Studying the Perfect Tenses
I am now going to study the Present Perfect Tense.
Is the Present Perfect Tense use in daily conversation or are the Pretèrito and Imperfect Tenses more common? In the "Reference Section", on this site, it is stated that the Present Perfect Tense is rarely used in Mexico and Latin America. With this in mind, should I study the Conditional Perfect Tense and study the Present Perfect Tense at a later time?
Or maybe I should begin working on the Subjunctive Tenses.
As always, I respect the assistance I recieve on this forum.
10 Answers
Hi Daniel
I am living in Bolivia just now and the present perfect is used here a lot.
I have started using it where the preterit might be more correct because the conjugation is much easier.
Remember that in Spanish the present perfect is different than in English.
for example you can say "He comido a las cinco" = I have eaten at 5 o'clock. of course in English this sounds strange and we would not use the present perfect but say I ate at 5 o'clock. or in Spanish "comi a las cinco" The Spanish present perfect can have a time reference but the English present perfect practically never.
Example "He hablado ayer" would be "I spoke yesterday"
By the way in Spanish you can never "split" the haber from the past participle. I have already eaten is Ya he comido not he ya comido.
Good luck
Ian
Have a look [url=http://my.spanishdict.com/vocabulary/vocabulary/show'id=1710195%3ATermList%3A936601]at this list[/url]. It might also help a little.
As a resident of Mexico, I have to agree with Santiago. As a general rule the verb tense that sounds right in English is also correct in Spanish. You definitely do need to learn the present perfect and use it as you would in English. If there are odd uses in an region where you are living or visiting pick those up as you go, but it is best to learn it right in the first place.
P. S. "Ya lo he hecho" and "Nunca he ido" are very common phrases in Mexico.
it is stated that the Present Perfect Tense is rarely used in Mexico and Latin America.
If it says that, it's wrong. It is true, as Lazarus says, that the frequency of usage is lower in Latin America than in Spain, but the present perfect is used VERY often in Latin America. In fact, it is used in many situations where the simple past or even the present would be used in English. For example, if someone says something you don't understand, you might say "No te he entendido." To say that you have (or have never) done something in the past, you would use the present perfect, as in "Nunca he ido a Nueva York." It would sound odd to say "Nunca fui a Nueva York."
Therefore, the "rarely" you mention should be thought of only as being relative to usage in Spain, and if you want to speak Spanish well in Latin America, you MUST know how to use the present perfect.
Thank you Lazarus Anything that helps me is much appreciated. I have a lot to learn.
Ian
Ian Francis Hill said:
Here the present perfect is used as a simple past tense - something that finished in the past - it seems strange to me too.
Funny! In other parts of Latin America they do the opposite: they use the past tense for everything, where I'd make a distinction between the past tense and the present perfect. In any case, it is clearly a regional thing, and should not be taught unless you plan to live there for the rest of your life, because it is going to sound weird everywhere else.
The present perfect in Spanish it is used when you are within the time frame that you are considering, or when some facts are somehow related to the present moment (e.g. for things that you've done in the past). The "standard" present perfect in Spanish is always used when you use yours in English, but we can also use it in some circumstances where you wouldn't in English. So, in a way, they are pretty close.
"I have spoken yesterday" is bad but "I have spoken, yesterday" can be fine.
Here the present perfect is used as a simple past tense - something that finished in the past - it seems strange to me too.
Ian Francis Hill said:
Example "He hablado ayer" would be "I spoke yesterday"
He hablado AYER'''? That sounds awful! I don't know if such sentence is a feature of some Bolivian dialect, but academically speaking, you cannot use the present perfect like that. Here you must use the preterite (in theory, at least). You will never hear that in Spain, and I bet you won't either in most countries.
The present perfect is less used in Latin America, but it does exist. It is a phenomenon parallel to that of USA and England with the English present perfect, which is often replaced in USA by the past tense where in England people would only use the present perfect.
The pluperfect (the perfect form of the imperfect) is used everywhere, and it is unavoidable to describe things that were happening in the past before another another time reference in the past.
The "anterior" (the perfect form of the preterite) is rarely used anywhere, and it can be replaced almost systematically by the pluperfect. Probably not worth learning.
The future perfect tense is used everywhere, and it is used to make predictions about things that finished before now, of before a future moment.
The conditional perfect tense is used everywhere, and it is used to make suppositions about things that were finished in a past moment. If someone uses the future tense to say a sentence, and you want to quote this person at a later moment, you need to use the conditional perfect.
However, the present subjunctive is used a lot more frequently than any of those perfect tenses.
