German has more than one way to talk about the past, which can feel unfamiliar if your native language gets by with a single past-tense form for everything. In this lesson you meet Präteritum, a simple past that is built from just one word, with no helper verb — unlike the Perfekt you already know, which needs haben or sein plus a Partizip II.
In written German — novels, newspapers, formal letters — Präteritum is used with almost every verb. But in everyday spoken German, native speakers reach for it with only three specific groups: sein (war), haben (hatte), and the six modal verbs können, müssen, wollen, dürfen, sollen, mögen. Every other verb, like gehen, essen, or arbeiten, is told in spoken German almost exclusively in the Perfekt.
The forms themselves are irregular and simply have to be memorized: war, hatte, konnte, and so on. Personal endings are added on top: no ending for ich and er/sie/es, -st for du, -n for wir and sie/Sie, -t for ihr. Notice that ich and er/sie/es take no extra letter at all — exactly like the modal verbs in the present tense you already learned in A1.
The reason German speakers prefer Präteritum for exactly these verbs is that their Perfekt equivalents — ich bin gewesen, ich habe gehabt, ich habe gekonnt — sound heavy and unnatural in speech, while war, hatte, and konnte are shorter, faster to say, and clearly the more common choice.
A common mistake is applying the general Perfekt rule to these verbs too, as if it were the only pattern for talking about the past in German, producing something like ‘Ich bin krank gewesen’ instead of ‘Ich war krank’ — even though the second version is the correct, completely natural form used in daily conversation.