The Dutch present perfect (voltooid tegenwoordige tijd)

The present perfect (in Dutch, the voltooid tegenwoordige tijd) is the everyday past tense of spoken Dutch: Ik heb gegeten (I have eaten / I ate). It joins a helper verb with a past participle.

Take hebben or zijn in the present tense and add the past participle, which moves to the very end of the clause: Ik heb een brief geschreven. (I have written a letter.)

1. Pick the helper: usually hebben (to have); a fixed set of verbs takes zijn (to be) instead. See hebben or zijn?.
2. Conjugate the helper for the subject: ik heb, jij hebt, hij heeft, wij/jullie/zij hebben.
3. Put the past participle at the end of the clause: Ze heeft de hele dag gewerkt. (She has worked all day.)

With a zijn-verb the pattern is the same, but the helper is ben / bent / is / zijn: Ik ben naar huis gegaan. (I have gone home.)

The helper sits in second position, like any finite verb; the participle waits at the very end. Everything else stacks in between, so the two forms act like bookends around the sentence.

• Ik heb gisteren een nieuwe fiets gekocht. (I bought a new bike yesterday.)
• In a question the helper jumps to the front, but the participle still stays at the end: Heb je de film gezien? (Have you seen the film?)

• For a finished action, especially when speaking: Ik heb je moeder gesproken. (I spoke to your mother.)
• In conversation Dutch prefers the present perfect over the simple past for a single finished action; both are correct.
• When you tell a story, the two tenses split the work: the present perfect names the key thing that happened, while the simple past paints the background around it. Ze is gevallen; het regende en de weg was glad. (She fell; it was raining and the road was slippery.) Here is gevallen is the main event, and regende and was fill in the scene it happened in.

English speakers reach for hebben everywhere, because English builds the perfect only with have. A set of Dutch verbs takes zijn instead: Ik ben gevallen (I have fallen), not ik heb gevallen; Zij is gekomen (She has come), not zij heeft gekomen. The rule for choosing is on hebben or zijn?. A second habit to break is leaving the participle in the middle: it is Ik heb de hele dag gewerkt, not Ik heb gewerkt de hele dag.