Hi, my name is Rebecca and today we're going to do an overview of English verb tenses.
A lot of students are, of course, quite confused by the number of different tenses we have
in English and that's why I thought it would be helpful for you to have a look at all of
them and see how they change, we're not going to discuss them in detail as to when you use
which one, we're just going to take one sentence, one sample sentence and one sample verb and
run it through all of the tenses so you have an idea of what they are and what's an example
of each one and also how it sounds and looks in each of the different verb tenses, okay?
So let's start to look at some examples now.
So the first tense is the present simple, an example of this is "I work".
The example verb that we're going to use throughout this exercise is the verb "to work".
So present simple would be "I work".
Present continuous would be "I am working".
Past simple of that would be "I worked", "Yesterday I worked all day".
Past continuous would be "I was working", "I was working when you called me".
Future simple would be "I will work" or sometimes "I'm going to work" and future progressive
would be "I will be working", alright?
So the important point is in order to communicate almost anything in English, you can actually
use just three of these tenses, the present simple, the past simple and what we call the
future which is basically future simple.
So in other words, you can really say everything you need to say if you master these three
tenses.
So make that your goal first, alright?
With that, you should be able to say everything.
So if you can say everything with that, why do we have all of these other tenses?
Well we have them because they specify specific periods of time when certain things happened,
alright?
And they give us more precise information about when certain events took place.
That's why we have all of these different tenses but what I'm trying to do is to help
you to understand which tenses to master first and then from there you can expand your English
knowledge so that eventually you will be able to use all of the English tenses comfortably,
ok?
Now we're going to look at some of the more advanced tenses.
As you may or may not know, these are known as the perfect tenses and even though they
may not seem so perfect to you because they can be quite challenging, let's go through
them.
Again, we're going to use the same example "to work".
So present perfect would be "I have worked", "I have worked here for five years".
Present perfect continuous would be "I have been working", "I have been working all day
and I'm really tired".
Past perfect would be "I had worked", ok?
There are some special rules about how to use the past perfect.
You need to study those.
Past perfect continuous is "I had been working".
Future perfect would be "I will have worked".
And the last one, future perfect continuous is "I will have been working".
So now this is a summary of the more advanced perfect tenses.
If we look at everything that we've studied today, we've given you an overview of all
of the verb tenses.
As I mentioned, the first six are the more basic ones, the ones you should master first.
The second set are more advanced tenses, but once you start to use them, you will see they
are quite useful, they're not annoying, I know they can be difficult to master.
From two points of view, you need to understand when to use them and you need to understand
how to use them, but just take it step by step, don't try to learn too many at one time,
that would be confusing, don't do that, just learn one tense at a time and try to master
it with all of its words and vocabulary and rules and so on, you can do it, alright?
So that's it for now, I hope this lesson helps you.
If you'd like more lessons in English, you can go to our website, www.engvid.com.
Thanks very much and good luck with your English, bye for now.