Combining Tenses
When you combine two tenses for a verb, for example "I would have said," conditional and present perfect, how is it done? Do you use the past participle or conditional form of the verb? Where does haber go? My best guess is "he diría", but since im only at the end of a level 1 year, ¡No tengo la menor idea! Me ayuda, por favor.
4 Answers
Eddy is right. If you use perfect tenses (the ones that use "haber" conjugated), the main verb you want to use must be a past participle (e.g. dicho = said), like in English. The conditional tense in English requires the auxiliary would, but in Spanish this is done using the conditional tense endings, which in this case, must be applied to the auxiliary "haber" (since "dicho" cannot be conjugated).
You are not combining tenses, because "I would have said" is NOT a combination of conditional and present perfect, but conditional perfect. "Present" (e.g. I go) becomes "present perfect" if you use "to have" (i.e. I have gone); "past" tense (e.g. I went) becomes "past perfect" if you use "to have" (i.e. I had gone); "future" tense (e.g. I will go) becomes "future perfect" if you use "to have" (i.e. I will have gone), and so on, and so forth.
When you combine two tenses for a verb, for example "I would have said," conditional and present perfect, how is it done? Do you use the past participle or conditional form of the verb? Where does haber go? My best guess is "he diría", but since im only at the end of a level 1 year, ¡No tengo la menor idea! Me ayuda, por favor.
Yo habría dicho with habría (conditional) being the "would have" and dicho (past participle) being the "said".
I am not a grammarian, nor am I a native but I would have constructed your two phrases thus.
(Yo) debería haber dicho - I should have said.
Me habría gustado haber dicho - I would have liked to have said.
I am not too sure about the second phrase but it just sounds right to me. Corrections from natives welcomed.
The (Yo) in the first phrase may be redundant dependant on previous context.
I'd like to bump this question. It's something I want to get a grip on. Combining the conditional with the perfect is a good example.
Let's say "I should have said" as we're not too far from that in the original question, with the conditional of deber and perfect of haber.
Or "I would have liked to have said/I would have liked to say" - where, in English, both grammar structures are perfectly acceptable in most contexts - I'm a little fuzzy on how to approach constructing such sentances.
