German · Chapter 4 · Lesson 11 · Grammar primer
Perfect tense
Prescribed by the AQA specification.
The short version
Journeys and changes take sein, the rest take haben
In the German perfect, verbs of moving from place to place (gehen, kommen, fahren) and of changing state (werden, sterben, passieren) take sein, and so do sein and bleiben. Everything else takes haben. Quick test: if the verb can take a direct object, it takes haben.
Ich bin nach Hause gegangen und habe ein Buch gelesen.
The German perfect happily takes yesterday
English will not let you say I have seen him yesterday. German will: its perfect covers both I saw and I have seen, and it is the normal spoken past. The exceptions are war, hatte and the modals, which Germans say in the simple past even in conversation.
Ich habe ihn gestern gesehen.
That's the gist. The full article goes deeper - more examples, the edge cases, the why - and the practice below scores like a vocabulary session and earns the same XP.
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10-question session
One question at a time, mixed across the exercises in this lesson. Miss one and it comes back round before the end. There are 18 in all: practise more afterwards if you want them.
Lesson 11 of 17 in this chapter