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[GRAMM] Verbs - Present Perfect

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Basler Biker
Switzerland

[GRAMM] Verbs - Present Perfect

Post by Basler Biker »

Present Perfect
Present perfect is used to express a past event that has present consequences. That's a very vague description, let's look at examples instead. What if we want to say I have eaten or He has written a book, how do you say that in Swedish? That is when we need to use present perfect and that is also what we are going to learn in this lesson.

What we have to do to express present perfect in Swedish, is to create a form of the verb, that we can use as an adjective. Then we combine this with the present form of ha, which is har.

Du har pratat (You have talked)
De har hört (They have heard)
Hon har klätt sig (She has gotten dressed)
Jag har ätit (I have eaten)
This probably looks complicated, and to be perfectly honest, it is. There are four different basic ways to construct present perfect in Swedish, and they look like this:

Infinitive Present Perfect English Translation
prata har pratat talk
höra har hört hear
klä har klätt dress, get dressed
äta har ätit eat
The form we use for the main verb is supine and when we combine this with the auxiliary verb har, we get present perfect, the equivalent of the English past participle.

This is one of those places where Swedish differs more than usual from English so this might need some extra practice. One thing to note is that this form is very common in Swedish and you will have to get used to it not only to understand what people say, but so that you can speak in a more Swedish way.

All the difficulties aside, good luck with your lesson in Swedish present perfect!


BB - Basler Biker - Positivity and constructiveness will prevail
Native :belgium: :netherlands: / fluent :fr: :de: :uk: / learning :sweden: / fan of :switzerland: (bs/bl)

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