Young Writers Society

I'm taking a German II course through independent study. The problem is, sometimes my course book is lacking the best explanation of things.

I'm not completely dumb when it comes to the past tense, since I learned a bit in my first year, and it's also not far from French. The use of sein/haben and a past participle is easy. I'm just a bit lost. I have a list (a long list. I think I'm going to die learning it all) of verbs, as well as their "Präteritum", "Partizipperfekt" and the English translation.

From there, I understand it a bit. They explained some things to me in the text book, but not very well. Here's an easy verb example: to read.

Lesen, las, gelesen.

From what I understand, you would form these sentences (respectively):

Ich lese, Ich las, Ich habe gelesen.

Yes?

My big question is what is the difference between the first past tense, and the second past tense given...

I'm overwhelmed, to say the least. I have three long pages of verbs to learn, then I have to learn their past tense, as well as their "imperfect" (From my understanding, it's like the French imparfait) form. That's a lot to learn...

Does anyone have a good way to memorize which verbs go with sein?

If I remember what my teacher said, verbs that go with sein are typically ones that involve either an action that involves movement or a change in state.

So things like ich bin geschwommen, or ich bin geschmolzen

If that's not what you were after just let me know; I still have a lot of notes and books lying around from last year ^^

Notes on past tense would be great! I'm not sure how much more of an explanation my course is going to give me. ><