3.5 The perfect I — haben + past participle — Epoché
What you will be able to do Build the past participle of any regular German verb — the wrapper ge- at the front and -t at the back — and say which two classes of verb leave the front half off. Put the perfect together: a form of haben in the second slot and the participle at the very end, in the frame you built for modal verbs. Say why this, and not a one-word past tense, is how Germans talk about yesterday. Explain why the German perfect must often be translated with an English simple past, and why the English rule that forbids I have seen him yesterday does not apply in German. Prerequisites : 3.4 — the sentence frame, which the perfect uses with a participle where the infinitive was; and the present of haben from lesson 3.2, which carries the person. Until now you could describe habits and plans but not tell anybody what happened. This lesson fixes that, and you already own both halves of the construction. The German compound past is a form of haben , conjugated for the person, plus a participle that never changes, at the end of the sentence — the same architecture as the modal frame. So there is one new word shape, the participle, and one new habit of mind, which is the harder of the two. The habit is this: in German this compound form is the ordinary past tense of speech. It is not a "perfect" in the English sense, it does not mean the event has present relevance, and it happily takes a definite past time. When a German speaker tells you what they did yesterday, they use it, and the English translation will almost always be a simple past. How the participle is built For a regular verb the participle is a wrapper: ge- in front of the stem, -t on the end. "To play" gives gespielt ; "to ask", gefragt ; "to buy", gekauft . Three adjustments complete the regular system. Stems in -t or -d insert a vowel , as in the present: the ending is -et rather than -t . The same applies after m or n preceded by another consonant other than l , r or h — the rule from lesson 3.1 in a new place: geatmet , geöffnet , but gelernt . Verbs with an unstressed prefix take no ge- . Some prefixes are permanently welded to the verb and never carry the stress. Such a verb already begins with an unstressed syllable, and German does not stack a second one in front, so the participle is simply the stem plus -t , with the prefix kept. There are about eight of these prefixes; you recognise them because the stress falls after them. Verbs ending in -ieren take no ge- either. These are borrowed verbs, mostly recognisable from English, stressed on the ie of the ending itself — stu die ren — so the first syllable is unstressed and takes no ge- . The next lesson deals with them together with the separable verbs. One more small group is worth learning as a list: about eight verbs that take the regular ending but also change their stem vowel. Grammarians call them mixed verbs. They include the verbs for "to think", "to bring", "to know a person" and "to know a fact", four of the most frequent verbs in the language. They are at the end of the table below. Table First the frame. The participle is the same word in every row. Person Perfect — spielen , to play 1 sg ich habe gespielt 2 sg du hast gespielt 3 sg er, sie, es hat gespielt 1 pl wir haben gespielt 2 pl ihr habt gespielt 3 pl sie haben gespielt Now a stem that needs the inserted vowel. Person Perfect — arbeiten , to work 1 sg ich habe gearbeitet 2 sg du hast gearbeitet 3 sg er, sie, es hat gearbeitet 1 pl wir haben gearbeitet 2 pl ihr habt gearbeitet 3 pl sie haben gearbeitet And one with an unstressed prefix, where the front wrapper is absent. Person Perfect — besuchen , to visit 1 sg ich habe besucht 2 sg du hast besucht 3 sg er, sie, es hat besucht 1 pl wir haben besucht 2 pl ihr habt besucht 3 pl sie haben besucht Three tables, eighteen cells, and within each table only the helper changes. All the person marking is on the helper. The participle is dead weight, which is exactly what makes the construction cheap: one participle per verb, ever, and the six forms of the helper you already know. How to read the endings There are no new endings. The helper has the endings from lesson 3.2, and the participle ends in -t — or -et after a stem that needs the extra vowel — and never varies. What deserves attention is the front of the participle. The front is ge- when the verb begins with its own stressed syllable, and nothing when it begins with an unstressed prefix or ends in the borrowed ending above. So "does this participle start with ge- ?" really means "where is the stress in this verb?" If you know how to say the verb, you know how to build its participle. Learn the unstressed prefixes as a set. They begin the verbs meaning, among others, to visit, to pay, to explain, to tell, to sell, to try, to discover, to destroy. Once you hear the stress fall on the second syllable, the missing front wrapper is something you can hear rather than remember. A warning: one of the eight prefixes is spelt exactly like the front wrapper, so its participle looks as though nothing was added. Two such verbs are very common, and adding a second copy of the syllable produces something no German speaker has ever said. From now on, learn three things for each new verb: the infinitive, the third person singular present, and the participle. (The principal parts that dictionaries and grammars give for an irregular verb are the infinitive, the simple past and the participle, with the present added when its vowel changes: fahren – fuhr – gefahren , er fährt . The simple past comes later.) Here the participle is predictable; from lesson 3.7 it is not, and the habit will carry you. Why the spoken past is the compound one German also has a one-word past tense, which you will meet in lesson 3.8 for a small group of verbs. It is the tense of written narrative: novels, fairy tales, newspapers, history. In most of the German-speaking world it is not the tense of speech: ask somebody what they did at the wee