An easy way to master Spanish present perfect and past perfect for regular verbs.

Sameera De Silva
3 min readDec 23, 2024

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In English:

The basic structure for the present perfect tense is indeed:
Subject + have/has + Past Participle
“I have spoken,” “She has eaten,” “They have traveled”

In Spanish:

The structure is similar, but the auxiliary verb “haber” changes its form depending on the subject:

Yo he hablado (I have spoken)
Tú has hablado (You have spoken)
Él/Ella/Usted ha hablado (He/She/You [formal] have spoken)
Nosotros hemos hablado (We have spoken)
Vosotros habéis hablado (You [plural, informal] have spoken)
Ellos/Ellas/Ustedes han hablado (They/You [plural, formal] have spoken)

Below table contains the breakdown for Present perfect example for AR, ER and IR verb endings .

I have spoken.

This common for all the AR regular verbs for Tomar its tomado

I have drunk.

This common for all the regular ER verbs , for Comer its comido

I have lived.

This common for all the regular IR verbs , for Conducir its conducido

Now lets look at the past perfect.

In English it will be

I had spoken .

I had drunk.

I had lived

So in Spanish , same participle is used . Only difference is different auxiliary verb is used for each subject.

Note- You can use https://www.linguasorb.com/spanish/verbs to find the past participle.

Regular Auxilliary verbs are in blue.

Supportive material-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNLUq1xDyoQ For AR

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-Spn7bc3t8 For ER

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFqfl25NWw 4 For IR

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