When we form the past simple tense in English, we tend to just add an "-ed"
ending to regular verbs. So we might say for instance "I kick" and that becomes
"I kicked." The "-ed" ending is added at the end. This is in contrast to
irregular verbs, where you simply have to memorize the ending or the change. If you
have something like "buy," that becomes "bought." If you have something like "eat" that
becomes "ate" there doesn't seem to be much of a pattern to that. And in that
case you just have to memorize the ending. But for most of these regular
verbs we add "-ed," and you might think "well, we're done then!" But the tricky
thing is that there are some spelling rules that are a bit unusual. That's
what we'll cover in this video and I think even native speakers of English
might find this very interesting because there are some unusual
exceptions that are worth paying attention to.
Okay, so let's start with verbs that end with a "silent e." An example
would be something like "I love" or "I bake." And you don't say "I lovee" or "I lovuh."
That "e" is silent, and in those cases we just add a "d." So we don't add another "e."
We just add a "d." Okay, so probably that one doesn't cause too much trouble. Let's
go to the next one, and this has to do with verbs that end with a "y." First of
all we have ones that end with a consonant and a "y." An example here
would be something like "try." You can see the consonant and
the "r," and then we have the "y" ending. When we have this this changes a little bit.
The "y" becomes an "ie," and we're going to get "tried." Now, we can contrast this with
a situation where we have a vowel plus a "y." So a vowel plus a "y." An example of
this would be something like "pray."
You can see the vowel and then the "y." And that simply becomes "prayed." "I prayed."
The next ones have to do with consonants. If we end with a consonant ...
So we're going to end our verb with a consonant after a single vowel ...
then there are a couple of situations that can take place. Okay, so the
first one is if the last syllable is stressed...
and sometimes it's much easier just to see what this looks like in
practice... Let's have a look at one here:
"defer." You can hear that there is first of all a consonant at the end
after a single vowel. An example of something else would be a verb like
"tweak," where we we just have two vowels and we add an "ed" ending quite
regularly. But in this case we have a consonant after a single vowel, but the
stress falls at the end: "deFER," not "DEfer." In this case we
actually double this consonant. This is going to become "deferred" with an extra "r."
By contrast, if we have the last syllable unstressed ...
an example would be "flatter." You can hear
that the first one is stressed here. Then we just add the "-ed" ending and we don't
double the consonant. That's kind of tricky isn't it? But you really have to
get an ear for that and the more you start seeing the pattern the easier it gets.
One more example here. If we use something like "stop," you can hear this is
an "o" -- that's a vowel before a consonant. And in this case there's only one
syllable, so by nature we're gonna we're going to stress this. That's why
again we double the consonant. It becomes "stopped." A few
more cases here, a few more instances where we have a tricky rule, and the next
one has to do with ending with an "l." Okay, what happens when we end with an "l." This
one actually has a lot of variation. So if you take a verb like "cancel" (and other
examples would be "travel, "equal" -- there's lots of verbs that end with "l") do you add
just the "ed" ending or do you write it with an extra "l"? Do you double the
consonant in this case? Well, if you are a British speaker of English you tend to
double the consonant. So this is very common in British English. In North
American English there's a lot more variation, so in North American English you
might see it with two "l"s. But you may also see it quite often with one "l." And
that can be kind of tricky and it may be hard to know what to do so just
try to get used to that and make up your own mind as to what you prefer. But it is
great to be aware of this distinction because even native
speakers of English struggle with this one all the time. Let's add [end] with one last
one here and this has to do with verbs that end with a "c." So let's say somebody
says "I panic." When you have this in the regular
present tense you see I "panic." But then when you form the past tense you add a "k,"
which is very strange isn't it? "I panicked,"
or "I frolicked." There's a bunch of other ones. There is one
exception to this rule though and this is a fairly contemporary verb. It's the
verb "sync." If you are syncing your files you do not add the "k." You would say "I
synced" -- just adding the "-ed." Hopefully this doesn't confuse you too much.
Hopefully you find this interesting and helpful. Those are the rules -- the spelling
rules for adding "-ed" to form the past simple tense.