A Foundation Course in Reading German, 2017a

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12/8/2017
In the example above for “sollen,” you can see three verbs. Sollen is conjugated,
but tun können are two infinitives. This construction is often called a “doubleinfinitive.”
Translating this into English is simple enough, since the infinitives remain
infinitives in English, too.
In general, the dependent infinitive, such as aufräumen or gehen in the examples
above, appears in final position in the clause. Note the position of the infinitives in
the following example:
Er will nicht sagen, ob er morgen zur Schule gehen muß.
He doesn’t want to say whether he has to go to school tomorrow.
Simple Past Tense
The simple past forms of the modals are formed like regular verbs except that they
drop their umlaut. Using the third person singular and plural as our examples:
3RD-PERSON
INFINITIVE
SINGULAR, PLURAL
GENERAL TRANSLATIONS
dürfen durfte, durften (was / were) allowed to
können konnte, konnten (was / were) able to
müssen mußte, mußten had to
mögen mochte, mochten liked to (Note the change from g to ch.)
sollen sollte, sollten (was / were) supposed to
wollen wollte, wollten wanted to
Sample sentences:
Wir wollten nach Hause gehen.
We wanted to go home.
Der Ingenieur mußte die Maschine reparieren.
The engineer had to repair the machine.
Perfect Tenses
The auxiliary verb of the modals is haben. In the formation of both the present and
past perfect tenses of the modal verbs we are introduced to a variation on the