Again: the Konjunktiv I mood is fairly uncommon and you shouldn’t spend too much time on it. At most, it can be mildly helpful to recognize it when reading the newspaper. It's used for reported speech (without quotation marks) in a relatively formal setting: According to a witness, the robbers escaped in a blue van. It’s rarely used in informal settings; in a sentence like My sister says her friends will meet us at the restaurant at 8, you just use the ordinary (indicative) present or future tense.

The endings for the present Konjunktiv I are like those of the strong verb present tense (V.3) with a few extra Es, and with no stem changes: even a strong, mixed or modal verb just takes the normal infinitive stem. Sein is the only irregular verb in the Konjunktiv I (see below).

Past tense statements are formed like the Perfekt, only with haben/sein in the Konjunktiv I instead of the normal present tense. Likewise, the future tenses are formed with werden in the Konjunktiv I.

		Konjunktiv I			haben	sein	werden
singular	1st person	ich	kaufe	I buy	habe	sei	werde
	2nd person	du	kaufest	you buy	habest	seist	werdest
	3rd person	er/sie/es	kaufe	he/she/it buys	habe	sei	werde
plural	1st person	wir	kaufen	we buy	haben	seien	werden
	2nd person	ihr	kaufet	you (pl) buy	habet	seit	werdet
	3rd person	sie/Sie	kaufen	they buy	haben	seien	werden

 

You may have noticed that some of the above forms are identical to the normal (indicative) present tense – ich kaufe, for example. In these cases it’s common to use the Konjunktiv II forms instead (coming up next) to avoid confusion.

In practice, the Konjunktiv I is mostly used in the third person. You are most likely to notice it in a news article in the form of sei where you’d expect ist, or habe where you’d expect hat.

The Konjunktiv II mood is much more common than the Konjunktiv I. It’s used to express wishes, desires, speculation, conditionality, and other “unreal” conditions, and it usually translates in English with words like were, would, or could:

If I were rich, I would buy it. Wenn ich reich wäre, würde ich es kaufen.

There are three ways to form the Konjunktiv II:

1. For weak verbs, it’s the same as the (indicative) Präteritum (given in V.3)
2. For non-weak verbs (aux., modal, mixed, strong), it’s the simple past stem with an added umlaut and those same –e endings from the Konjunktiv I (above)
3. BUT for certain strong verbs, the vowel in that past stem is conventionally replaced with a ü; for example, the KII of "helfen" is not hälfen from the past stem half, but rather hülfen

Sounds like a nightmare to learn, right? But you probably don't have to. Because in practice, the only verbs that are always conjugated in the Konjunktiv II are the modal and auxiliary verbs. Once you’ve learned their subjunctive forms, you can just use those forms with the infinitives or participles of other verbs. Notice that sollen and wollen are the only exceptions to rule #2 above, in that they don’t get the umlaut:

	sein	haben	werden	dürfen	können	mögen	müssen	sollen	wollen
ich	wäre	hätte	würde	dürfte	könnte	möchte	müsste	sollte	wollte
du	wärest	hättest	würdest	dürftest	könntest	möchtest	müsstest	solltest	wolltest
er/sie/es	wäre	hätte	würde	dürfte	könnte	möchte	müsste	sollte	wollte
wir	wären	hätten	würden	dürften	könnten	möchten	müssten	sollten	wollten
ihr	wäret	hättet	würdet	dürftet	könntet	möchtet	müsstet	solltet	wolltet
sie/Sie	wären	hätten	würden	dürften	könnten	möchten	müssten	sollten	wollten

The main one you’ll use is werden, which works like would in English:

Would you help me with this?
Würdest du mir damit helfen?

There are a few strong verbs that are occasionally used in the Konjunktiv II, but as a foreign speaker, you really don’t need to worry about them: just use the werden form for everything except the nine verbs in the table above.

One of the most common forms in that table is möchten (would like), from mögen (to like); it’s used for ordering in restaurants (Ich möchte einen Kaffee) and other polite requests, as well as more general wishes and desires. In fact it’s so common that it’s often introduced, confusingly, as a seventh modal verb independent from mögen. If you’ve learned it that way, then now you know the truth.

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