Voltooid tegenwoordige tijd
hebben or zijn plus a past participle — the ordinary way to say what happened, in speech and in a message.
Dutch tells past events with the perfect far more than with the simple past, so this is the tense an A2 message actually needs. The participle is easy: ge- plus the stem plus -t or -d. Two things are not: choosing hebben or zijn, and remembering that the participle goes to the end of the sentence and stays there however long the sentence gets.
How the exam tests this
Schrijven, handwritten, four tasks in 40 minutes. Every task that reports something — why you missed an appointment, what happened to a delivery, what you have already done about a problem — is written in this tense, so it appears more often than any other verb form on the paper. It is marked as part of "is this understandable Dutch", and the error that hurts is the split one: a sentence whose participle never arrives at the end reads as unfinished. It also matters in Lezen, where a letter's key fact is regularly in a perfect-tense sentence whose participle is six words after the auxiliary.
What is wrong with this sentence?
Ik heb gebeld gisteren de gemeente over mijn aanvraag.
Most candidates write it exactly like this and lose the mark without knowing why.
The rest of this lesson
The rule, the worked examples, the exceptions and what to do in the exam room open with Mastery, together with every other lesson for this exam.
See plans