The past tense in German | Coffee Break German Podcast S1E40

coffee beach german lesson 40. [Music] hello and headshot coffee break german hello zurich and welcome to the last episode in innsbruck even mark my name is thomas and we're here for our final episode from innsbruck and indeed the final episode of this series of coffee break german i've spent the past few days in innsbruck here to do some recording with thomas for our course and i've had a fantastic time how would i say i've had a fantastic time in germany we are definitely going to be looking a little more at this in this episode because

one of the things i've felt as we've gone through the past few days is that the area that i'm really struggling with is talking about the past we've had lots of examples in the conversations but in this episode we're going to tighten this up a little and give you some further examples i've got about an hour and a half to go before i need to get my flight as you can probably hear we're here in the airport um but we're going to have one last conversation before i head back to scotland zanfangan [Music] so as

i explained there i think that one of the the times when you feel you're making progress in a language is when you can start to talk not just about what is happening now or what you do normally but what will happen in the future and what has happened or what happened in the past we've come across quite a number of examples of the perfect tense in german so some of the things that we talked about for example when i was at the pharmacy uh vas habensie gegessen or happens [Music] it [Music] so what we're doing

is taking that verb haben and combining it with this other word the geschlafen gegessen and so on now basically what i'd really like to do is actually conjugate a verb in the perfect tense i'm assuming that you would refer to the geschlagen and the guessing and so on as the past participle exactly and normally it's just an infinitive with a ge in front of it so commonly but unfortunately it's not always that easy and the irregular ones as well and we heard for example gemacht yeah so that's that's from to do so much from the

verb learning but in that case it's it changes slightly it doesn't have gelanin but gillian okay can we take let's take one of the the regular ones let's take a guessing can we now conjugate the whole of that verb with haben as our auxiliary verb and guessing as our past participle so i would say i have eaten you have eaten [Music] and the you formal plural havitan c haben gegessen okay so the whole of that verb can be conjugated using the verb haben plus the past participle and just a reminder we know haven't already but

it's [Music] excellent so all that is combined with our past participle which as we now know in regular verbs is formed by putting ge in front of the infinitive and sometimes verbs change their form so for example i very good and we also learned that if it's a verb that's put together by a preposition and the verb like up far in uncommon eins the ge goes in the middle so [Music] so i have invited you for your breakfast okay so i'm glad now can i ask you could we say uh the train has already left

ah that's where i'm very sorry to disappoint you the perfect is not always formed with a haben okay so yeah that was a little bit of a loaded question i have to say because i'm thinking that this might happen in a similar way to french uh where we use etre for our perfect tenses with verbs of emotion yeah so for example uncommon you use sein so dear zug is angry common so rather than saying that hat and common we use zein and the air form of the the verb sign is east ist so for example

if we would conjugate the verbs with motion like uncommon to arrive up fahren to depart it would be ich bin an air ist is okay so i think this has been a very quick introduction to the perfect tense in german and i think what we'll do now is have a little chat about my stay here in austria and hopefully i'll get the chance to use some of these perfect tenses and thomas you can help me with other ways to express myself in the past of course let's get started everything was wonderful is that right and

i feel that my my german has improved lots um how would i say that my deutsche hatsey for i do think i've made lots of progress but as i mentioned earlier i realized that i can't really talk about the past but this is definitely helping it's good good practice um what else could i say can you say i've visited many places um places that sounds strange i'm sorry i gave you a bad example again it's also a irregular one so it's just a habit let's try a little bit simpler one which is actually regular um

i've eaten lots of cake yeah that is very true um and uh how would i say they were all delicious sivaren [Music] is not the perfect tense that's the different past tense that's in an english would be the simple past i suppose they were all very delicious so they were all very delicious [Music] so uh alice i said earlier so everything was wonderful we also heard the sweater versa good the weather was really good of course so var for singular things and valen for plural the aleca vast i didn't fully understand all of that oh

how would i say i haven't understood right i knew it was going to be irregular okay so see again what you said there um so all cakes in austria are really very delicious fast alley i think you have tried almost all of them is that right faster yeah you've almost tried it all of them quite quite possibly yes okay so we've got the kohan [Music] in an innsbruck could i how would i say can i say mein alfenthalt fantastic yeah my alphanthalt fantastic unfortunately my trip is almost over yeah unfortunately but uh in innsbruck might

have already mentioned that uh happy birthday to yeah the main attraction in innsbruck it's like a golden rift building in the in a little square which is quite cool that's and nine yeah let's not talk about that one okay going well so far i have one final question how would i say i hope to return soon i hope so i'll come back very soon that is where we're going to leave this lesson of coffee break german and indeed that's where we're going to leave the course for the time being we really hope that you've enjoyed

learning along with me and we would like to say a huge danke to thomas but not just to tomas to kirsten and to julia and indeed to the whole team that you don't really hear much about that is behind coffee break german and i personally also really want to thank all of you because i really enjoyed teaching german and i think it's a really nice language and thanks thanks a lot for listening and making the effort to learn a new language and to like get to know the culture get to know the people and and

i really hope you get the chance to travel to germany austria or switzerland to make use of all what you've learned and to really engage with the people and just go for it they will be really pleased if you try to speak german absolutely now we've not fully planned the next steps for german here at radiolingua we're not quite sure which direction to go so let us know what you think get in touch with us by emailing support radiolingua.com or join us on facebook where you can have your say about the next steps for learning

german with us here at radiolingua of course the best place to find all information about coffee break german is on our website and that's at coffeebreakgerman.com now i have a plane to catch so for now it's time to say that's right foreign [Music] this is a production of the radiolingual network find out more at radiolingua.com