The Perfekt — German's everyday past tense
When a German speaker tells you what they did yesterday — at the bakery, on the phone, in school — they use the Perfekt tense, not the simple past you might know from English textbooks. It's a two-part construction: the helper verb haben (conjugated) sits in slot 2, and the past participle flies to the very end of the sentence, exactly like the verb-bracket from lessons 13–14. Ich habe gestern Pizza gegessen. = 'I ate pizza yesterday.' This lesson covers the haben-version; the next lesson handles a smaller group of verbs that take sein instead.
Forming the past participle: weak verbs
Most regular ('weak') verbs build their past participle with the formula ge- + stem + -t. machen → gemacht (made). spielen → gespielt (played). lernen → gelernt (learned). kaufen → gekauft (bought). sagen → gesagt (said). fragen → gefragt (asked). If the stem ends in -t or -d, you get a buffer -e-, just like in the present: arbeiten → gearbeitet, reden → geredet.
Strong verbs: ge- + ... + -en, often with a vowel change
A smaller group of common verbs ('strong' verbs) end the participle in -en and frequently change the stem vowel. You memorize them. The high-frequency ones: essen → gegessen (eaten), trinken → getrunken (drunk), lesen → gelesen (read), schreiben → geschrieben (written), sprechen → gesprochen (spoken), sehen → gesehen (seen), finden → gefunden (found), schlafen → geschlafen (slept), helfen → geholfen (helped). And the special two: sein → gewesen (been — but sein uses sein as helper, lesson 17), haben → gehabt (had — yes, with a -t, slightly mixed).
Verbs with no ge-
Two groups skip the ge- prefix. (1) Verbs that already start with an inseparable prefix — be-, ge-, er-, ver-, zer-, ent-, emp-: bezahlen → bezahlt, verstehen → verstanden, erzählen → erzählt, bekommen → bekommen (no change at all, since the verb already begins be-). (2) Verbs ending in -ieren (almost all loan-words from French / Latin): studieren → studiert, telefonieren → telefoniert, fotografieren → fotografiert. No ge-, just stem + -t.
Word order: the bracket again
Same rule as with modals: helper verb in slot 2, participle at the END. Ich | habe | gestern Pizza | gegessen. Anna | hat | um drei Uhr ein Buch | gelesen. Move something else to slot 1 and the helper still anchors slot 2: Gestern habe ich Pizza gegessen. Um drei Uhr hat Anna ein Buch gelesen. Yes/no questions put the helper first: Hast du Pizza gegessen? W-questions: Was hast du gestern gemacht?
When to use it (vs the simple past)
In speech and informal writing, the Perfekt is the default past tense for ALL verbs — even ones that would sound stiff in spoken English. Ich habe gegessen. = 'I ate' / 'I have eaten' / 'I did eat' — German makes no distinction. The simple past (Präteritum — ich aß, ich kaufte) does exist, but at A1 you mostly meet it with sein (war), haben (hatte), and the modals (konnte, musste, wollte), and in books. For everything else: when in doubt, Perfekt.
