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Heidi

You follow these — you would never say them

isch gange, hät gmacht — which auxiliary

The rule

The past is always auxiliary plus participle, and the auxiliary is si or ha. Movement and change take si: isch gange, isch cho, isch gfahre, isch worde. So do sitting and standing — isch ghocket, isch gstande — where German in Germany says «hat gesessen». Nearly everything else takes ha: hät gmacht, hät gseit, hät gschlafe.

Where it catches you

If you learned German in Germany, sitting and standing are the trap: «Ich bi ghocket», never «Ich ha ghocket». In the vocabulary, each verb's past row shows its auxiliary.

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