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About verb tenses
1 What happens, what happened and what will happen
At this moment, you are doing something, something is happening near you, and things are happening all over the Earth. But much has already happened. It is in the past. Of course, many things will also happen in the future that we don’t yet know about. In our language, there are many forms for expressing the time when something is happening, happened or will happen. First, read this text:
2 Present tense (present)
Anything someone is doing right now, or anything happening right now, takes place in the present. This tense is called the present tense. Here are some examples:
3 Perfect tense
When something has just ended or happened recently, we use the present perfect tense. This tense is also called the perfect tense. It uses the personal forms of the verbs “have” or “be”. Here are some more examples:
4 Past Tenses (Simple Past)
We sometimes add short verbs to many other verbs to say more precisely what we mean. We call these other verbs auxiliary verbs. They are the words “have,” “be” and “will.” For example, we say, “I have eaten.” This tells us that the eating took place in the past. If we say, “I will eat something soon,” the action is still in the future. Here are two exercises:
5 Future tense
Some things don’t happen now, but later in the day. They may even happen tomorrow, the day after, or sometime in the future. When we talk about this, we use the future tense, also called the simple future.