Javea Grapevine Issue 179 - LARGE FONT EDITION | Page 34

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SPEAKING ‘PERFECT’ SPANISH
Anyone who has looked in a book of Spanish verbs can
be forgiven if they panic & run for the hills when they
count how many tenses there are! But all is not as bad
as it seems…… About half of them are what we call
‘Compound Tenses’, which means that they involve more
than one verb. The ‘good news’ is that the verb HABER
is always one of those verbs. The ‘bad news’, is that
they seem to have almost as many names as there are
grammar books, so when I teach them, I tend to teach
what they mean, rather than worrying about what they
are called. They are generally known as the ‘Perfect’
tenses, s o I will keep the names as simple as possible
for those of you who want a name for the tense.