How do you form the perfect tense in German?

The perfect tense is a compound tense. This is because a sentence in the perfect tense is constructed from an auxiliary verb and a past participle.Let's use the simple sentence "I have played" as an example.Firstly, we have the auxiliary verb. This verb is conjugated and will either be 'haben' (to have) or 'sein' (to be). If there is movement in the verb, we will use 'sein'; if there is no movement, we will use 'haben'.Since there is no movement in the sentence, we will use 'haben':I have- Ich habeAfter the auxiliary verb, we have the past participle., which in this case is 'played'. To form the past participle in German, we need to take the infinitive, replace the -en ending with -t, and add ge- to beginning.spielen:spielen ---> spielt ---> gespieltWe now have our perfect tense sentence. Ich habe gespielt

TG

Related German GCSE answers

All answers ▸

‘Wenn’ and ‘als’ can both mean ‘when‘ in English. What’s the difference between them?


How is the conditional formed in German?


Deine deutsche Freunde Julia hat dich über einen Urlaub gefragt. Du schreibst Julia einen Brief über deinen Lieblingsurlaub. Schrieb: Wo bist du gefahren, wer bist du mitgefahren, wie war den Urlaub, über deine Pläne für nächstes Jahr.


What is the difference between the present perfect and the past perfect?