Compound tenses: one recipe, eight tenses

Compound tenses at a glance

The whole family on one screen. Read down the second column: that is the only difference between the eight tenses.

Five of them carry everyday Spanish and have their own pages: the present perfect, the pluperfect, the perfect subjunctive, and the conditional perfect and pluperfect subjunctive. This page adds the other three: the future perfect, the past anterior, and a word on hubiere, which survives in legal texts: el que hubiere firmado (whoever shall have signed).

The forms of haber

Learn haber in each tense and you have every compound tense. Read down a column:

Usted takes the él form and ustedes the ellos form, as everywhere. The past subjunctive also has an -iese set (hubiese hablado), interchangeable with -iera and less common in speech.

Participles and three fixed rules

Regular participles: -ar verbs take -ado, -er and -ir verbs take -ido:

• hablar, hablado - spoken
• comer, comido - eaten
• vivir, vivido - lived

A stem ending in a vowel puts an accent on the í: leído, traído, oído, creído. Verbs in -uir do not: construido.

The irregular participles are few, and most are very common:

Verbs built on them inherit the irregularity: devolver, devuelto (given back); describir, descrito (described).

Three rules hold in all eight tenses (literary prose occasionally slips an adverb in, había ya salido, but in your own Spanish keep the two together):

Outside the compound tenses, used as an adjective, the participle does agree: Las puertas están abiertas. (The doors are open.)