Past tense

German has two ways to say something happened:

Ich habe gestern Fußball gespielt. (Perfekt)

Ich spielte gestern Fußball. (Präteritum)

Both mean "I played football yesterday". Not "I have played" versus "I played" — that English distinction does not transfer. Both German sentences describe the same completed past event.

So how do you choose?

The rule that covers almost everything

Speak in the Perfekt. Write in the Präteritum.

In conversation across most of Germany, the Perfekt is the normal past tense. Using the Präteritum for everyday events sounds literary, like narrating your own life.

In written narrative — novels, news reports, history, anything telling a story on the page — the Präteritum is normal, and a page of Perfekt would feel clumsy and repetitive.

If you are learning German to talk to people, the Perfekt is the tense to get fluent in first. You will read the Präteritum far more often than you produce it.

How the Perfekt is built

Auxiliary (haben or sein) in second position, past participle at the end.

Ich habe das Buch gelesen. — I read the book.

Wir sind nach Berlin gefahren. — We went to Berlin.

The participle goes to the very end, however long the sentence gets. That is the same sentence bracket that separable verbs use.

haben or sein?

Most verbs take haben. Use sein when the verb is:

• movement from one place to another — gehen, fahren, kommen, fliegen, laufen
• a change of state — aufstehen, einschlafen, sterben, wachsen
• one of three specials — sein, bleiben, werden

Ich bin nach Hause gefahren. — I drove home.

Ich habe das Auto in die Garage gefahren. — I drove the car into the garage.

The same verb, both auxiliaries. When it moves something else — a direct object — it behaves like a normal transitive verb and takes haben; when only the subject moves, it is pure movement and takes sein, even with a distance: Ich bin einen Marathon gelaufen. You do not need to agonise over this — ask whether something else is being moved.

Building the participle

Weak (regular) verbs: ge- + stem + -t. spielen → gespielt, machen → gemacht.

Strong (irregular) verbs: ge- + often-changed stem + -en. lesen → gelesen, finden → gefunden, schreiben → geschrieben. The vowel change has to be learned per verb.

Separable verbs put ge- in the middle: aufstehen → aufgestanden.

Inseparable prefixes take no ge- at all: verstehen → verstanden, bezahlen → bezahlt.

Verbs ending in -ieren also take no ge-: studieren → studiert, telefonieren → telefoniert. This is a reliable rule and worth knowing, because there are hundreds of them and most are transparent borrowings.

The verbs that stay in the Präteritum even in speech

Here the rule flips. These are so common that the Perfekt sounds heavy, and Germans use the simple past in conversation:

That is about a dozen verbs — sein, haben, werden, the six modals, wissen, and es gibt. Learn these in the Präteritum and everything else in the Perfekt, and you will sound natural in almost any conversation.

A regional note

The further south you go, the more the Präteritum disappears from speech. In Bavaria and Austria you will hear ich bin gewesen where a northerner might say ich war. In the far north the Präteritum survives a little more strongly. Neither is wrong.

What about the Plusquamperfekt?

Same as English past perfect: something that happened before another past event. Built like the Perfekt but with the auxiliary in the past.

Ich hatte schon gegessen, als sie ankam. — I had already eaten when she arrived.

You need it rarely, and only when the sequence genuinely matters.

What to actually memorise

If you are unsure, use the Perfekt. It is correct in speech everywhere, it is understood in writing, and the worst that happens is you sound slightly conversational. The Präteritum used wrongly is the more noticeable error — it makes ordinary remarks sound like a storybook.