Thomas

If we are dealing with these sentence parts that cannot stand by themselves, then we need to use nachdem for the correct word for after.

Example, ich esse die Schokolade erst.

nachdem ich den Gipfel erreicht habe.

Okay, so I only eat the chocolate after I have reached the summit.

Now there's two things that are important here.

Erstens, the sentence part starting with nachdem, our subordinate clause, has the verb at the end.

If you think back to our example, we said, nachdem ich den Gipfel erreicht habe.

So our conjugated verb habe is at the very end of the sentence part.

Zweitens, and this is quite unique to nachdem, the sentence part with nachdem is always in the past tense.

And this does kind of make sense, since you're talking about what you do after you have done something else.

Nachdem ich die Äpfel geschält habe, esse ich sie.

So, after I have peeled the apples, I eat them.

I need to peel them first, I finish peeling them, now I eat them.

So the part with the peeling is in the past.

However, if the action in your main sentence, in our case the eating, is also in the past, then you need to use a past tense that is even further back, which would be the plusquamperfekt of Deutsch.

Look at the same sentence again.

So in English we would be, that would be after I had peeled the apples, I ate them.

So again we use a past that's further back than the past tense in our main sentence.

Remember, merken, nachdem works like before and that it is used for a subordinate clause.

However, this clause needs to use a past tense that happened earlier than the tense in the sentence part that follows.