Longism about Linguism

Language is a funny beast, like a platypus. Particularly German. German language, not German platypuses (platypii?).
“There are three tenses.” No there aren't! We have Past Perfect, Past Imperfect, Past Plus Perfect, Present, Future (written often as Present), Passive, Subjunctive (two of these), Imperative. I know some of those probably aren't tenses, but they are good as.
Present tense. This one says what we are doing now, or what we do regularly. There is no way of knowing between the two, other than context. It can also be used as Future, when you're talking about the near Future. But then there is in fact Future Tense for this job, which can be used for near or far Future. And the verb you use to signify it is Future, is “to become”. Which is all very logical, until you wish to use the verb “to become” in Present Tense.
The Past Tense is much easier. No! You have Perfect, Imperfect, and Plus Perfect. You can use Perfect for Imperfect too, which is nice, but not for Plus Perfect, which isn't nice. The auxiliary verb is also variable. Anything that involves movement from A to B should use “to be”, or also strangely the verbs “to remain”, “to be” and "to become". Also, if you say “I have travelled” instead of “I am travelled”, it means that you did the travelling yourself, as in you drove the car/bus/train. The Plus Perfect is just a pleasing combination of Imperfect and Perfect. You use Imperfect for stuff you did once. I like that one, it can reasonably claim to be a practical marriage of function and ease of usage.
The Passive is just some crazy ass thing.
Subjunctive has two lovely variations. The second is strangely the more common, used to show some kind of condition. You just whack the two little dots over the first vowel of the Imperfect, or use Subjunctive of "become" (würde) plus the infinitive. If you use it well enough you can blur the difference between “hatte” and “hätte” when you've not done something, as it changes the meaning from “I had done it” to “I would have done it”. The First Subjunctive only exists about once a month when I read a newspaper, and it covers reported speech. For this you just use the wrong form of the verb.
You can use the Imperative politely or familiarly. So when you tell a stranger to sod off, you can say it politely, by using the infinitive followed by the unfamiliar form of “you”. Otherwise you just shorten the 2nd person form and whack an exclamation mark on the end.
Next week I'll talk about the extremely (un)useful Case and Gender System! Great!