The Plusquamperfekt (PQP)

The good news are that you won’t have to use the PQP much until B1. But even in the higher levels of the German language you won’t really use it except with ‘nachdem’ or ‘bevor’. As it is also very easy to understand the PQP, I will keep this chapter as short as possible.

The Plusquamperfekt literally means: more than complete(d time) and is located before the usual past tenses. Take a look at the following timeline. Germans think of the past to be on the left:

PQP – Präteritum/Perfekt – Präsens – Futur I – Futur II

To build the PQP you need the Perfekt-tense as a base. A few examples:

Perfekt: Ich habe gestern Fußball gespielt.

PQP: Ich hatte gestern Fußball gespielt.

Perfekt: Ich habe einen Döner gegessen.

PQP: Ich hatte einen Döner gegessen.

Perfekt: Ich bin um sechs Uhr aufgewacht.

PQP:Ich war um sechs Uhr aufgewacht.

Perfekt: Ich bin letzten Monat nach Kreuzberg gezogen.

PQP: Ich war letzten Monat nach Kreuzberg gezogen.

Example 1) shows a regular verb (=spielen)

Example 2) shows an irregular verb (=essen)

Example 3) shows a regular verb with ‘sein’ (=aufwachen)

Example 4) shows an irregular verb with ‘sein’ (=ziehen)

You can see that all you’ve got to do is to put the auxiliary verbs ‘haben’ or ‘sein’ into their Präteritum forms ‘hatte’ or ‘war’. And that’s it.

So, to master the PQP you need to have mastered the Perfekt tense first and of course know the Präteritum forms of ‘haben’ and ‘sein’.

To make your life a bit simpler, here they are again:

Once again, you don’t need to use it actively for quite some time. You just need to be able to understand it when it occurs and I bet that you understand the following sentence easily even without having put any additional effort into this topic:

Ich hatte einen Text über das Plusquamperfekt gelesen und verstanden.