Past Participles of Haben Sein

We mentioned before that while most German verbs express the past by the perfect tense, these two are often used in the past tense as well. So you will be learning these forms:

SEIN, "to be"
	Present	Past	Perfect
ich	bin	war	bin gewesen
du	bist	warst	bist gewesen
er, sie, es	ist	war	ist gewesen

wir	sind	waren	sind gewesen
ihr	seid	wart	seid gewesen
sie (Sie)	sind	waren	sind gewesen

HABEN, "to have"
	Present	Past	Perfect
ich	habe	hatte	habe gehabt
du	hast	hattest	hast gehabt
er, sie, es	hat	hatte	hat gehabt

wir	haben	hatten	haben gehabt
ihr	habt	hattet	habt gehabt
sie (Sie)	haben	hatten	haben gehabt

As with English "to be," sein is the most irregular verb. In both languages, it probably developed from several ancient verbs. Different verbs were preserved in the different tenses, and especially in the different persons of the indicative present. By comparison, haben looks quite regular (and we will see later that this is a model for the usual way of forming the simple past).

In spoken German, the past tense of these two verbs is used very frequently, simply because these forms are nice and short. Therefore, you would say either:

Perfect	Past
Ich bin in der Stadt gewesen.	Ich war in der Stadt.
Ich habe Glück gehabt.	Ich hatte Glück.
Wir sind im Kino gewesen.	Wir waren im Kino.
Wir haben eine Tasse Kaffee gehabt.	Wir hatten eine Tasse Kaffee.

As you see, you will need both, the past and the present perfect of haben and sein.

Now, memorize them well!

Word order in sentences with the present perfect

Please take a a second look at the sentences in the perfect tense:

Ich bin in der Stadt gewesen.

Ich habe Glück gehabt.

Wir sind im Kino gewesen.

Wir haben eine Tasse Kaffee gehabt.

Note that in each sentence, the conjugated form of haben and sein are in the second position of the sentence and the past participle (gewesen, gehabt) comes at the very end of the sentence.

Look at this sentence:

Der Student ist heute abend mit seiner Freundin ins Kino gegangen.
(The student went with his girl friend to the movies this evening).

Note that this sentence is much longer than the ones above, but the same rule about the word order of sentences such as this in the perfect tense holds true:
The conjugated form of haben or sein (as appropriate) comes in the second position. “Second position” means the second grammatical position. In the sentence above, Der Student is the subject of the sentence and is in the first grammatical position. The word ist then correctly comes in the second position. Several other pieces of information then follow: this evening, with his girl friend, to the movies (note the order of these adverbial modifiers for future reference: time-manner-place). The past participle gegangen comes at the end of the sentence.

Even for longer sentences in the perfect tense, remember: the conjugated form of haben or sein comes in second position, and the past participle comes at the end.