Leading forms of verbs

Listen to these chants and see if you can explain how they are constructed: Ride, rode, ridden Pick, picked, picked Sleep, slept, slept Let’s repeat some verb basics: Verbs are words which change their form depending on when in time the action is taking place. The different variants of the verbs are verb forms. The different times that the verbs describe are tenses. Some tenses have their own verb forms. The simple past tense for example: Ate, prayed, loved Other tenses are formed by combining auxiliary verbs with some form of the main verb.

Such as the present perfect tense: Have eaten, have prayed, have loved Infinitive is a verb form, but not a tense, because it says nothing about when the action is taking place. The verb form infinitive is the basic form of the verb. In English, the infinitive and present tense forms often look the same, while in many other languages, they differ from each other. This is what infinitive sounds like: Eat, pray, love To make it easier to keep track of all those verb forms, we are going to use those chants you heard before. They are useful regardless of whether you are trying to understand your first language better, or working to acquire a new one.

We create a short chant for each verb, consisting of three of the verb forms. We call them the leading forms of the verb. First, we state the verb in its base form - infinitive. That’s the form you find in a dictionary, and that you can put to in front of. Ask Cry Make Forget Go Then we add the simple past tense.

It’s a verb form and a tense, used to talk about things that have already happened in the past. You can put yesterday in front of the simple past form of the verb. Asked Cried Made Forgot Went And then finally we have the verb form past participle. Past participle is the verb form you use to form both the present perfect tense, and the past perfect tense. You can place have or had in front of the past participle, depending on which tense you want to form.

Asked Cried Made Forgotten Gone There you go – leading forms of some common verbs. Let’s chant’em! Ask, asked, asked Cry, cried, cried Make, made, made Forget, forgot, forgotten Go, went, gone If you want, you may add more than three of the verb forms to each chant, before you practice.