Compound verb tenses (part 2)

WE are looking at verb tenses that are made up of more than one word and so far we have talked about the present action tense (estoy hablando) and the recent past tense (he hablado). As you can see, in addition to the principal verb ‘hablar’ we have used two of what we call ‘auxiliary’ verbs, that is, verbs that help us form the correct tenses, which are ‘estar’ and ‘haber’. There are various combinations using ‘estar’, which we will come back to later.

They are not difficult to understand, but ‘estar’ is not regarded as an auxiliary verb in the purest sense of the word.

If you have a look at your Spanish verb book (being careful to wipe the dust off first), you will find that the auxiliary verb, par excellence, is ‘haber’.

This verb is expressed by the word ‘have’ in English, but it is not the ‘have’ of possession which would be ‘tener’. Just as ‘he hablado’ means ‘I have spoken’, we can also say things like: ‘I had spoken’, ‘I will have spoken’ and ‘I would have spoken’ all of which use various forms of ‘haber’ in Spanish.

Let’s look first at ‘I had spoken’. This tense is sometimes called the ‘past perfect’ tense.

In Spanish, it has a truly horrible name which I almost daren’t tell you. Here goes … it’s called the ‘pluscuamperfecto’.

You really don’t need to know that but if you see it written down, now you know what it is. When would we use this ‘past perfect’ tense? Well, we use it when we’re talking about the past and need to take one step further back.

For example, we have already learnt to say ‘I spoke to John’ (Hablé con John) and ‘I have spoken to John’ (He hablado con John), but if I want to tell you that I had already spoken to John before some other event in the past I would use this past perfect tense –e.g. ‘Mary phoned me yesterday to ask me when I had spoken to John and what he had said to me’.

Notice that here I have changed the word ‘have’ into its past tense version ‘had’.

This takes the sentence one step further into the past. If Mary phoned me yesterday afternoon then perhaps I spoke to John yesterday morning, one step further into the past.

In Spanish, I do the same thing by changing the present tense of the verb ‘haber’ (he, has, ha, hemos, habéis, han) into its past form ‘había’ (había, habías, había, habíamos, habíais, habían). So, here is our sentence: ‘María me llamó para preguntarme sobre cuándo yo había hablado con John y qué me había dicho’.