E: Simple past tense

You already know how to talk about things that already happened:

• Rita war traurig. (Rita was sick)
• Fred hatte ein neues Handy. (Fred had a new cell phone)
• Herr Oopsilon wurde krank. (Herr Oopsilon became sick)
• Rita wollte Glückwunsch finden. (Rita wanted to find Glückwunsch)

This is called ‘simple past tense’ and overall it is just like in English. The endings pattern in the past is the same as the one for the ‘special verbs’ (will, kann, muss, mag, darf, soll, möchte, hätte, weiß) in the present:

• Wolfgang ging in den Campusladen. (W. went to the campus store)
• Du hattest keine Ahnung!  (You had no idea!)
• Er hatte ein neues Handy! (He had a new cell phone.)
• Wir wurden krank. (We became sick.)
• Ihr wart froh. (You guys were happy.)
• Sie wollten weggehen. (You/they wanted to walk away.)

Here are the forms of the most frequent verbs you must know:

• war (was)
• hatte (had)
• wurde (became)
• wollte (wanted to)   Redman wollte sein Auto finden.
• sollte (had to lit. shoulded to*) Fred sollte mehr lernen!
• musste (had to lit. musted to*) Maroona musste viel trainieren.
• durfte (was allowed)  Siegfried und Wolfgang durften nicht rein.
• konnte (could lit. canned*) Wolfgang konnte nicht schwimmen.
• mochte (liked) Rita mochte Fred nicht. 
• wusste (knew)    Rita wusste nicht, dass Herr Ooplison krank war.

The rest of the verbs are either simple and form the past tense by just adding -te (-ed in English: kochte = cooked) or are unpredictable (go-went, gehen-ging). These ones have to be learned by heart.

Easy verbs

The ‘easy’ verbs are just that – easy. All you have to do is to replace the -en ending with -te:

sagen (to say) → sagte (said)

machen (to make/do) → machte (made / did)

Unpredictable verbs

The other verbs are unpredictable and you have to learn their forms by heart. Below are the most frequent of these verbs in German according to Randall & Tschirner, Frequency Dictionary of German, 2006

• geben – gab = gave
• kommen – kam = came
• gehen – ging = went 
• sehen – sah = saw
• lassen – lies = let
• stehen – stand = stood
• finden – fand = found
• bleiben – blieb = stayed (remained)
• liegen – lag = lay 
• heißen – hieß = was called
• denken – dachte = thought
• nehmen – nahm = took
• tun – tat = did
• halten – hielt = held
• nennen – nannte = called (named)
• sprechen – sprach = spoke
• bringen – brachte = brought
• fahren – fuhr = drove 
• kennen – kannte = knew (personally)
• gelten – galt = was valid  
• beginnen – begann = began
• schreiben – schrieb = wrote
• laufen – lief = ran
• sitzen – saß = sat
• ziehen – zog = pulled / moved
• scheinen – schien = seemed
• fallen – fiel = fell
• treffen – traf = met
• tragen – trug = wore
• lesen – las = read
• verlieren – verlor = lost
• anfangen – fing an = started
• helfen – half = helped
• gewinnen – gewann = won
• schließen – schloss = locked
• anbieten – bot an = offered  
• verbinden – verband = connected
• vergleichen – verglich = compared
• steigen – stieg = climbed
• wachsen – wuchs = grew

The technical term for this tense is ‘Imperfekt’ or ‘Präteritum’.

The ‘easy’ verbs are called ‘regular’ and the unpredictable ones are called ‘strong’ or ‘irregular’ verbs. 

 E: Simple past tense of ‚special‘ verbs

The 6 ‘special’ verbs behave normally in the past tense (meaning that they take the same past tense endings as ‘normal’ verbs) and take the following forms:

dürfen – durfte

können – konnte

mögen – mochte

müssen – musste

sollen – sollte

wollen – wollte

wissen – wusste 

Note that the verbs ‘möchte’, ‘würde’, ‘hätte’ that we put in the same group because they follow the same pattern of endings do not have a past tense.