84 lines
4.5 KiB
Markdown
84 lines
4.5 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: "The Perfect Tenses - German for English SpeakersGerman for English Speakers"
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source: "https://germanforenglishspeakers.com/verbs/perfect-tenses"
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crawled: "2026-06-30"
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---
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# The Perfect Tenses - German for English SpeakersGerman for English Speakers
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# The Perfect Tenses
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Once you know a verb’s participle, the _Perfekt_ is formed by adding it to the present tense of _haben_ or _sein_:
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**haben:**
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**sein:**
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_Ich habe gelacht._
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I laughed.
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_Du bist aber gewachsen!_
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Have you ever grown!
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_Es hat funktioniert._
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It worked.
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_Wir sind wieder zu Hause angekommen._
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We arrived back home.
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_Habt ihr gegessen?_
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Have you (guys) eaten?
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_Sind sie da geblieben?_
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Did they stay there?
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Your first instinct will be to translate every _Perfekt_ statement in German with the perfect tense in English: "I have laughed," "It has worked," etc. But as you can see above, the most natural translation is usually the simple past (preterite) tense. There is effectively **no connection** between the _Präteritum_/_Perfekt_ distinction in modern German, which is mainly a written/spoken one, and the preterite/perfect distinction in English, which is about the relationship between past and present (see the [next section](/v-verbs/6-perfect-vs-preterite.md "6. Perfect vs. Preterite") for much more on this).
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Most verbs take _haben_, but some of the ones that take _sein_ are pretty common. In general, _sein_ is for verbs showing a change of location (movement) or a change of state/condition (transformation). For example:
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**movement:**
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_gehen_ – to go
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_kommen_ – to come
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_laufen_ – to walk, run
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**change of state:**
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_sterben_ – to die
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_wachsen_ – to grow
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_genesen_ – to recover, convalesce
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There are some regional differences; generally, as you go further South you'll hear more verbs used with _sein_. For example, in Bavaria it's more common to say _ich bin gesessen_ (I was sitting) but in the rest of Germany it's _ich habe gesessen_.
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Verbs that take _sein_ are always **intransitive**, which means that they don't take a direct (accusative) object. Unfortunately, many intransitive verbs also take _haben_, like _schlafen_ (to sleep) or _starren_ (to stare), so this rule doesn't work in the other direction.
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In the rare cases where a _sein_ verb is used with a direct object, it takes _haben_ instead:
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**intransitive** (_sein_):
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_Ich **bin** in die Stadt gefahren._
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I drove into the city.
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**transitive** (_haben_):
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_Ich **habe** meine Schwester in die Stadt gefahren._
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I drove my sister into the city.
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However, it’s more common for verbs to have a transitive variant: one example that still has the shift in English is _fallen_ (with _sein_, as in "a tree **falls**") vs. _fällen_ (with _haben_, as in "to **fell** a tree"). Another is _liegen/legen_, which corresponds to the English "lie/lay." With pairs like these in German, the transitive verb (with _haben_) tends to be weak, while the intransitive verb (with _sein_) is strong.
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The _Plusquamperfekt_ is used for an event that had already occurred before some other point in the past. It’s the same as the _Perfekt_, only it uses the past tense (_Präteritum_) of _haben/sein_ instead of the present tense:
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_Es **hatte** bereits **angefangen** zu regnen, als Stefan nach Hause kam._
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It **had** already **started** to rain when Stefan came home.
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_Wir **waren** bis zur Brücke **gekommen**, bevor uns einfiel, dass wir unser Geld **vergessen hatten**._
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We **had come** to the bridge before it occurred to us that we **had forgotten** our money.
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_Damals **hatten** wir noch nie ein echtes Schloss **gesehen**._
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At the time, we **had** never **seen** a real castle before.
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One of the more complex aspects of the perfect tenses in German is what to do when there are multiple verbs in a dependent clause. Generally, German does not allow two adjacent past participles in the same clause. Instead, both become infinitives. (There is an exception to this, termed the [Ultra-Perfekt](http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doppeltes_Perfekt) by some, but it’s regional and very non-standard usage.) And when such a bundle of verbs gets grouped together at the end of a dependent clause, the conjugated auxiliary verb goes before the infinitive forms, not after them.
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_Ich habe es gemacht._ (I did it.)
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_Ich musste es machen._ (I had to do it.)
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_Ich habe es machen müssen._ (I had to do it.)
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_Weißt du, bis wann er es hatte machen müssen?_ (Do you know by when he had to have done it?)
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[Continue to next section >>](/verbs/perfect-vs-preterite.md)
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