Verb tenses

There are many parts of speech. One of them has this peculiar habit that can get rather complicated. The words change their forms depending on time. Which part of speech are we talking about? Correct.

Verbs. Verbs are good for many things. They can for example, tell you something about when an event is happening. Here are a few sentences. Look at the verbs, and say if they are happening in the past, right now, or in the future.

A ship was moored to the quay. Further down, a giant crane towered. It had rusted so much it was leaning over. When you press the button underneath here, the video plays at a different speed. If you select pause, the video stops.

I will do the dishes, and then I will clean up, but first of all I will take a nap. Look at the verbs. These verbs tell us that those things have already happened. In the past. These verbs tell us that these things are happening right now.

And these verbs reveal these things that haven’t happened yet. And to be completely honest, it isn’t even certain that they will happen at all. Except the part about resting. When we change a verb to fit time like this, we say that we change the tense of the verb. Tense means time, and the verb has different forms depending on tense.

Here are a few more examples. Will eat. Eat. Ate. Have eaten.

Will be flying. Fly. Flew. Had flown. As you can see, some tenses have their very own forms of the verb, a verb form.

Other tenses, such as these, are created by adding an additional verb to help out, an auxiliary verb. You can also see that there are several different ways to express both past time and future. Let’s organise the examples, so it becomes clearer. Time before now. I ate dinner last night.

I have eaten dinner. I had eaten dinner. Time after now. This Tuesday we will be flying to Paris. This Tuesday we shall fly to Paris.

We fly on Tuesday. Pause the film and read these sentences carefully. Can you spot any differences between the various ways of expressing past time, or between the ways of expressing future? Do they have exactly the same meanings, or just almost? When you write a story, or some other text, it is often wise not to mix tenses too much.

Listen to this example and see if you can spot any peculiarities. It was a beautiful morning. She gets dressed and looked out of the window. The sun is shining, but it has been raining and the street was still wet. That didn’t sound very good.

Look at the verbs: a mix-up of different tenses. Let’s try again. It was a beautiful morning. She got dressed and looked out of the window. The sun was shining, but it had been raining and the street was still wet.

Better? Now the tenses match. When they harmonise like this, we say there is sequence of tenses. Most of the verbs are now in the same tense, but not all. Look at this one here.

This is not the same tense as in the rest of the text. Pause, read, and see if you can see why. The rain had already stopped falling when she looked out, so that gets its own tense. Sequence of tenses means that the tenses harmonise with each other throughout a text, not that they have to be identical in all places. Now, you have seen a video about tense.

You are watching the last few seconds. In a short while, you will have watched it until the very end. In the future, you might watch it again.