Quote:
Originally Posted by ArcheM
Oof, at the risk of... interfering with the book, but that's another of the topics I enjoy.
The equivalent of the use of "sein" ("to be") in English isn't completely unknown or hasn't disappeared. The most common expression would be "something is gone". Well, with a certain meaning it's just an adjective, and when you want to be more specific, you can, of course, say "something has gone". But there's still traces of the present perfect being expressed there.
Oh, yeah, so I have to defer to my own grammar book, according to which (well, I know it myself, but rather implicitly), perfect tenses are used with "sein" when it has to do with movement or transformation (plus some special cases, like "bleiben", "passieren"): "ich bin gekommen" - "I have come", "Was ist passiert?" - "What has happened?", "Er ist gestorben" - "He has died".
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You're not interfering with the book, you're just addijg a little extra information that helps me be less confused.
Anyway that makes more sense, I just got confused because the word "sein" wasn't used, but other verbs were instead. Like today the lesson was the simple past tense and again the example word was "sein", but the table showing the -ich, -du, -wir, -Sie, -ihr forms used the words "war", "waren", "wart", and "warst", so again it isn't using the word "sein" but other verbs.
Also "wart" is translating to "serviceable", but in the context the book was using it in I think it means "were", though I may be wrong.