Das Imperfekt – The Other Past Tense
Used less in conversation and more in print/writing, the simple past, narrative past, or imperfect tense is often described as the more “formal” of the two past tenses in German and it is found primarily in books and newspapers (except for a few important exceptions, that you will learn in section C.)
Just like the present perfect, the German simple past tense may have several English equivalents. A phrase such as, “er spielte Ball,“ can be translated into English as: “he was playing ball,” “he used to play ball,” “he played ball”, or “he did play ball,” depending on the context.
Regular Verbs:
As in the present tense, each "person" (he, you, they, etc.) requires its own ending on the verb.
There are four (4) unique endings in the German simple past tense, one less than in the present tense (because the endings for ich and the third person are identical in the past).
- The simple past tense endings are: -te (ich, er/sie/es), -test (du), -tet (ihr), and -ten (Sie, wir, sie [pl.]). Unlike English, the past tense ending is not always the same: I played = ich spielte, we played = wir spielten.
Now let's look at all the conjugations of spielen in the simple past tense:
spielen (to play)
| ich spielte | wir spielten |
| du spieltest | ihr spieltet |
| er spielte | sie/Sie spielten |
