Spanish: An Essential Grammar

With unfinished periods of time

The perfect tense is used for events that have occurred in a designated

period of time that has not ended. Typically it is accompanied by terms

like hoy‘today’,ahora‘now’,todavía/aún no ‘still not’ or time phrases

formed using este‘this’:

Lo he hecho hoy. I did it today.

Este verano hemos ido a This summer we went to

Portugal. Portugal.

For very recent events

The perfect tense is used for very recent events (usually occurring during

the present day), even in cases where the simple past tense would be used

in English:

¿Qué has dicho? What did you say?

Hemos perdido el tren de We missed the two o’clock

las dos. train.

¿Quién ha llamado? Who called?

The pluperfect tense

The pluperfect denotes what hadhappened, or a state of affairs that had

existed, before some particular time in the past:

A las dos todavía no habían They still hadn’t arrived at 2

llegado. o’clock.

No sabía si me habían visto. I didn’t know whether they had

seen me.

Note: For the replacement of the pluperfect tense by the -raform of the imperfect

subjunctive, see 12.5.

The future perfect tense

This is used to refer to what will havehappened at some point in the future.

Additionally, it can be used to makes guesses and suppositions:

11.2.3

11.2.2

11.2.1.3

(^1111) 11.2.1.2
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

1011

1

12111

3 4 5 6 7 8 9

20111

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

30111

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

40

41111

Compound

tenses

137