If you have reached the present perfect and the past perfect, you are on a good track for your Spanish studies and it is time to talk seriously about grammar.
I don’t know of any shortcuts around regular practice. However, you can do yourself a great favor if you take the time to figure out what you want to say in English before trying to build the grammar in Spanish.
It is possible to learn to conjugate present and past perfect verbs without really understanding their meaning or where and when to use them in writing or conversation. If you’re reading this, chances are you’ve set higher goals for yourself.
Let me start by introducing the present and past perfect tenses in English. Once we have grasped the purpose of these verb forms, we can move quickly and easily through the “rules.”
Remember that in simple present or simple past we say “I live” or “I lived”. “I love it” or “I loved it.” Pretty straight forward. In the present and past perfect tenses, however, we express “I have lived” or “had lived.” “I have loved” or “I had loved.”
If you imagine yourself narrating the story of your life, you can probably see why certain memories require “I have loved” or “I have loved.” Because we “love” people and things for periods of time in the past that begin and end and sometimes overlap or change, it’s not as simple as just “I love him” (now) or “I loved her”. ” (so). There are moments in your story that need a more nuanced timeline, additional context that anchors a sentiment in the past or draws it, alternatively, to the present moment.
“I have lived” (present perfect) and “had lived” (past perfect) is a difficult distinction for students to make. Hopefully the examples below will clarify the difference between these seemingly interchangeable statements.
“I have lived” refers to the immediate past or to an action or state of being that occurred in the past but continues into the present tense. “I’ve lived without chocolate for a week” or “I’ve lived in California my whole life.” See how the present perfect suggests both the past and the present? The speaker is very well (although not necessarily) still longing for chocolate and continues to live in California. The past perfect, on the other hand, expresses a past action that has come to a definite end.
It’s helpful to look at the past perfect as a two-part story. Often the past action we are referring to occurred before another past action, for example, “I HAD lived in California for three years BEFORE my family moved to Pennsylvania.” A bit more context establishes that the action came to a definite conclusion in the past, as in “I had lived in California growing up.”
Now we move from the abstract to the concrete. How do we construct the present and past perfect tenses?
In both languages, the perfect tenses are “compound tenses”, which means that they require 1. an auxiliary verb (to have) and 2. the past participle (lived) of the main verb (to live). “I have lived.”
1. “Haber” is the translation of “to have” in English. The conjugated form of “haber” will precede the past participle and must reflect the subject of the verb (yo, tú, él/ella, etc.) in addition to the tense.
2. In English, we usually create a past participle by adding “-ed” to the main verb: “lived.” To create the past participle of a verb in Spanish, we remove the “ar” from AR verbs and replace it with “ado”. We remove “er” or “ir” from the verbs ER and IR and replace them with “ido”. So, if the main verb is “live” or “vivir”, the past participle becomes “lived”.
Finally, here is the construction in Spanish:
Present perfect: (“Haber” conjugated in the present tense) + (past participle of the main verb);
“I have lived” / I have lived.
“We have lived” / We have lived.
Past Perfect: (“Haber” conjugated in the imperfect) + (past participle of the main verb);
He had lived./ I had lived.
“We had lived” / We had lived.