How to learn tense?
This question often arises in English language students minds as tenses play important role in language learning. But before you start learning tenses, you should ask yourself,
What is a tense?
Time and action relationship is called tense. In simple words, "time" in grammar is known as tense provided, there is an action associated with it.
"Birds fly" despite the fact it does not show a clear time but from the verb "fly" we know, it's their ROUTINE or Habit hence, we can mark the tense of this sentence as simple present.
WHERE TO START FROM?
In this article students will be given a complete guideline for tenses learning.
Now let's begin our lesson!
How many tenses English language has?
English language has 12 tenses. The table below will help you learn the names of all the 12 tenses.
12 TENSES WITH Helping verbs
|
Tense |
Helping verbs |
|
Simple present |
Do / Does |
|
Present continuous |
Is / are / am |
|
Present perfect |
Has / Have |
|
Present perfect continuous |
Has been / have been |
|
Simple past |
Did |
|
Past |
WAS / WERE |
|
PAST PERFECT |
had |
|
Past perfect continuous |
Had been |
|
Simple future |
Will |
|
Future continuous |
Will be |
|
Future perfect |
Will have |
|
Future perfect continuous |
Will have been |
As a beginner, your first job will be to read the table as many times until you memorize all the tenses including their helping verbs. Once you are done doing this, now write down the tenses on paper.
If you still miss a name or two, go through the table again.
Some students make a big mistake by learning the structures first. This is wrong approach. Until you clearly know the tenses and the relevant helping verbs (also called Auxiliary verbs) DO NOT GO FOR STRUCTURE LEARNING.
Remember, basic tenses are 3 but each of them has been further divided into 3 more groups.
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