If you come to Afrikaans from Dutch, this is the single highest-leverage correction you can make in the whole verb system. Dutch splits its perfect auxiliary between hebben ("to have") and zijn ("to be"): movement and change-of-state verbs take zijn (ik ben gegaan, "I have gone"), while most others take hebben. Afrikaans threw that split out. In the active voice, every perfect uses het — no exceptions, no motion-verb carve-out. The reflex to say is for "gone, come, arrived, walked" is the most common Dutch-transfer error there is, and one rule fixes the entire class.
The rule in one line
In an active perfect, Afrikaans always uses het + past participle. is is reserved for the passive (where Dutch would use worden/zijn too), not for active motion. If the sentence has a real subject doing the action, it is het.
Ek het gegaan.
I have gone. / I went.
Sy het gekom.
She has come. / She came.
Compare the Dutch your ear wants to produce: ik ben gegaan, zij is gekomen. Both are correct Dutch and both are wrong Afrikaans. Swap ben/is for het, and you are done.
The motion verbs that trip Dutch speakers
These are exactly the verbs that take zijn in Dutch, which is why each one is a transfer trap. The pattern is identical every time: Dutch is/ben/zijn becomes Afrikaans het.
| Verb | Dutch (transfer error) | Correct Afrikaans | English |
|---|---|---|---|
| gaan | Ek is gegaan | Ek het gegaan | I went |
| kom | Sy is gekom | Sy het gekom | She came |
| loop | Ons is geloop | Ons het geloop | We walked |
| val | Hy is geval | Hy het geval | He fell |
| bly | Ek is gebly | Ek het gebly | I stayed |
| ry | Hulle is gery | Hulle het gery | They drove / rode |
Here are the corrected forms in natural sentences, so the het pattern settles in your ear:
Ons het gister stad toe gery.
We drove into town yesterday.
Die kind het op die trap geval.
The child fell on the stairs.
Hulle het tot laat by die partytjie gebly.
They stayed at the party until late.
Ek het te voet werk toe geloop.
I walked to work on foot.
Every one of these is a verb that would summon zijn in Dutch. Every one is het in Afrikaans.
So where does is go? The passive
Afrikaans does keep is in the perfect — but for the passive, where there is no acting subject, only something that gets done. This is the genuine home of perfect is, and keeping the two apart is the whole game.
Die brief is gepos.
The letter has been posted. (passive — someone posted it)
Die werk is klaar gedoen.
The work has been finished. (passive)
Contrast the active and passive directly:
Hy het die deur gesluit.
He locked the door. (active — het)
Die deur is gesluit.
The door has been locked. (passive — is)
The test is simple: if a subject is doing the action, use het; if the subject is having something done to it, use is. The fuller treatment of this active/passive split is on het vs is in the perfect and the decision guide choosing het vs is.
One subtlety worth flagging, because it catches Dutch speakers out a second time: a handful of Afrikaans verbs can read as either active or passive depending on meaning, and the auxiliary follows the meaning, not the verb. Die ys is gesmelt ("the ice has melted") treats the melting as a state the ice has reached — close to a passive-like change of state — whereas Die son het die ys gesmelt ("the sun melted the ice") has a clear agent and takes het. So the auxiliary is not a fixed property of the verb the way zijn versus hebben is in Dutch; it is a live signal of whether you are describing an action with a doer or a result without one. That is precisely why the Dutch instinct misleads — in Dutch the choice is lexical and must be memorised verb by verb, while in Afrikaans it is grammatical and falls straight out of the meaning you intend.
Why Afrikaans simplified this
Afrikaans descends from seventeenth-century Dutch but underwent heavy regularisation, partly through contact with second-language speakers at the Cape. The hebben/zijn alternation is exactly the sort of irregular, hard-to-predict rule that levels out under such pressure: learners generalise the more frequent auxiliary. The winner was het for all active perfects. The result is that Afrikaans is more regular than Dutch here — which is good news, because there is simply less to remember. The split survives only in the active/passive contrast, which is a meaning difference, not arbitrary verb-class membership. For more on what Afrikaans kept and dropped from Dutch, see relationship to Dutch.
Common mistakes
❌ Ek is na die winkel gegaan.
Incorrect — Dutch zijn-transfer; active motion takes het.
✅ Ek het na die winkel gegaan.
I went to the shop.
❌ Sy is gisteraand gekom.
Incorrect — kom is active here; use het.
✅ Sy het gisteraand gekom.
She came last night.
❌ Die hond is in die dam geval.
Incorrect — the dog is the active subject of falling; use het.
✅ Die hond het in die dam geval.
The dog fell into the pond.
❌ Ons is by die hotel gebly.
Incorrect — bly is active; the auxiliary is het.
✅ Ons het by die hotel gebly.
We stayed at the hotel.
❌ Die kinders is stad toe geloop.
Incorrect — loop is active motion; het, not is.
✅ Die kinders het stad toe geloop.
The children walked into town.
Key takeaways
- Afrikaans uses het for every active perfect — there is no zijn-style motion-verb exception inherited from Dutch.
- The Dutch hebben/zijn split is the source of the error: ik ben gegaan → Ek het gegaan; zij is gekomen → Sy het gekom.
- Watch the classic motion verbs — gaan, kom, loop, val, bly, ry — these are precisely the ones that take zijn in Dutch and therefore tempt you into is.
- Perfect is survives in Afrikaans only for the passive (die brief is gepos), where there is no acting subject.
- The one diagnostic question: is the subject doing the action (→ het) or having it done to it (→ is)?
Now practice Afrikaans
Reading grammar gets you part of the way. The exercises are where it sticks — free, no signup needed.
Start learning Afrikaans→Related Topics
- Choosing the Perfect Auxiliary: hetB1 — Afrikaans uses het as the perfect auxiliary for every active verb — there is no hebben/zijn or haben/sein split — and the only is + participle you ever meet is the passive, not an active perfect.
- het vs is in the PerfectB1 — Afrikaans builds every active perfect with het — there is no hebben/zijn split — and is + participle is only the passive or a stative result, so the het/is line is simply the active/passive line.
- Afrikaans and Dutch: A Grammatical ComparisonB2 — Afrikaans is the most analytic Germanic language — a daughter of 17th-century Dutch that kept Dutch syntax but shed almost all of its inflection.
- Dutch False FriendsB2 — Words that look identical in Afrikaans and Dutch but mean different things — the insidious traps that catch Dutch speakers precisely because the two languages are so close.
- Dutch Transfer: dan vs as for 'than'A2 — Why Dutch speakers say groter dan when Afrikaans demands groter as — a clean reversal of the two languages' words for 'than', and why dan in Afrikaans only ever means 'then'.