Names for the Past Tenses

I've recently had an email from Jim who mentions that there are a lot of names for the German past tenses in both English and German, which makes it confusing. So I've decided to give you a table showing all the different names I've been able to find for the different past tenses. I've highlighted the name I use in the podcasts for each tense by making it bold and I've put an example of the past tense type described in each column at the top. I've tried to group names that seem to relate to each other together, but not everyone will favour three names in any one line or use the translations that are near each other.

Also, I just want to point out that in Latin, the perfect tense refers to actions that have completed (are perfect) by the time of speaking and the imperfect tense refers to actions that have not yet completed or are repeated or continuous (are imperfect) - which is where the names come from. But this doesn't apply to German, which can make using these names for the tenses confusing (particularly for anyone with a background in Latin grammar) and is one reason I decided not to refer to the ich tat es tense as the imperfect tense in my podcasts.

Unfortunately, having written all that, it turns out that you can't put tables in this blog (or at least not by any method I can work out), so here's a link to the table on my grammar and tables website.