- Hello, I'm Julian Northbrook from DoingEnglish.com.
Let's talk about verb tenses, baby.
(clicks mouth)
(upbeat rock music)
Oscar asks, "Hi Julian, what a great voice!
"Your accent is very clear,"
blah blah blah,
blah blah blah blah blah,
"My question: on a daily basis,
"when doing ordinary activities,
"like running errands, doing chores, et cetera,
"how many tenses do you think native speakers of English use
"to communicate?
"Thanks."
Good question.
The frequency distribution of different kinds of words
and chunks is something that I talk about
quite a lot in my book, Master English FAST:
An Uncommon Guide To Speaking Extraordinary English.
What I don't talk about in that book, however,
and which Oscar will know because Oscar has the book,
is the frequency distribution of tenses.
First, a quick clarification.
There are only actually three tenses in English,
the past, the present, and the future,
and technically, only two grammatical tenses
by which of course I mean the past and present.
Because the future tense is formed
by using the present form of the verb,
plus an auxiliary verb, such as will.
But then there are also four aspects,
the simple, the progressive, the perfect,
and the perfect progressive,
which then, combined with the three tenses
to form 12 tense categories.
As Oscar's question alludes to,
it probably won't surprise you to learn
that native speakers don't use
these 12 tense categories equally.
A lot of research has been done
on the frequency of the tenses,
and the findings are pretty much unanimous.
Whether in spoken or written English,
the simple present usually accounts for about 60 to 70%
of the verbs found.
Then the simple past, about 20%,
meaning the simple past and the simple present alone account
for about 80 to 90% of all the verbs
in any stretch of spoken or written English.
Clearly, that is a lot,
but what about the other 10 tense categories?
To make this easy to understand,
I made this pretty simple and extremely rough graph.
Straight away, you will see
that the present simple accounts for a massive 50%
of the verbs in this data.
Then, the past simple, a further 30%,
meaning the present simple
and the past simple combined account
for 80% of the verbs in this data.
Then we have the present perfect at 5%,
and the future simple, and present progressive at 2% each.
And from there, the rest of the tenses account
for less than 1% of the data each,
right down to the future perfect progressive,
which accounts for only 0.01%
of the verbs in this dataset.
Again, this graph is pretty rough.
It's something that I just threw together quickly
based on the different research that I looked at.
But it should give you a pretty good idea
as to how the tenses are distributed throughout English.
Before I move on, let me just make one point
because I don't want you to misunderstand.
Just because a tense is, relatively speaking, quite rare,
it doesn't mean that it's not used at all.
All tenses are useful somewhere
and they all have a place within the English language.
For example, the future perfect progressive.
A very rare tense to be sure.
But, next week, I will have been doing
the Doing English Plus Programme,
now Julian Northbrook's League
of Extraordinary English Speakers, for three years,
which was an example of the future perfect progressive.
Again, a rare tense compared
to some of the others to be sure.
But in this situation, a very useful one.
The point is the frequency of the 12 tenses
is clearly extremely imbalanced.
And when you are learning English,
if you are giving equal time and attention, or worse,
you are doing what generally happens
in traditional English learning classrooms
and giving all of your time and attention
to the rarer-perceived difficult tenses,
you are probably not being very efficient
in the way that you learn.
Indeed, the way that most people approach learning English
is actually backwards.
They learn the rules and the tenses
and they try to produce English from that.
This is a pretty poor way to go about trying
to improve your English.
You get taught the tenses,
again, usually with more emphasis on the rarer,
more difficult ones, and then you're expected
to produce language from that.
This is a very quick and easy way
to end up overusing the rare tenses
that native speakers almost never use.
Want a better way to practise the tenses
and improve your English?
A way that's not backwards?
Then check out my book,
Master English FAST: An Uncommon Guide
To Speaking Extraordinary English.
In chapter six, I talk in detail
about something that I call example-based learning,
Which, you ask me, is the best way
to improve your use of the English tenses,
and, well really, any other kind of grammar
that you want to get good at as well.
And there we go. (upbeat rock music)
That is the end of this video.
Did this clear up a few things
about the equation tenses for you?
If it did, go ahead, click the thumbs up button
and leave a comment.
If you thought this video was a load of all shit,
doesn't matter, go ahead, click the thumbs down button.
And either way, if you're new to this channel,
subscribe, and I will see you
in the next extraordinary video, good bye.
However, I didn't really talk
about the frequency of grammatical patterns.
(upbeat rock music)
Uh, they've gone out.
Uh, Delphine's I think, sorry.
Yeah, see ya later.
You can probably see this on the Youtube later.
(laughing)
Bye.
He stood on the other side of the window.
Don't stand on the other side of the window,
I can see you!
(lightly laughing)