Present Perfect

The present perfect is formed in German the same way as in English: it is a compound tense which uses an auxiliary properly conjugated in the present tense and the past participle of the main verb.

	auxiliary	past participle of main verb
Mary	has	spoken.
Maria	hat	gesprochen

In German most, but not all verbs, use haben as the auxiliary for the present perfect. However, a small group of verbs expressing a movement or a change use sein.

The verbs we have learned that use sein are:

fahren	ich bin gefahren
kommen	du bist gekommen
fliegen	sie ist geflogen
gehen	wir sind gegangen

You can see that you will want to learn to use haben and sein really well, and also learn the past participle of a new verb along with the infinitive. There are rules for forming the past participle of strong and weak verbs, which you will learn in this chapter, but there are several sub-groups and many individual variations.