present perfect

Question

why it is difficult and confusing to learn present perfect?

Emilylion · Accepted Answer

because there is no tense in some languages about perfect tense.

Avangi · Answer

It can't be effectively summarized by a formula.

KJinCali79 · Answer

There is not an equivalent to the English present perfect tense in many other lanugages, for example, German, French and Italian have similar, but not equivalent tenses. I do believe that English, Spanish, and Portuguese all keep the present perfect tense and the simple past tense as distinct tenses.

The present perfect tense is generally used to express a past event with present consequences and generally refers to completed actions although not necessarily.

Forming the present perfect uses the auxiliary verb to have. Formula: subject + has/have + 3rd form of verb.
He has arrived at the airport.
I have eaten my dinner.
You have finished the assignment.
I have lived in this house for five years. -- An example that does not necessarily signal completion, e.g. I could still be living there, or maybe I am in the process of moving to another house.

CalifJim · Answer

AnonymousWhy it is difficult and confusing to learn present perfect?

Teaching the present perfect tense to someone whose native language does not have it does seem equivalent at times to trying to teach a rat calculus. If there is nothing in your current experience that forces you to conceptualize reality in the ways needed for using the present perfect tense correctly, it's obvious you'll have trouble with it. Learners seem to grasp this idea, at least intuitively, and the unfortunate effect is that it doesn't inspire a lot of confidence. But it sometimes helps to realize that it's the same for any thing else you might want to learn. It takes a lot of practice.

And then there's the fact that there are so many different explanations to choose from in the grammar books, some of them full of nonsense or near-nonsense. Different books focus on different uses of the present perfect tense, and it may be difficult for a learner to pull together all the different ways of looking at it into one coherent explanation that works for that particular learner.

At least, that's my brief version of the matter.

CJ

present perfect

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