Dear anyone,
Your duolingo forum registration isn't automaticaly transferred to duome forum so in order to join duome forums you need to register with your existing or any other username and email; in any case it's advised that you choose a new password for the forum.
~ Duome Team
Moderators: MoniqueMaRie, Cifi
In this sentence: "Sie sollten öfter schwimmen gehen." "You should go swimming more often."
Why is this "sollten" and not "sollen". Duo is doing this in every sentence that uses this verb, and I don't get it.
Verbformen tells me "sollten" is the imperfect, past tense form, and I see nothing past tense about this sentence. It is telling someone what they "should" be doing from now on, which is at least present or future tense in my mind.
Sollten is here from Konjuntiv II. It used as an advice. With sollen the whole sentence sounds more as an order and less polite.
If I add
Um etwas Gewicht zu verlieren sollten Sie öfter schwimmen gehen.
it is maybe a little bit more obviously.
native: 
, B2 - C1: 
, A1: 
Where the confusion with the tense being also referred to as "imperfect" is because Konjuntiv II conjugates very similarly to Präteritum (as you may have noticed when looking at the conjugation tables for sollen on Verbformen). Sometimes Duo translates present tense sollen as should, which I find misleading; I instead translate it as "to be supposed to", or "to be obligated to".
– Native
(Cantonese) – Conversational
– Low-intermediate | – Low-intermediate | 
– Conversational
