In English we have 12 different tenses, and as you look at this chart it may
initially seem a little bit overwhelming, because how are you supposed to read it?
And how are you supposed to make sense of it? Well, we can be more specific in
categorizing this information. So instead of saying that we have 12 tenses,
we can use the word "tense" more specifically to say that we actually
have three tenses and four aspects. When we combine them, then we get these
twelve different ... tenses I suppose you can call them as well, but twelve
different ways to use an action or a verb. So we'll start with the tenses then.
We have three tenses. We have the past (what happened before), we have the present
(what is happening now or in the "now" moment --whatever that means), and we have
the future (which is what happens later). You can read this vertically then, so
all of these actions here happen now. I walk, I am walking, I have walked, I have
been walking, and you can see that with the last two they're not happening
exactly right now. By the "now" moment we mean something fairly loose
and fairly expansive. I've given you a regular verb here in "I walk" and all the
orange ones are related to this verb, but I've also indicated that
there are irregular verbs as well. Those change in different ways. So "I sang,"
for instance, is the past tense of "I sing." And I haven't conjugated the yellow verb
(the irregular verb) here fully, but I think you can kind of go through it and
use the same pattern as "I walk" and then see how it might be similar or different.
So the continuous would be "I was singing," "I am singing," and so on.
Okay, so that is "tense," but we can also talk about "aspect." We have four
different aspects, as mentioned, and the word "aspect" often gives people a bit of
trouble. Because what does it really mean? Well, I've defined "aspect" here for you as
how an action relates to time, or how it extends over time. Let's see if we
can quickly make sense of the four different aspects.
The simple aspect refers to an action that simply happened. We can
draw an arrow here [to indicate] that it just happened at a point in time. But we're
not being too specific necessarily about when it happened.
In fact, what's kind of weird about the present simple here (you can also
say the simple present by the way but we tend to read it from the top down --
so first the tense and then the aspect) ... but if you're talking about the present
simple here ("I walk"), you wouldn't say that if you're just talking about what you're
doing right now. You would actually say "I am walking." That's what's
happening right now. You don't say "I walk." So what's kind of weird about the the
simple aspect is that it often has a bit of a timeless quality to it. It's
something that could happen over time or that you could use to talk about
repeated actions or habitual actions. So you could say "I walk every day to school"
and that's an action that you repeat all the time. So the simple aspect
isn't entirely simple. It refers to an action that simply happened, but in terms
of its duration there's quite a bit of flexibility and we're not not being
entirely specific in terms of what's going on here. Okay, then the continuous
is an action that takes place over a period of time, so it's a continuing or
progressing action. It's really categorized by the present participle,
which ends in -ing, and then we have some helping verbs with it. The present
participle does have that sense of continuation. "Walking" -- it doesn't
say it happened at this moment. It's a process. So the continuous or progressive
tense or aspect then indicates a sense of something happening over a period of
time. Notice that the past tense here (the
past continuous) in some languages this is referred to as the imperfect. If
you learn French, for instance, the past version here may be called the imperfect.
That's the similarity that you can look for. The perfect is
something that happened in the past and was completed. It's something that was
completed and sort of has an endpoint. I shouldn't say in the past because it
can also happen now or in the future. So it's a completed action that happens in
the different tenses. You can say "I had walked," "I have walked," or "I will have
walked." And then the perfect continuous -- the last one -- is sort of a combination of
the previous two. The way you can think of this is as a kind of continuing
action that also has an endpoint. So "I had been walking" ... "walking" is that
continuing action, but then there was an endpoint and something else probably
happened after that. I had been walking when, you know, I tripped, or something
happened. So the perfect continuous then is a kind of hybrid of the previous two.
That's it then for tense and aspect. If you combine the two, as we've seen,
you can create all these twelve different tenses in English.