Is the difference between this lesson and the other lesson on haber + past participle, tone?

Hola Devin P.

Here, the difference is not really the structure itself, but the function and the context in which that structure appears.

In both cases you are right that the form haber + past participle is the same, and that’s exactly why it can feel confusing at first. What changes is what that form is attached to and what meaning the whole construction expresses.

In the lesson about “you should / shouldn’t have done something”, the key element is the modal verb (for example deber, tener que, poder). In sentences like “Deberías haber llamado”, haber llamado is a perfect infinitive that depends on deberías. The idea of obligation, advice, or criticism comes from the modal verb, not from haber itself. The construction is used to look back at a past action and judge it from the present.

In the lesson you’re referring to here, haber + participle is used simply to locate an action before another moment in time, without adding advice, obligation, or reproach. It’s a neutral temporal relationship. The meaning is closer to “to have done something before something else”, and any nuance (neutral, explanatory, factual) comes from the surrounding sentence, not from the form itself.

So structurally they look identical, but semantically they are doing different jobs. One expresses a past action evaluated through a modal verb, and the other expresses a past action as a time reference. Spanish relies heavily on context and accompanying verbs to signal that difference, rather than changing the form.

This is a really good observation, and we agree that seeing the same structure explained in different lessons can be confusing. We’ll take your feedback into account and look at how we can make that contrast clearer in the lessons so it’s easier to see why the same form behaves differently depending on context.

Buen finde!

Silvia