Could you translate that into English for me?
;-)
'Past indicative' and 'past subjunctive' sound like two terrifying names. For the sake of freeing ourselves from the sense of intimidation they convey to us, from now on, let us call them 'Yogi Bear' and 'SpongeBob' respectively. Yogi Bear and SpongeBob are two sets of inflectional systems. We now have yet another scary expression. To remove this too, let us denote 'inflectional system' by the name of 'Smurf'.
Smurfs Figures
What Smurfs do is they assign forms to verbs in certain grammatical structures from the set of forms they contain.
The set of SpongeBob forms for 'be' comprises one element: 'were'. 'be' in all persons and numbers gets this form.
The set Yogi Bear forms of 'be' consists of was and were.
The set of present indicative forms, Cinderella for convenience, of 'be' are: am, are, is,