Holiday Activities: Grammar & Phonics (AQA GCSE German): Revision Note

• To get the highest marks in the exam, you need to be able to use and understand three time frames - past, present and future

• The perfect tense is essential for talking about past holiday experiences

• Let's look at this key tense in more detail

Holiday activities: the perfect tense

• Use the perfect tense to refer to the past, for example to say what you did or have done on holiday

• In German, the perfect tense has three parts:

  • subject (noun or pronoun)

  • auxiliary verb - a form of haben or sein

  • past participle - at the end of the clause

Regular past participles

• To form the past participle:

  • remove the -en ending of the infinitive

  • add ge- to the front

  • add -t to the end

• Verbs that begin with an inseparable prefix (be-, er-, ver- etc.) do not add ge-:

Irregular past participles

• Some verbs are irregular and their past participles must be learned individually

• Here are the most important ones for the topic of holiday activities:

Haben or sein?

• Most verbs use haben as their auxiliary verb

• However, verbs of movement or change of place use sein

• This includes many of the most common holiday activity verbs:

• Here is the full conjugation of both auxiliary verbs in the perfect tense:

Word order in the perfect tense

• In a main clause, the auxiliary verb is in second position and the past participle goes to the very end:

  • Ich habe das Schloss besucht. I visited the castle.

  • Wir sind in die Berge gefahren. We went to the mountains.

• When a subordinating conjunction such as weil (because), dass (that) or obwohl (although) is used, the auxiliary verb moves to the very end of the clause, after the past participle:

  • Ich habe viel Geld ausgegeben, weil das Hotel teuer war. I spent a lot of money because the hotel was expensive.

  • Ich war müde, weil wir den ganzen Tag gewandert sind. I was tired because we had hiked all day.

Holiday activities: phonics

• The letters au in German are always pronounced like the ow sound in the English word 'cow'

  • Ausland

  • Urlaub

  • Aufenthalt

  • Ausflug