Tenses and Aspects - start here to learn about tenses and aspects.

Hello and welcome to this section on tenses and aspects.

This is a part of the English language that can often cause confusion for learners and really for several different independent reasons.

And we’ll quickly touch on those now.

For instance, how many tenses are there?

Well really there are only three: past, present and future.

But then we have things called aspects and there are four aspects, namely simple, perfect, continuous and perfect continuous.

And when we apply each of these four aspects to each of the three tenses, we end up with 12 combinations which we also call tenses although they’re not really tenses.

There are tense aspect combinations but we call them tenses because we really don’t have a better word for it.

So that’s one of the causes of confusion and one of the other common causes of confusion is that many other languages and possibly even your mother tongue do not have that equivalent of the continuous aspect.

So what we do is we combine one of the three tenses with one of the four aspects.

So we have say the past tense with the continuous aspect and call it past continuous and we have 12 of these in total and there’s a lesson on each one in this section and what we’ve done is we’ve looked at when you would use this particular tense, we will look at how you would form the tense (they are very regular in their formation) but we don’t just look at one; we look at how you add former in a positive sentence, in a negative sentence, as a question and also as a negatively formed question and then for each of these areas of use and how we use the tenses in different situations, we have lots of examples so you can really see what we mean by this.

The last lesson in this section is to do with reported speech and it’s been put here in this tenses and aspect section really because of the way in which we form reported speech.

So-called backtracking or back stepping the tenses.

So it kind of fits in here quite nicely.