We have good news!!! In spoken German, we mostly only use one past tense: das Perfekt.
I ate an apple.
Ich habe einen Apfel gegessen.
I have eaten an apple.
Ich habe einen Apfel gegessen.
For the Perfekt, you will need:
  1. The auxiliary verb haben or sein
  2. The past participle of the verb
auxiliary verb
past participle
Ich
habe einen Apfel
gegessen.
Ich
bin zur Arbeit
gefahren.
You will often read that the rule of thumb is to use sein if the action involves movement, and haben in all other cases. This can be misleading, because almost all verbs involve some kind of movement and for many of those you will need haben and not sein. For example, "to dance" involves movement and yet the auxiliary verb is haben.
Ich habe getanzt.
I danced.
So when do we use "sein"?
When the action of the verb in question involves: a) a change of location: to go, to fly, to run, to walk, to swim, to drive b) a change of state: to wake up, to fall asleep, to become, to die
Word order
The auxiliary verb remains in the second position, as usually. The past participle goes to the end of the sentence. If the sentence was a sandwich, your verbs would be the bread.
Ich habe gestern drei Stunden mit meiner Mutter gesprochen. I talked with my mother for three hours yesterday.
"Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth."
Mark Twain - "The Awful German Language".
Past participles Many of them are irregular, but nobody expects you to know all of them right away. We will help you memorize the irregular past participles with our flash card system and you will master them in no time!
The regular ones look like this:
hören
gehört
glauben
geglaubt
kochen
gekocht
kosten
gekostet
wohnen
gewohnt
lernen
gelernt
arbeiten
gearbeitet
kaufen
gekauft
brauchen
gebraucht
mieten
gemietet
Irregular past participles:
Note that most irregular forms end in -en.
With haben:
finden
gefunden
nehmen
genommen
lesen
gelesen
trinken
getrunken
essen
gegessen
schlafen
geschlafen
helfen
geholfen
schreiben
geschrieben
treffen
getroffen
With sein:
fahren
gefahren
fliegen
geflogen
kommen
gekommen
gehen
gegangen
With sein where it's not really clear why:
bleiben
geblieben
sein
gewesen
werden
geworden
My head...
Time to practice