Breakdown of La campeona ha ganado tres medallas.
tres
three
haber
to have (auxiliary)
ganar
to win
la medalla
the medal
el campeón
the champion
Questions & Answers about La campeona ha ganado tres medallas.
Why is it campeona without an accent mark, when the masculine word is campeón?
Nouns for people that end in -ón form their feminine by adding -a (making el campeón into la campeona). When we add the -a, the spoken stress naturally lands on the second-to-last syllable. Since Spanish words ending in a vowel naturally stress this exact syllable, the written accent mark is no longer needed to show where the stress goes.
Why use ha ganado here instead of the simple past tense ganó?
In Spain, this tense (the present perfect) is heavily used for past actions that are still connected to the present, or that happened in an unfinished time frame like "this year" or "today". If the sentence mentioned a finished time period, like "in 2020" or "last week", a Spanish speaker would use the simple past tense instead: ganó.
Because la campeona is feminine, why isn't the past participle feminine too (ha ganada)?
When a past participle is used with the helping verb haber to form a verb tense like this one, it never changes to match gender or number. It will always end in -o. Past participles only change their endings to match gender and number when they are used as adjectives, like in the phrase las medallas ganadas (the won medals).
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