German

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The perfect tense is sometimes referred to as
the present perfect or the
compound past tense, contrasting with the
imperfect or simple past tense.
In English it is formed by combining a fi nite
form of the verb ‘to have’
with the past participle, e.g. ‘He has played’ or
alternatively ‘He has been
playing’. German is similar in the way in which it
forms this tense, e.g. Er
hat gespielt, where it is immediately obvious
the two English forms, where
the second is the progressive form, are both
rendered by the one form in
German. There is a parallel here in the present
and imperfect in English
(see 10.1.1 and 10.1.4.1). There are two
complications in forming the
perfect tense in German: fi rstly you need to
derive the correct form of the
past participle from the infi nitive of the verb
concerned, and secondly you
need to decide whether the auxiliary verb it is to
be used in conjunction
with is haben, as in English, or sein, an option
which no longer exists in
English.
10.1.5.1 Deriving the past participle of a
verb from its infi nitive
To derive the past participle of a regular verb,
you take the stem and add
ge- to the beginning and -t to the end of it, e.g.
spielen _ gespielt (played), kaufen _
gekauft (bought), loben _
gelobt (praised)
Where the stem ends in -d, -t or a consonant _
n, you must add -et,
e.g.
reden _ geredet (talked), beten _ gebetet
(prayed), regnen _
geregnet (rained)
The past participles of all strong verbs, those
belonging to groups 1 to 7
(see 10.1.4.2), start with ge- and, like many
English irregular verbs, end in
-en, and the vowel of the stem depends on
which group of strong verbs the
verb in question belongs to, e.g.
schreiben _ geschrieben (written), stehlen
_ gestohlen (stolen),
kommen _ gekommen (come)
Any verb that starts with one of the following
unstressed inseparable
prefi xes, whether regular or irregular, does not
add ge-, which would add a
second unstressed prefi x and thus is avoided,
e.g.

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