Er konnte nicht schlafen. - He could not sleep.
• Wir wollten nach Hause gehen. - We wanted to go home.
• Ich mochte ihn nicht. - I did not like him.

Sollte does two jobs. It means was supposed to, and the same form also means should. Context tells you which. See modal verbs for the present tense.

The reason the modals keep the short form is practical. The perfect of a modal with another verb needs a double infinitive crowded at the end of the clause, which is clumsy to say and easy to get wrong, so most speakers take the one-word past instead. Ich musste gehen is shorter, clearer and just as correct. Of everything on this page, these six forms repay the effort most, because you will say them every day.

Weak verbs: add -te

Most German verbs are weak, and the simple past is simple: take the stem and add -te, then the personal ending. The ich and er forms stop at -te.

A stem that ends in -t or -d needs an extra e so that the ending can be heard: arbeitete, not arbeitte. The same happens with warten, wartete. So does a stem ending in -m or -n after another consonant, unless that consonant is l or r: regnen, regnete, and likewise atmete and öffnete. Everything else just adds -te: sagen, sagte; spielen, spielte; kaufen, kaufte; lernen, lernte.

A weak verb's simple past and its participle share one skeleton: machte goes with gemacht, sagte with gesagt. That makes weak verbs the cheapest thing to learn in German. A new weak verb never needs looking up, because the pattern is always the same. New and borrowed verbs follow this pattern too, so it is the one to fall back on when you are unsure.

Strong verbs: a new vowel, no -te

Strong verbs change the stem vowel and add nothing in the ich and er forms. These are the old, common verbs, and the ones you will meet most in reading:

The other persons take endings: du gingst, wir gingen, ihr gingt. After -d or -t the du and ihr forms add an e: du fandest, ihr fandet. The vowel changes come in repeating families, laid out in the German irregular verbs guide, and that page is the place to learn them as patterns instead of as twelve separate facts.

Learn each strong verb as a trio: infinitive, simple past, participle. Not just gehen, but gehen, ging, gegangen. The vowel changes cannot be calculated from the infinitive, but each verb only needs learning once, and the English cognate is often a good clue: finden, fand against find, found; kommen, kam against come, came.

Mixed verbs: wusste, dachte, brachte

A small group of common verbs does both things at once: the stem vowel changes, as in a strong verb, and the -te ending is added, as in a weak one. English has the same mix in bring, brought and think, thought.

They conjugate like weak verbs from there: du wusstest, wir dachten. Learn them as a short list; there is no rule that predicts them.

When German uses it: writing versus speaking

The simple past and the perfect mean almost the same thing. The difference is the setting.

German speakers tell a story in the simple past once they are reading it aloud or writing it down. When they talk, the perfect takes over for everything except those few verbs. The tendency is regional: in the south of Germany, in Austria and in Switzerland the spoken Präteritum is rarer still, while speakers in the north use it a little more. Even so, it is a tendency, not a rule, and you will hear both everywhere.

To see the difference, compare the same evening told twice. The first column is how you would say it to a friend. The second is how a narrator would write it.

The last row is the same in both columns, which is the point: war belongs to both registers. War and hatte also help build the past perfect, for events earlier than another past event: Ich hatte schon gegessen. - I had already eaten.

For a learner this gives a practical split. Read and recognise the simple past everywhere; speak it for war, hatte and the modals; use the perfect for the rest. Telling a past event in the present tense is a separate device, covered in the historical present.

One word-order difference helps reading. The simple past is a single word, so there is no participle waiting at the end of the clause: Ich ging nach Hause, weil ich müde war. A separable verb still splits, as in the present: Er rief mich an.

Mistakes English speakers make

The bigger mistake is not on the table: using the simple past for everything when talking. It is not ungrammatical, but Gestern ging ich ins Kino can sound like a narrator, and a friend would say Ich bin gestern ins Kino gegangen.

What to do next

1. Learn war and hatte until they are automatic, then add the six modals.
2. Read a graded story and underline every simple past form you meet.
3. Work through the irregular verbs pattern by pattern, then compare with the perfect tense.