Learning English

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What is ‘tense’?

Tense is the form of a verb which tells you when something happened. Look at the verb ‘talk’ for example. 

• If you say ‘I talk’, you are either telling us a fact or talking about your routine.
• If you say ‘I talked’, you are telling us about a finished action in the past. 

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On a basic timeline, you have the past, present and future. At each of these points in time, there are four different verb structures: simple, continuous, perfect, and perfect continuous. 

Technically, there are only two grammatical tenses in English: present and past. To talk about the future, we actually use the present tense. However, it can be useful to separate the verb structures into 12, like this:

1. Present simple e.g. I walk
2. Present continuous e.g. I am walking
3. Present perfect e.g. I have walked
4. Present perfect continuous e.g.  I have been walking
5. Past simple e.g. I walked
6. Past continuous e.g. I was walking
7. Past perfect e.g. I had walked
8. Past perfect continuous e.g. I had been walking
9. Future simple e.g. I will walk
10. Future continuous e.g. I will be walking
11. Future perfect e.g. I will have walked
12. Future perfect continuous e.g. I will have been walking

In the other videos in this series, you will learn about each of the 12 structures: how they are used and how they are formed. 

To do

Practise by using the worksheet on this page, and continue to the next videos.

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