German Grammar! The Tenses!:mad:

Ok, I promised to help, so I will. Give me a minute.

Simple past / imperfect tense of weak (regular) verbs is formed by taking the stem of the verb (e.g. spiel-en) and adding the following endings:
ich spiel-te
(du spiel-test)
er spiel-te
wir spiel-ten
(ihr spiel-tet)
sie spiel-ten

The du and ihr forms aren't used very much because the imperfect is so rarely used in speech. The imperfect is translated exactly the same as the past tense, though, so "ich machte meine Hausaufgaben" means the same as "ich habe meine Hausaufgaben gemacht", but the first is more clumsy and probably wouldn't be seen other than in a book/newspaper.

For strong (irregular) verbs, take the stem and apply the imperfect vowel change (which you just have to learn for each verb): fahren --> fuhr. Then add the following endings:
ich fuhr
(du fuhr-st)
er fuhr
wir fuhr-en
(ihr fuhr-t)
sie fuhr-en

Again, the du and ihr forms are rarely used, except in du warst/ihr wart (sein) and du hattest/ihr hattet (haben).

Does this help?

Yeah, it makes more sense than when I'm using my grammar book There's just so much pointless stuff in there And thank you for my rep I'm onto my 2nd shiny

Das hab ich bemerkt.

Ich weiß daß das einen Apostroph dort haben soll! (Ich fuehle mich wie eines Genie

It doesn't, he just made a mistake

(It should have been "Ich glaube, dass es dort ein Apostroph geben soll. Ich fühle mich wie ein Genie")

At AS, which tenses do you think we should be comfortable using (as in, not just recognition but actively writing/speaking)?

I made sure at AS that I'd be able to use imperfect, pluperfect, past, present, future and a little subjunctive I think.

And can I ask, what grade you got knowing those tenses I really want to hit my target grade

Err... your AS grade is not totally and entirely dependent on using nice tenses.

And to answer Excalibur's question, again, I didn't use a particular set of tenses. I made sure I knew every tense there was available, and used whichever sounded natural. I'd say at AS you should be handling everything except maybe complicated and rare constructions (modals + passives, or future perfect, or something), but then it's not too hard just to learn them all... seriously, if you can handle "ich bin gegangen" and "ich war gegangen" then you can probably handle "ich wäre gegangen" and "ich werde/sollte gegangen sein" too. It's not that other tenses are more complex, it's just a case of familiarity - future perfect is no harder than the perfect, it's just a case of practising it as much as you have practised the perfect over the last couple of years.

Phew My knowledge of vocabulary isn't too bad [at least I think anyways], but I keep forgetting it; I only wish the people in the German Society could have a proper conversation, without telling me to get away (which one person did before when I started a conversation off with them - how nice...just because I like French) Anyways, not to stray off point...just phew

gooner1592, if you have msn we can try speaking in German over it if you like My address is in my profile.

Yeah, I guess lots of nice tenses doesn't automatically equal high grades (though it certainly won't harm you!). I know what you mean, that once you're familiar with a tense it's no harder than anything else; the passive for example is quite easy to use (in the present/imperfect) once you know how to. No, it won't be the grammar that will be my downfall - it'll be the speaking

Right, well the thing is, I get so confused by German grammar, so if anybody could give me some help, it'd be greatly appreciated.

Okay, firstly, the Simple Past Tense in German, anybody wanna shine some light upon this? Thanks in advance everybody