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Year 8 - German

A new experience: perfect tense with 'haben' and 'sein', 'in' and 'auf'

New experiences: perfect tense with 'haben' and 'sein'

Unit Summary

This unit revisits the perfect tense with both haben and sein, as well as a range of sound-symbol correspondences.Within the context of new experiences, pupils can apply this to school, home or travel experiences.

Lesson Summary

You will learn to use the perfect tense to understand and write about recent experiences.

Key Notes

  • Strong past participles are formed by 'ge-' and '–en' surrounding the stem; the stem may have a vowel change, too.
  • With certain verbs, often verbs of movement to a destination, the perfect tense is formed with 'sein', not 'haben'.
  • With movement, prepositions 'in' and 'auf' mean 'into' and 'onto', and are followed by the accusative case.
  • When starting sentences with time adverbs to sequence narration, we use word order 2 so that the verb remains second.

Vocabulary To Learn

  • perfect tense: 2-verb tense that describes completed actions in the past, e.g., 'I said', 'she played'
  • strong past participle: past participle that sandwiches the stem with 'ge-' and '-en' and often changes the stem vowel, e.g., 'geschrieben'
  • word order 2 (WO2): sentence order in which an element other than the subject starts the sentence; verb and subject invert so that the verb remains the second idea

Common Mistakes To Avoid

  • It is only the verb in a sentence that can tell us whether the action of the verb implies movement towards a destination or a static location.

3 Quick Questions (With Answers)

1. Explain what you can now say or understand in this lesson.

Strong past participles are formed by 'ge-' and '–en' surrounding the stem; the stem may have a vowel change, too. With certain verbs, often verbs of movement to a destination, the perfect tense is formed with 'sein', not 'haben'.

2. Define this key language word and use it in context. 'perfect tense'

2-verb tense that describes completed actions in the past, e.g., 'I said', 'she played'. Say or write it in a short sentence so you use the word actively.

3. Correct this common language-learning mistake.

Mistake: It is only the verb in a sentence that can tell us whether the action of the verb implies movement towards a destination or a static location. Correction: The case (form of the article 'the' or 'a') used after prepositions 'in' and 'auf' tells us whether movement or location are implied, e.g., when the article is in the accusative case ('in den', 'in die', 'ins') it means 'into' and indicates movement.

More Lessons In This Unit

Browse all guides in the Year 8 German guide library.