Perfekt.
The spoken past.

In spoken German, Perfekt is the past tense. Not Präteritum. When you tell someone what happened yesterday, what you did last week, what you ate for breakfast, that is Perfekt.

The structure: two parts, one sentence

Perfekt always has two pieces. The auxiliary verb (haben or sein) goes in position two, exactly where a normal verb sits. The past participle goes to the end of the sentence.

Position 1	Position 2 (auxiliary)	...	End (participle)
Ich	habe	viel	gelernt.
Er	hat	einenKaffee	getrunken.
Wir	sind	nach Berlin	gefahren.

The auxiliary is conjugated and changes with the subject. The participle never changes. It is always the same form at the end.

Regular past participles: ge- + stem + -t

Take the infinitive, remove -en, add ge- at the front and -t at the end.

• lernen → lern → gelernt
• kaufen → kauf → gekauft
• machen → mach → gemacht
• arbeiten → arbeit → gearbeitet (stem ends in -t, add -et)

Irregular past participles: ge- + changed stem + -en

Strong verbs change their stem vowel. The pattern is ge- + new stem + -en. These must be learned individually, but the most common ones come up constantly and become automatic fast.

Infinitive	Participle	English
essen	gegessen	eaten
trinken	getrunken	drunk
schreiben	geschrieben	written
gehen	gegangen	gone
fahren	gefahren	driven
kommen	gekommen	come
sehen	gesehen	seen
sprechen	gesprochen	spoken

Two groups that skip ge-

Two groups never add ge- at all: verbs ending in -ieren, and verbs with an inseparable prefix. Separable verbs are a third case: they keep ge-, but it moves inside the word.

Verbs ending in -ieren skip the prefix entirely.

• studieren → studiert
• telefonieren → telefoniert
• passieren → passiert

Verbs with an inseparable prefix skip it too: the prefix already sits where ge- would go.

• verstehen → verstanden
• besuchen → besucht
• erklären → erklärt

Separable verbs do the opposite. They keep ge- and slot it between the two halves: eingekauft, aufgewacht. They get their own article.

haben or sein?

Most verbs use haben. Use sein for two groups: movement from one place to another, and change of state. Everything else takes haben.

Use sein	Use haben
Movement A to B → gehen, fahren, fliegen, laufen, kommen	Everything else → essen, kaufen, lernen, arbeiten, sehen, sagen
Change of state → werden, wachsen, sterben	Also: verbs with an Akkusativ object always take haben
Also → bleiben, sein, passieren	When in doubt → haben is the safer default

• Ich bin nach Hause gegangen. (I went home.)
• Er ist um 7 Uhr aufgewacht. (He woke up at 7.)
• Sie hat dasBuch gelesen. (She read the book.)
• Wir haben gut gegessen. (We ate well.)

For the full conjugation of sein and haben as auxiliaries, see sein and haben. For an action that was already finished before another past event, see Plusquamperfekt. The past before the past.