Present Perfect

The Present Perfect is used to express actions that happened at an indefinite time or that began in the past and continue in the present. This tense is also used when an activity has an effect on the present moment.

Note: later in this article, Preset Perfect will be abbreviated as PP.

I've eaten 10 apples today!

 

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Oil prices have gone up recently.* * This is not up-to-date! It should be, "Oil prices has gone done recently." I will replace this animation as soon as possible.

 

 

The structure of PP is not very easy because it requires some pratice to get used to it. To correctly form Present Perfect sentences, you should know these:

the proper conjugation of the verb "have" (=auxiliary verb) [1]
Past Participle [2]

[1]

The conjugation of the verb "to have" is the same as in the Present Simple.

	Singular	Plural
1st person	I have	We have
2nd person	You have	You have
3rd person	He/she/it has	They have

 

As seen in the table, only the third person singular (he/she/it has) is irregular:

• She has never seen my brother
• Neither of my brothers has ever driven a truck

[2]

To correctly form a sentence in the PP, we also need the past participle. You can read a nice article about the past participle here. In short it is the verb from that is used with the perfect tenses.

Same as the past form, the past participle can be either regular or irregular.

The regular verbs are typically formed by adding -ed. Read an article about regular verbs.

Verb	Past Participle
talk	talked
explain	explained
use	used
deliver	delivered
include	included
achieve	achieved

 

The formation of the irregular verbs does not follow one rule. Therefore, they should be memorized. Read an article about irregular verbs.

Verb	Past Participle
be	been
become	become
see	seen
go	gone
eat	eaten
grow	grown