Questions & Answers about Mein alter Kühlschrank war kaputt.
Why is the adjective alter instead of just alt or alte?
Kühlschrank is a masculine noun. Here it is the subject (nominative case). After a possessive word with no ending like mein, the adjective has to step in and show the gender by taking the masculine ending -er.
If the fridge is masculine, why doesn't mein have an ending?
In the nominative case (when the noun is the subject), possessive articles like mein do not take any endings for masculine and neuter nouns. They only get an ending for feminine (meine) and plural (meine) nouns.
Why doesn't the word kaputt get an ending too?
In German, adjectives only get endings when they come directly in front of the noun they describe (like alter Kühlschrank). When an adjective comes after a verb to describe something, like kaputt does here, it stays in its basic dictionary form.
Is war the past tense of ist?
Exactly! war is the simple past tense of the verb sein (to be) for the third-person singular (he, she, or it). So just as ist means 'is', war means 'was'.