6.5.1 Grammar: the perfect tenses

In this section we will go over the perfect tenses.  This may be fully or partially review for you but it will be important to read in order to understand the next grammar topic in the chapter, the sequence of tenses.

What is a perfect tense?

Perfect is a grammatical term that means “completed”.  You may see a relationship between this name and imperfect which mean “not completed”.  There are six perfect conjugations that represent a mix of tense, aspect and mood:

  1. Present perfect indicative
  2. Present perfect subjunctive
  3. Conditional perfect indicative
  4. Future perfect indicative
  5. Pluperfect[1] indicative
  6. Pluperfect subjunctive

As stated above, in grammatical terms perfect means that something has been completed.  The different conjugations of the perfect tenses are used to explain time relationships.  Let’s look at exactly how these time relationships work and how these different forms are conjugated over the next few pages.

  1. Pluperfect is short for "pluscuamperfecto" in Spanish. ↵

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