Grammar - Regular Perfect

NOTE: At 1:41 I talk about (in)separable verbs. You can ignore that for now. The (in)separable verbs do not matter at this point.

There are six tenses in German of which you mainly need two -and a few words from the second past tense: The Präsens which you have already learned in lessons 03 and 04 and the Perfekt which is a form of the past. Just for the sake of completion, here are all six in chronological order:

  • Plusquamperfekt - Pre-past (similar to the English past perfect)
  • Perfekt & Präteritum - Past (oral/script)
  • Präsens - Now or future
  • Futur I - Assumptions + rather rarely: unfinished future
  • Futur II - Assumptions + rather rarely: finished future

The tenses you need to pass level B1 of the CEFR are highlighted in red. The Perfekt is the most important one of the two past forms that I am going to explain here. I will talk about the difference between the Perfekt and the Präteritum at the end of this chapter. Let‘s get started:

The regular Perfekt past

The Perfekt is actually a compound form. That means that you always need two parts to construct it. Those are usually a form of haben* and what is called the past participle. One example:

Ich habe meine Hausaufgaben gemacht.
haben + past participle

You should be able to use (=conjugate) haben by now, so let‘s focus on the regular (!) past participle (in German: das Partizip II).

If I parse gemacht a bit apart you might realize that mach is the stem of the infinitive machen that is squeezed in between a ge- and a -t. And that‘s actually it. Take a look at three other examples and then try it for yourself:

Ich habe nichts gesagt.
I haven't said anything.

Er hat nicht gefragt.
He hasn't asked.

Wir haben alles gehört.
We have heard everything.

Try it yourself with the following five verbs. You can find the answers in the footnotes below**:

Infinitive Past Participle
leben - to live
duschen - to shower
kochen - to cook
fehlen - to be absent
regnen - to rain

A few more things

There are a few exceptions, of which you will have to be aware. Those concern the separable and inseparable verbs (coming soon) and verbs ending in -ieren. You can ignore these for now as the (in)separable verbs do not matter at this point. It's just here to prime you for when you reach the lesson about this topic. Some examples:

Separable verbs

1 | Ich habe zu viel eingekauft.
I have shopped too much.***

Inseparable verbs

2 | Er hat mich gestern besucht.
He has visited me yesterday.

Verbs ending in -ieren

3 | Wir haben gestern eine Stunde lang telefoniert.
We have talked on the phone for one hour yesterday.

Learnings from the examples above:

  1. The ge- squeezes between the prefix (here: ein-) and the stem of the separable verb.
  2. Inseparable prefixes do not allow you to use ge- anymore. Hence just add a -t to the end of the stem and you are done.
  3. -ieren verbs also do not allow the use of the ge-. Again, simply add a -t to the end
    of the root, et voilà.

These rules also apply to the irregular forms, that I will talk about later.

Footnotes - Fußnoten

* At times you will have to use sein with the past participle to build the Perfekt. I will talk
about this later in this course.

** gelebt - geduscht - gekocht - gefehlt - geregnet

*** I am aware of the fact that in English you wouldn’t really use the Present Perfect. But
in German we do almost exclusively use the Perfekt past. Consider the
“faulty" translation as an initial exposure to this topic.