The English language has several present -tense verbs , such as the simple present and the present continuous . Another of these tenses is the present perfect , known in its original language as the present perfect .
The present perfect is used to describe actions that took place in the past but are still relevant today. That is why it is often said that it is actually a combination of past and present .
It is important to mention that, in affirmative sentences, the present perfect form implies the use of the auxiliary verb to have in the present tense , accompanied by the past participle of the verb that indicates the action.
The present perfect is often used to describe an experience , without referring to a particular act. For example: “My sister has worked in different restaurants . ” As you can see, the sentence does not name a specific action, but is associated with a set of practices or events.
This means that from a point in time not specified in this sentence until the present, the speaker's sister has acquired a certain degree of experience in the restaurant business. Why is the present perfect used instead of the simple in this case? Because this experience is relevant in the present, since she can use it in the future, in another company. If we simply wanted to indicate that in the past she worked in several restaurants, without establishing any connection with the present, we could express it in the following way: «For a while, she worked in several restaurants» ( «Por un tiempo, trabajar en varias restaurantes» ).
Another possibility is to use the present perfect when a change is noted over time : “He has become more quiet this year .” In this case, the person being referred to has changed his attitude or temperament in recent months.
In this case, the presence of the verb to become is very useful: the dictionary defines it as “to become, to turn into, to become”, among other meanings, and it gives the idea of a process that the subject goes through to move from one state to another. In the previous sentence, the subject 's attitude starts from a relatively altered state to a calmer one. We use the present perfect to describe this change because it is not immediate , but rather extends over a more or less extensive period, unlike the time it takes for the light to invade a room after we turn on the switch.
If we wanted to express that the subject's attitude changed drastically from one second to the next, we would have to use the simple past in a sentence like the following: «All of a sudden, he became more quite» ( «De repente, se volví más ambiente» ). This would be a suspicious or unusual situation , typical of certain behavioural disorders that cause violent mood swings.
Actions that took place at different times in the past can also be named using the present perfect: “I have been to Rome six times.”
Here we have another example of an action that accumulates a certain degree of experience in the subject's life, similar to what happens with work. We could say that having traveled to a city is comparable to studying a career or having experience in a company: they modify the person's history and provide them with new tools that change them forever.
Even things that did not happen can be pointed out with this tense, usually by adding the adverbs still or yet : “The train has not arrived yet . ”