Questions & Answers about Du hast recht.
Is this sentence in the past tense? I thought we were learning the Perfekt tense!
No, this sentence is in the present tense. Because this lesson focuses on the Perfekt tense, you might expect hast to be a helping verb. However, there is no past participle (a word usually starting with ge-) at the end of the sentence. Here, hast is just the main verb, meaning "have".
Why do we use hast (have) instead of bist (are)?
In English, we say that a person "is" right. In German, the expression is recht haben (literally: "to have right"). So, instead of saying "You are right," Germans express this as "You have right."
Why is recht written with a lowercase letter? I thought nouns were always capitalized.
Normally, all nouns in German are capitalized (like das Recht, meaning "the law" or "the right"). But in the fixed expression recht haben, the word recht acts more like an adjective describing a state, so it is traditionally written with a lowercase r.
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