Perfekt &
Präteritum.

If an English speaker says "I went to the bakery" and "I have gone to the bakery", they mean different things. German doesn't work that way. Ich ging zum Bäcker and Ich bin zum Bäcker gegangen mean exactly the same thing — they're the same event, the same time, the same finality. What's different is the register: one belongs in a novel, the other in a kitchen conversation.

So the rule is not "Perfekt = recent past, Präteritum = distant past." That's a myth English speakers carry over and it will trip you up. The real rule is:

Almost every learner under-uses Perfekt and over-uses Präteritum, because Präteritum looks "shorter and cleaner" on paper. But in a real café, ordering a coffee and telling your friend what you did yesterday, Präteritum sounds like you've stepped out of a 19th-century novel. Use Perfekt.

Perfekt is built with two pieces: an auxiliary (a conjugated form of haben or sein) sitting in the normal verb slot, and a past participle parked at the end of the sentence. The auxiliary carries the person and number; the participle carries the meaning.

Weak (regular): the boring, predictable pattern.

For a weak verb, you wrap the stem in ge-…-t. No vowel change, no surprises. Most German verbs work this way.

Strong (irregular): the ones you must memorize.

For a strong verb, the participle ends in -en, and the vowel in the stem often changes. There's no rule that predicts which strong verbs change vowels and which don't — you simply learn the three principal parts of each one, the way English speakers learn sing — sang — sung.

Roughly 90% of German verbs form their Perfekt with haben. The sein verbs are the exceptions — and they fall into three clean categories. Learn the categories, not a list.

Category 1 — Verbs of motion from A to B

If the subject moves, physically, from one place to another, the verb takes sein: gehen, fahren, fliegen, kommen, laufen, reisen, schwimmen, steigen, fallen, springen, ziehen (in the sense of to move house).

Category 2 — Verbs of change of state

If the subject changes from one condition into another — waking up, falling asleep, dying, growing, melting — the verb takes sein: aufwachen, einschlafen, sterben, wachsen, schmelzen, werden, passieren, geschehen.

Category 3 — The three special cases

Three verbs take sein for historical reasons and don't fit either category: sein itself (ich bin gewesen), bleiben (ich bin geblieben), and begegnen (ich bin ihm begegnet).

Where Perfekt is a sandwich of aux + … + participle, Präteritum is a single conjugated verb in the normal verb slot. That's what makes it efficient on the page: less scaffolding per sentence.

Weak verbs — add -te- between stem and ending

For weak verbs, you take the present-tense stem, insert -te-, and add the personal ending. The ich and er/sie/es forms are identical (both end in just -te), which is unusual for German.

Strong verbs — change the stem vowel, no -te-

Strong verbs in Präteritum work differently: there's no -te- infix. Instead, the stem vowel changes (just like English sing → sang), and the personal endings are bare. Again, ich and er/sie/es are identical and both have no ending at all.

The Präteritum verbs you'll use in speech anyway.

Even though Perfekt rules conversation, there are a handful of verbs Germans almost always use in Präteritum when they speak. They feel clumsy in Perfekt. Memorize this short list — these are the ones people actually break the rule for.