More Perfekt

The Perfekt is how Germans talk about the past in conversation, so the limiting factor is simply how many participles you know. This lesson widens that pool considerably.

The frame never changes: auxiliary in position 2, participle at the very end. All that varies is which participle and which auxiliary.

That table is not meant to be memorised in one sitting. Practise will bring it in; the patterns below are what make it stick.

Pattern 1 — regular: ge- + stem + -t. machen → gemacht, lernen → gelernt, kaufen → gekauft. If a verb feels ordinary, this is almost always right.

Pattern 2 — irregular: ge- + stem + -en, usually with a changed vowel. sprechen → gesprochen, nehmen → genommen, finden → gefunden. These have to be learned one by one, which is why the common ones are worth drilling.

Pattern 3 — separable verbs put the ge- in the middle: anrufen → angerufen, einkaufen → eingekauft, aufstehen → aufgestanden.

Pattern 4 — no ge- at all. Verbs beginning with be-, ver-, er- and similar take no ge-: besuchen → besucht, verstehen → verstanden. Same for verbs ending in -ieren: telefonieren → telefoniert.

Now the haben or sein question. Around nine verbs in ten take haben. sein is for a small group, and it is worth being precise about what that group is.

sein is used with verbs that have no object and describe either going somewhere (gehen, fahren, kommen, fliegen) or becoming something (werden, aufstehen, einschlafen) — plus sein and bleiben themselves.

Notice bleiben: nobody moves anywhere, yet it takes sein. So "movement verbs use sein" is a useful rule of thumb rather than the actual rule — the real test is whether the verb describes a change of place or state without acting on an object.

This also explains a pair that looks contradictory. Ich bin nach Berlin gefahren — I travelled, no object. Ich habe das Auto gefahren — I drove the car, and the car is an object. Same verb, different auxiliary, because the second sentence has something being acted on.

• Ich habe gestern einen Film gesehen.

  I watched a film yesterday.

• Am Wochenende bin ich zu Hause geblieben.

  At the weekend I stayed at home.

  no movement, still sein

• Ich habe mit meiner Frau gesprochen.

  I spoke with my wife.

• Letztes Wochenende bin ich nach Berlin gefahren.

  Last weekend I travelled to Berlin.

• Sie hat mir geholfen.

  She helped me.

  helfen takes a dative object — mir, not mich