The ironic thing is a lot of foreigners who have been studying English for many years would be more likely to know this than vast majority of native English speakers.
Actually, not really. Language teaching is based on Latin so they learn 12 tenses when in reality, English has two tenses and four aspects. Latin languages have tenses, English doesn't. This video confuses the issue a bit.
Don't worry, most people that I know, who are good at English despite being non-native speakers (also including me) don't have a clue about these tenses
yyangcn Honestly, most of us don't have a single clue about our native tongue. I only recently founf out that Dutch, my mother tongue, places all verbs after the first one at the nd of a sentence. Which means it officially has a "SOV" sentence structure. and I've been speaking that way for as long as I know...
First learning spanish introduced me to the idea of tense, where learning the english equivalents of spanish conjugations was as interesting to me as learning the actual spanish.
post my comment here again. hey, Chinese doesn't use verb tense to express time. Coz time is a more environmental thing than people's activities. In Chinese, time adverb is more effective and economic than English to waste too many words/forms to express the time of every activity. English is more accurate than Chinese most of the time. But that doesn't mean English is a perfect language. And the most important thing is, time doesn't exist. So, English isn't a good language for the future of all humans on earth.
In Latin, “past perfect” is called the “pluperfect”. A combination of “plus” (more) and “perfectus” (completed). So the pluperfect tense is “more past” than the perfect tense. It makes a lot of sense when you think about it.
Stephen Darrenkamp ..Latin terms are used as a blanket description by language teachers and grammarians for all foreign languages even when it doesn't fit every language. Some languages have no tenses at all so using terms like pluperfect would not help you to understand Russian or Japanese. Where English teachers and grammarians really come unstuck is with English pronouns which notoriously don't fit into the Latin usage of nominative and accusative forms causing endless pointless discussions about whether you should say "It is I" or "It is me".
Anonymdeath ..German actually does have tenses. However, only two are used - present and present perfect - because German relies on adverbs to show aspect; "Ich habe es bis morgen gemacht" - lireally "I have done it until (by) tommorrow" - is perfectly acceptable in spoken German. This is the reason why children learn "signal words" as a matter of convenience to understand the aspects of English. It is also common in EFL teaching to use "signal words" to teach English as a foreign language, even though it is actually misleading and confuses a lot of learners.
I think we can all agree on this: If you went to school in America, you may* not be aware of all of this... And from what I've read in the comments, it's quite accurate. For some reason, native English speakers are not aware of all these tenses because we were just told, "This is the way it's always been, is, and will always be," but they don't even explain the tenses in that sentence too. And it's not just tenses that are vaguely exlained... how many of us actually retain lessons on perfect English GRAMMAR and PUNTUATION usuage? And a couple years ago, I would have been awed at this video too! The only reason why I'm not is because I have been learning Spanish at school for about 3 years now and little by little I started to become exposed to all the tenses. And it wasn't that I didn't know the tenses exist; I've used them for about 10 years now!! It's just that---this goes for most speakers whose first language is English---that I was not aware of the reason behind their usage. Gosh, I could keep talking about this really, because learning languages is such a fascinating thing to me. In addition to English and Spanish, I also speak French and Lingala** with my family, so whenever I have to explain to my relatives conjugation in English---or anything English, for that matter---it's a hot mess!! But it's still fun. 😂 And my last point is that they forgot two other tenses that is vaguely referred to: the "imperfect" and subjunctive tense. And the subjunctive has like 5 other subtenses from what I remember. English speakers be like "whaaaaaaa?!" 🤣🤣 *may, meaning didn't want to offend those of you who already knew **Bantu language native to The DR of Congo Thanks to those who read the whole thing!
Teddy Angelova Good point... but it depends on how you look at the subjunctive. Sure, it technically is not a "tense", but this video was all about the tenses in the indicative mood... so. Really, the same idea could be applied.
Yeah, I'm learning Korean... English was always my best subject in school, and I studied communication in college, but you're absolutely right, I'm nearly incapable of explaining English in any meaningful way to another person. Sure, I may understand a wide array of facets of the language, but my grasp of the most fundamental building blocks of the language are non-existent. I just "know" how it works. 😳
I think the main problem when it comes to discussing English’s verb tenses is that by saying we have 12 tenses, we’re implying they’re all unique and need to be individually learned. But, it’s just not how it works. We may have 12 individual tenses in total, but they overlap by pretty predictable patterns. Our tenses are created by putting together the verb’s tense itself (commonly in the form of a suffix) and helper verbs. “Have” or “has” implies that the action, in some form or another, was performed before this instance. Both “been” and “-ing” implies being in the middle of an action, etc etc. Yes, it adds up to 12 tenses, but you can learn all twelve by learning a few rules (and spending some time practicing). This is different from languages like Spanish, which has a multitude of unique tenses, the conjugations of which are each unique and need to be individually memorized. Helper verbs barely play a part in tenses in Spanish. So, despite Spanish having a similar amount of tenses to English, it’s much harder to get them memorized in languages like Spanish as compared to English.
As a foreign, I think difference Past Simple and Present Perfect, Action and non-action verbs are the things that you should've mentioned. Also we can use continues for future, and that's only that I could remember.
@simrankumari8763 Past, present and future are all tenses, grammatical ways to explain time. tense can also mean intense, like threatening or worrying. its a play on words, tense is refers to the past, present and future, and also describes the mood of an event
While English may have a variety of auxiliary verb tenses, it interestingly only has 2 truly conjugated tenses, past and present. Compare that to Spanish, which has present, preterite (past), imperfect (past), future, conditional, present subjunctive, and the imperfect subjunctive. Of course both languages have several other tenses formed with past/present participles and an auxiliary verb as well.
English has conjugated future tense for the to-be verb. I was (past) I am (present) I will (future) To express something to happen in the future, you use the future tense of the to-be verb. But yes, Spanish has a lot more verb tenses than English, which is really confusing as somebody who was trying to learn Spanish. I never quite understood subjunctive tense.
@@TheJohnnycreep English verb tenses are very confusing. So, depending on the context you could use either. The future conjugate of "to be" is "will", and you use will on its own whenever you have a neutral verb after it. "I will go to the store", "I will play at the park", "I will buy some candy", ect. If you do not have a neutral verb after will, then you say "will be", however this usually only works when you're talking about being present at some place. "I will be at the store". In certain instances, you can choose to either say "I will x", or you could say "I will be (verb)ing x", the meaning will be the same. "I will deliver a speech at the university", and "I will be delivering a speech at the university" hold the exact same meaning. The only reason somebody may choose to say the second sentence and not the first sentence is if they're trying to make themselves sound more verbose/formal, however both sentences mean the same thing,
@@flandrescarlet506 I will deliver is a future, and will be delivering is a future with a continuous. Where did you find "will" as a conjugation of to be? I don't think english tenses are confusing at all! :)
Well technically the future tense is just a special case of the present tense where “will” is an auxiliary verb followed by a bare infinitive verb. English only has the past and present tenses in that sense. The future tense is the present tense indicating the future.
I've never really understood the different tenses; however, this video has cleared up the questions I've had for the past four years of my life. Thank you so much for all the great videos you post, TED Ed!
post my comment here again. hey, Chinese doesn't use verb tense to express time. Coz time is a more environmental thing than people's activities. In Chinese, time adverb is more effective and economic than English to waste too many words/forms to express the time of every activity. English is more accurate than Chinese most of the time. But that doesn't mean English is a perfect language. And the most important thing is, time doesn't exist. So, English isn't a good language for the future of all humans on earth.
That part which mentions that there are auxiliary words also applies to all of those words like "have, will, was, are, have been, will be," and so on. So while English does essentially have those concepts, that's not actually grammatical tense (Also, most of those are aspect rather than tense, since it's referring to how the actions occurred in relation to time). Grammatical tense and aspect mean that the language has a different form of a verb to refer to that tense or aspect, like how French has "Je saute" - "I'm jumping," "Je sautais" - "I was jumping," and "Je sauterais" - "I will jump." Each is a different form of the same verb, but each means all of that tense and aspect information in just one word, and there are. French has, essentially, 20 different forms of each verb based on combinations of tense, aspect, and mood (a third category of verb modification which shows the speaker's attitude about the action). English, by contrast hasn't got nearly as many. It has three, four in the case of some irregulars. One for present: "jump," one for present participle: "jumping," one for past: "jumped." And the case for most irregulars: One for present: "see," one for present participle: "seeing," one for past: "saw," and one for past participle: "seen." There isn't even a future. You express future by putting the word "will" in front of your verb. The concepts are there, of course, just not baked into the grammar.
This video would be much more helpful (and accurate) if it could help viewers distinguish between sentences like "I ate" and "I have eaten." The narrator states that the "perfect aspect" (as used with the present tense in the second sentence) "describes actions that are finished." This is wrong and unhelpful. It is wrong because verbs can take both the perfect and progressive aspects, and therefore the "perfect" aspect does not imply completion. The verb in "We have been waiting for over an hour" takes the perfect aspect, but obviously represents an ongoing activity, not a "finished" one. It is unhelpful because it fails to distinguish the "present perfect" from the past. Isn't the past tense designed to "describe actions that are finished?" It is much more useful and correct to use the term "consequential aspect" rather than "perfect aspect," and to define its use correctly. The consequential aspect indicates "status-as-consequence," that is, it indicates that a particular action or state of being (whether in the past, present, or future tense), is the consequence of a previous action or state or being. For instance, the statement "I ate" makes a claim about a past event, but "I have eaten" makes a claim about my current state as a consequence of previous eating, thereby implying that I'm no longer hungry. Consider the statement "I have lost my keys." Notice that this is fundamentally distinct from the simple past "I lost my keys," precisely because the first sentence implies that my current status is a consequence of a past action (thereby implying that I no longer have my keys). The statement "I lost my keys yesterday, but found them today" is perfectly sensible, but "I have lost my keys yesterday, but found them today" is not.
Ok, but most strictly, English only has two grammatical tenses: past and present. Even if we talk about the future, we're using present tense forms of helper verbs (typically "will"). So if you say "I will be out of town tomorrow", you're talking about a future action with a statement technically in the present tense, so it requires an explicitly established temporal context to be understood as the being in future. This is why "I am going to the store" can mean either I'm going right now or I'm going later, unless I specify a time i.e. "I'm going to the store tomorrow/later/in a while, etc."
Future is not a "tense" but a "time" A tense is a bare infinitive case + a suffix (s/es for the present and ed for the past) Since there is no suffix for the future and it can only be formed with auxiliary verbs, it is considered a time and not a tense in grammar.
English doesn't have a future tense. Every structure used for the future can be used to describe the present, and vice versa. Some of you will be shaking your head right now (but this sentence has just used 'will' for a present prediction). And even English books recognise that 'I fly tomorrow' and 'I'm flying tomorrow' are perfectly fine, but they give them ridiculous names like 'Present continuous for future use'. Such a mouthful! Just accept the facts: You're going to feel better for it (and 'going to' is actually present continuous structure that we sometimes pretend is a tense in its own right). This isn't surprising since 'will'/'going to' etc are just words in their own right. They're not as strongly codified into a proper tense yet. This is what you get when you have linguists using terminology and concepts from Latin and applying it to every language, whether it fits nicely or not. Similar deal with the 'perfect aspect' here. Using 'have' doesn't mean finished per se, it means 'finished in reference to the time frame we're talking about'. And if you don't specify a time frame, it means 'in your whole life' as in, 'I have the experience of X'. Have you been to a boring English class? Yes, I have.
A "tense" is when a verb physically changes to show time. English only has two tenses- present (which only changes to add the "s" to the third person singular) and simple past (which is usually +ed give or take about 200 exceptions). All the rest is aspect. We do not have a future tense- to talk about the future we may use simple present (I leave for Warsaw tomorrow), present continuous (I'm leaving for my vacation next Monday), be going + infinitive [sic] (What are you going to do for your project next month?) and the modal "will" or (rarer) "shall" (She will be here in an hour.) When students learn this, it makes English so much easier! Then, rather than teaching them about the 14 or so "tenses" in English [sic], we can delve into the meaning behind the uses for the aspects of the verb (like this video attempts to do) and so we can talk about simple tenses as "FACT" and the continuous aspects as "TEMPORARY" and "TAKES TIME". We can look at the perfect aspects as "LOOKING BEFORE" (Present Perfect, looking before now; Past Perfect, looking before a past fact; Future Perfect, jumping to a future time and looking before that). A good reference for this information is Michael Lewis' book The English Verb.
Technically English only has 2 tenses: past and non-past. Future isn't technically a tense since an auxiliary verb is needed and there is no future tense morpheme in English. For example, in Spanish "estudiaré" which means "I will study"; Spanish, and some other languages actually have a future tense morpheme and they don't need an auxiliary verb (i.e. - will). And aspect is something different from tense since aspect shows the state of the action, not the time. Using the perfect for example, "She has gone" vs. "She had gone", it's the same aspect, showing that the action of going is relevant to the time of the utterance, but the tense is put on the auxiliary verb, not the main verb.
@@robenkhoury7079 yes. A lot more verbal tenses combined with more forms that represent the same aspect and tense. Spanish also has a complex verb conjugation system. Don't forget that it also has a subjunctive form
English has two verb tenses -- present and past. All other temporal ideas require auxiliary verbs. Even if we were to grant future and perfect in the tenses (they qualify in some languages) it only brings it up to 6. "Aspect" is a different idea and does not contribute to tenses any more than an infinitive does. It would arguably contribute to the number of verb forms. But it is independent of tense.
I think the future perfect is rarely used in speech as it seems awkward to use it. I'm a native speaker of English and not even myself seem to know how to use it right because I constantly replace it with simple future tense. In fact, this is not usually taught in schools; this is an advanced feature for writing. Also, the video didn't say anything about the subjunctive mood outside of "if one were" which I know how to use it only by reading online.
I'm still learning English and I can tell you future perfect is the most difficult for me, like you said it's not really used that much in movies/music where most of my vocabulary came from lol
Future simple tense is for if you know when you will do something at some specified time in the future. I *will make* dinner after writing this comment. Future perfect is for when you don't know/care *when* something will happen, but you know the deadline it *will have been done* by. I *will have eaten* my dinner by the time you read this. People probably use it more often than they think, but without thinking about it, and yeah, it's still not often. Combine a deadline and a duration and you get future perfect continuous, as in, when I finish writing this comment I *will have been writing* for, say a minute.
yeah, except that English itself uses auxiliaries instead of tenses in so many of your examples! it's not at all obvious that there is a true "future tense" in English - not in the same way there's a past. The past is conjugated in a verb (run, ran; go, went; walk, walked), but the future isn't, it's an auxiliary construction (going to / will run, gonna / will go, gonna / will walk). And, we often use the present tense to talk about the future. "I'm running in the marathon tomorrow" is a perfectly acceptable sentence, but that "I am running" there is the present continuous. "I run" is technically present simple, but it's really only used as the habitual. (In general, I run. I'm a runner). Your video totally glosses this over, accepts all the Latin-derived "English" grammar, and then says English works just like other Indo-European languages when it really doesn't... And then says other languages use auxiliaries instead of tense, when English does the same thing!!!!
Exactly. I’m amazed that they could get this so wrong. She claims that English has twelve tenses. No, it has two: past and present. And different ways to refer to the future (or ‘future time’). The rest is aspect, not tense. This video is pure disinformation, and it’s irresponsible for them to put it out there.
@@АнастасияЛаговская-у8о It doen't. It has past, present and a semi-tense future, but that is debatable. Everything else is expressed through aspects. For example, past perfect is the past tense, but the perfect aspect.
@@pragmatastic Agreed. One minor point, the two English tenses are better described as "past" and "not-past", not "present", as it is also used to speak about the future.
ethan Yeah, you’re right. ‘Non-past’ is indeed more accurate and useful, especially as, for instance, it is only through continuous/progressive aspect that the present can be present. With simple aspect, the present simple isn’t really about the present at all! And let’s not get started on the deictic issues with whether or not references to the future can ever be about the future or whether they are instead about the present. However, I teach, and talking about the non-past would just confuse everyone! I find the tense vs aspect separation to be useful in helping my language learners to understand, but I’m not going to push it too far, lol.
This video actually describes aspects rather than tenses. English only has two tenses: the Present and the Past. We use the Present tense with future markers such as 'will' and 'going to' to express the future. Sometimes, we simply use the Present tense to express the future, for example, the train leaves at seven o'clock tomorrow morning. ;-)
and English uses the simple present and present progressive together with an indicator to show future action: "The train leaves the station at 11"...a scheduled event. Or "I'm staying home this evening"...something the person intends to do.
If I remember correctly an aspect or mode does not make a new tense. English only has two tenses: Past and Present. All other "tenses" are modified versions of those; be it through aspect or mode.
I think a really important aspect of learning the grammar of another language is to understand how your own first language's grammar functions. so this is pretty handy since I'm currently covering l'imperfetto in italian
I learned more from this brief video than from four years of high school English classes. We are taught the politics of writing rather than the structure on which it is built.
I have always seen it like this: Simple + Past + Future = 3 Progressive doubles them: 6 Perfect or simple doubles again: 12 Then we have passive voice: 24 Some crazy stuff can come from this, like past perfect progressive in passive voice: "had been being played"
English, morphologically speaking, only has 2 tenses: past and non-past. Because in "I cried", "I cry" and "I will cry", the past tense form is the only one with a separate word. The future is made with two words, will and cry
I’m so confused 😐. This is why I stopped taking anymore English classes than I needed lmao Edit: makes me glad that I was born in an English-speaking country so I don’t ever have to go through whatever this video was 😂😂
English technically only has two tenses plus the gerund: 1) the present and 2) the simple past. All other forms require helping verbs (e.g. to have, to be, to go, will/shall) to specify aspect.
"English has only two morphological tenses: the present (or non-past), as in he goes, and the past (or preterite), as in he went. The non-past usually references the present, but sometimes references the future (as in the bus leaves tomorrow)." Grammatical Tense - Wikipedia
The answer seems obvious- past, present and.... there is no future tense. English uses modals (auxiliaries) to add time or other interpretations to the verb. There are also tense-like forms using the past participle of a verb plus ‘have’ to carry the time. Not mentioned in the video, English does not have a conditional tense. Conditional sentences use ‘if’ and several different syntaxes to establish a conditional clause. English has evolved from several historical languages that have been erratically merged ad hoc. (that’s an example right there)
Yeah, and the same can be said of all the Germanic languages: they contrast past with non-past. To correct you, the perfect (represented in English with a form of "have" + the past participle) was mentioned.
Isn't this exactly an aspect of a tense? My English studying friend told me once that 'to have' and 'to be' words as auxiliary verbs don't change tense as we are used to think. She said that according to grammar rules the word (break-broke-broken) has to change to be considered there's a separated tense and in the sense of it there's no future tenses in English because verbs stay the same, didn't make another form (Polish: łamię-złamałem-złamię). What about that?
Yet don't English regular copular/transitive/intransitive verbs only indicate two tenses, present and past? The other tenses are marked by modal or auxiliary verbs. Our university's prof used to be pretty insistent about incorrectly marked tenses so that's what I've been conditioned to.
On my CELTA course they said that there are just two tense, present and past. While it's useful to teach 12 tenses there are strictly speaking two tenses + aspects and future marker language is used to talk about the future.
If you consider progressive, perfect etc as "aspect" and as tense, the surprising truth is that English just has two different tenses: present and past. Using verb forms of these two you can build all the other 12 tenses.
I studied linguistics in college. Linguists say there are two because there are two inflected tenses. Normal people vary between three, which includes the future and is constructed using a modal verb and twelve because the don't know the difference between tense and aspect.
0:40 Perfect aspect. This confused me. The cup has been washed describes an act that is finished. But if I said "I have beem sailing for 3 months." wouldn't that generally be understood as "I am still sailing"?
The reason why most native english speakers don't learn this in schools, is because it is so simple. English conjugation is in no way as complex as French for example where the verbs in each of the tenses demand a different suffix. And to make matters harder, all verbs in english finish in "ing" and thus are all subject to the same conjugation pattern. French has 3 different types of Verbs each with their own set of suffixes and indeed...irregularities
Furthermore, Verbs in English only have 4 forms: simple, 3rd person, gerund and past (participle hardly counts as not all verbs have this form and it is never used in its own) The tangle of tenses described in the video is formed with only these forms and mixing with various auxiliaries.
Except, as you noted, some have 5 (take/takes/taking/taken/took), and also some have just 3 (hit/hits/hitting, put/puts/putting), some have just 2, at least among the auxiliaries (can/could, will/would), some have just 1 (must, ought), and one has 8 (is/am/are/was/were/be/being/been). But yeah, most have 4 distinct forms.
Sí, en español tenemos todos los simple, los compuestos más los diferentes modos, la forma de usted, las personas cambian mucho. Creo que es lo mas dificil para los extranjeros de aprender
If you trully want feedback here is the thing you wrote translated to english(im not a professional so it might not be 100% accurate): "That is because I love spanish! it is an easy language and makes sense. I have studied Spanish for almost 3 three in school and I can see the difference between english. Sorry for my grammatic(idk if this word exists in english but that last part is correct)." Translated to english it doesn't seem that bad but if you see it in spanish it has some important flaws. First, you start with "eso es por qué..." / "That is because..." if you want us to understand you first you must say what "that" means, for example you could say "¡He aprendido español porque (it is written "porque" instead of "por qué" in this context) me encanta el español!" or "I have learned spanish because I love spanish!" The next flaw is "Es una lengua fácil y tiene sentida" / "It is an easy language and makes sense" here you say "sentidA" which should be "sentidO" because even if a lot of words change because their gender "sentido" does not, "sentido" does exist, "sentida" doesn't exist. This one I don't know how it happened but "Yo he estudiado español por casi 3 tres en colegio y puedo ver la diferencia entre inglés" / "I have studied Spanish for almost 3 three in school and I can see the difference between english." you can see that you say "3" and "three" when i think you meant "3 años/meses" or "3 years/months". At the end of the sentence you do a very similar thing to what you did at the start, you say "puedo ver la diferencia entre inglés" "I can see the difference between english." both in English and in spanish you cannot compare only 1 thing, you must compare 2 or more things so it should be "puedo ver la diferencia entre español e inglés"("e" is same as "y" but if the next word (inglés) starts with "i" or "y" you must write "e" instead of "y"(just like in english you write "an" instead of "a" if the next word starts with a vowel)) / "I can see the difference between Spanish and English" Lastly "Perdón la horrible gramática mía." i don't think if that is entirely wrong but it sounds akward, it would feel more natural if you say instead "Perdón por mi horrible gramática" / "Sorry for my horrible grammatic" as you can see is almost the same in English.
Qiao hui Xu LOL, I bet every Spanish speaker is now shaking their heads at me tight now. Thanks for taking your time to reply to my comment. The only thing I don't agree with is that you translated por qué as because when really porque = because and por qué = why. Also, i was refering to the original comment when I wrote the first sentesce. Other than that, I'll edit the rest of the mistakes. It's a pain sometimes when you get something wrong, but---eh---I'll live. 😅😅
dani8906 Wow, thanks for taking the time to pick that apart! I know I learned something. But I need to point out that you wrote "bowel" instead of "vowel" which is… not unlike a potato with 47 anuses
Deborah Mutombo Don't you have a hard time telling all those tenses apart and learning them? (I'm a Spanish native speaker and I wouldn't be able to list all tenses) Especially for translations, isn't it difficult to translate into another language with fewer tenses?
In fact, in english there is not such a thing as the future tense, you can talk about the future using "will" but you never modify the verb itself, you say "walk, walking, walked" and that is when talking about present, past and a continuous action, but for talking about future you don't touch the verb but add a particle (will)
thanks Ted-Ed for making many things clarified in an intellectual simple 5 minutes video which i bet these 5 minutes had you weeks or so to build them. much appreciated.
We learned about German tenses in my German class as well... and I am German. This video confuses me, because I was under the impression that everybody learns the verb tenses of their mother tongue in elementary school... No offense to the native English speakers who didn't learn about them in school (after all, you can't control what your school system deems necessary to teach) It just seemed like something rudimentary.
Don't you study all this in your English classes? That's what people who study English as their second language do. At least where I live we study all the grammar of our native tongue; we approach them differently, but in the end, we just know all the grammar. That video is so basic, it feels like the next one may as well be about how to brush my teeth: not obvious, some do it wrong, but it's nothing life-changing, it's not "an idea worth spreading".
No, this is generally not taught to English native speakers unless they study a foreign language like French or Spanish. In that case this would be taught if French or Spanish class.
Well that’s kind of a silly question. I was talking to by dad (has spoken Spanish since birth, and I am taking Spanish as a 2nd language) about the different tenses, i.e. “can you help me with the imperfecto...” bla bla bla and he said how he just grew up speaking it but doesn’t know all the specific names, categories, and rules of each tense. For native English speakers, we just learn the language through context and listening, we don’t learn this sort of grammatical structure like tenses. Sure, we learn the basic grammar in school (verbs, adjectives, nouns, adverbs, yay!) but not usually stuff like this. This is why learning a second language is so important because it can actually help you with grammar in your first language and understand how languages work in general.
This hardly covers all the verb tenses. There is also voice, which describes whether you were the subject or the object (active vs passive); mood, which describes, for lack of a better term, the mood of a verb (indicative, conditional, imperative, interrogative and subjunctive (this one's a bit archaic, but still exists)); conditional mood (subset of mood really), describing how likely a verb is to happen (could, should, would and things of that sort); and probably dozens more which I've missed. The point is, verbs aren't simple, and there a lot more than 12 tenses.
The ironic thing is a lot of foreigners who have been studying English for many years would be more likely to know this than vast majority of native English speakers.
It comes naturally to native speakers, even if they don’t realise it, because they don’t need to think about it, the meanings come naturally
Actually, not really. Language teaching is based on Latin so they learn 12 tenses when in reality, English has two tenses and four aspects. Latin languages have tenses, English doesn't. This video confuses the issue a bit.
Don't worry, most people that I know, who are good at English despite being non-native speakers (also including me) don't have a clue about these tenses
@@plerpplerp5599 What?
yyangcn
Honestly, most of us don't have a single clue about our native tongue.
I only recently founf out that Dutch, my mother tongue, places all verbs after the first one at the nd of a sentence. Which means it officially has a "SOV" sentence structure.
and I've been speaking that way for as long as I know...
4 years of studying English grammar in school summed up in 4 minutes. :-))))
Thanks!
That's what I thought as well :D
Lol this is a great summary of something you have experience with. If this was a first time. Or a new language you'd be scratching your head
First learning spanish introduced me to the idea of tense, where learning the english equivalents of spanish conjugations was as interesting to me as learning the actual spanish.
12 tenses
Lucky you! You got English grammar. I didn't learn this stuff until I studied a foreign language.
"At first, the answer seems obvious: there's past, present and future.
bUt ThAnKs To SoMe ThInG cAlLeD gRaMaTiCaL aSpEcT"
hehehehehe
LMAO
hey michael from vsauce, english only has 3 verb tenses right?
WRONG
Everything changed when the Grammatical Aspect attacked....
....defined?
ahahahah
a "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" reference at 3:31 !
It's not brown.
I paid attention to that after seeing your comment
съешь еще этих мягких французских булок да выпей чаю
我在这里等你们回来吃饭没有，我在
OHHHH
If there’s anything I learned from this video, it’s that fish wear pants.
Bet you don't know your time doesn't exist at all. Smart baby!😂😂😂
Spongebob taught you that!
LOL, time doesn't exist, remember that whether you understand it or not.
post my comment here again.
hey, Chinese doesn't use verb tense to express time. Coz time is a more environmental thing than people's activities. In Chinese, time adverb is more effective and economic than English to waste too many words/forms to express the time of every activity. English is more accurate than Chinese most of the time. But that doesn't mean English is a perfect language. And the most important thing is, time doesn't exist. So, English isn't a good language for the future of all humans on earth.
Clearly its a murloc.
In Latin, “past perfect” is called the “pluperfect”. A combination of “plus” (more) and “perfectus” (completed). So the pluperfect tense is “more past” than the perfect tense. It makes a lot of sense when you think about it.
Stephen Darrenkamp Just like the german "Plusquamperfekt" that describes an action that happened before another action in the past
You can translate pluperfect using had verbed
Stephen Darrenkamp ..Latin terms are used as a blanket description by language teachers and grammarians for all foreign languages even when it doesn't fit every language. Some languages have no tenses at all so using terms like pluperfect would not help you to understand Russian or Japanese. Where English teachers and grammarians really come unstuck is with English pronouns which notoriously don't fit into the Latin usage of nominative and accusative forms causing endless pointless discussions about whether you should say "It is I" or "It is me".
Anonymdeath ..German actually does have tenses. However, only two are used - present and present perfect - because German relies on adverbs to show aspect; "Ich habe es bis morgen gemacht" - lireally "I have done it until (by) tommorrow" - is perfectly acceptable in spoken German. This is the reason why children learn "signal words" as a matter of convenience to understand the aspects of English. It is also common in EFL teaching to use "signal words" to teach English as a foreign language, even though it is actually misleading and confuses a lot of learners.
Mindblown!
I think we can all agree on this:
If you went to school in America, you may* not be aware of all of this... And from what I've read in the comments, it's quite accurate. For some reason, native English speakers are not aware of all these tenses because we were just told, "This is the way it's always been, is, and will always be," but they don't even explain the tenses in that sentence too. And it's not just tenses that are vaguely exlained... how many of us actually retain lessons on perfect English GRAMMAR and PUNTUATION usuage?
And a couple years ago, I would have been awed at this video too! The only reason why I'm not is because I have been learning Spanish at school for about 3 years now and little by little I started to become exposed to all the tenses. And it wasn't that I didn't know the tenses exist; I've used them for about 10 years now!! It's just that---this goes for most speakers whose first language is English---that I was not aware of the reason behind their usage.
Gosh, I could keep talking about this really, because learning languages is such a fascinating thing to me. In addition to English and Spanish, I also speak French and Lingala** with my family, so whenever I have to explain to my relatives conjugation in English---or anything English, for that matter---it's a hot mess!! But it's still fun. 😂
And my last point is that they forgot two other tenses that is vaguely referred to: the "imperfect" and subjunctive tense. And the subjunctive has like 5 other subtenses from what I remember. English speakers be like "whaaaaaaa?!" 🤣🤣
*may, meaning didn't want to offend those of you who already knew
**Bantu language native to The DR of Congo
Thanks to those who read the whole thing!
Deborah Mutombo i read the whole thing
There is a difference between tense and mood.
Teddy Angelova
Good point... but it depends on how you look at the subjunctive. Sure, it technically is not a "tense", but this video was all about the tenses in the indicative mood... so. Really, the same idea could be applied.
Yeah, I'm learning Korean... English was always my best subject in school, and I studied communication in college, but you're absolutely right, I'm nearly incapable of explaining English in any meaningful way to another person. Sure, I may understand a wide array of facets of the language, but my grasp of the most fundamental building blocks of the language are non-existent. I just "know" how it works. 😳
Luke Taylor
How does Korean compare to English?
I think the main problem when it comes to discussing English’s verb tenses is that by saying we have 12 tenses, we’re implying they’re all unique and need to be individually learned. But, it’s just not how it works. We may have 12 individual tenses in total, but they overlap by pretty predictable patterns. Our tenses are created by putting together the verb’s tense itself (commonly in the form of a suffix) and helper verbs. “Have” or “has” implies that the action, in some form or another, was performed before this instance. Both “been” and “-ing” implies being in the middle of an action, etc etc. Yes, it adds up to 12 tenses, but you can learn all twelve by learning a few rules (and spending some time practicing).
This is different from languages like Spanish, which has a multitude of unique tenses, the conjugations of which are each unique and need to be individually memorized. Helper verbs barely play a part in tenses in Spanish. So, despite Spanish having a similar amount of tenses to English, it’s much harder to get them memorized in languages like Spanish as compared to English.
As a foreign, I think difference Past Simple and Present Perfect, Action and non-action verbs are the things that you should've mentioned. Also we can use continues for future, and that's only that I could remember.
Well in English at least there are only some verbs who don't change in the tense.
*Cries in portuguese*
i feel your pain
não é só com voces nao nativos que isso acontece.
what
nós tambem temos dificuldade em saber qual tempo verbal usar
nós têm dificuldade também
This had me recalled all the struggles during English classes. It's just all freaking confusing without practical examples.
王昱博 Same :(
Languages are supposed to be natural and intuitive that’s why the examples are so important
@@luisandrade2254 true
That opening sentence was epic. The person who said it/wrote it down must be honored.
Will you please tell in brief what it means
@simrankumari8763 Past, present and future are all tenses, grammatical ways to explain time. tense can also mean intense, like threatening or worrying. its a play on words, tense is refers to the past, present and future, and also describes the mood of an event
This video opened up old wounds *cries in Dutch*
Those schools days when I understood not a bit of this 😖😖
What's that like? Is it just crying because of mary-jane smoke?
Noud Plasmans zeker als je er 3 dagen geleden een proefwerk over had
But look what you can do now, you can write a comment in English. **smile in arabic**
*laughs in Spanish
While English may have a variety of auxiliary verb tenses, it interestingly only has 2 truly conjugated tenses, past and present. Compare that to Spanish, which has present, preterite (past), imperfect (past), future, conditional, present subjunctive, and the imperfect subjunctive. Of course both languages have several other tenses formed with past/present participles and an auxiliary verb as well.
English has no future
English has conjugated future tense for the to-be verb.
I was (past)
I am (present)
I will (future)
To express something to happen in the future, you use the future tense of the to-be verb. But yes, Spanish has a lot more verb tenses than English, which is really confusing as somebody who was trying to learn Spanish. I never quite understood subjunctive tense.
@@flandrescarlet506 but shouldn't you say I will be? I never thought about will as a conjugation of the verb to be
@@TheJohnnycreep English verb tenses are very confusing. So, depending on the context you could use either. The future conjugate of "to be" is "will", and you use will on its own whenever you have a neutral verb after it. "I will go to the store", "I will play at the park", "I will buy some candy", ect. If you do not have a neutral verb after will, then you say "will be", however this usually only works when you're talking about being present at some place. "I will be at the store".
In certain instances, you can choose to either say "I will x", or you could say "I will be (verb)ing x", the meaning will be the same. "I will deliver a speech at the university", and "I will be delivering a speech at the university" hold the exact same meaning. The only reason somebody may choose to say the second sentence and not the first sentence is if they're trying to make themselves sound more verbose/formal, however both sentences mean the same thing,
@@flandrescarlet506 I will deliver is a future, and will be delivering is a future with a continuous. Where did you find "will" as a conjugation of to be? I don't think english tenses are confusing at all! :)
Welcome to freshman year of the highschool in Turkey.
And others countries as well.
U don't wanna learn English in Turkey trust me
.o. I’m so sorry
@@georgemwanza6339 why?
@@naimabaz6782 nobody speaks it
Well technically the future tense is just a special case of the present tense where “will” is an auxiliary verb followed by a bare infinitive verb. English only has the past and present tenses in that sense. The future tense is the present tense indicating the future.
0:24 & 4:09 reference to _Akira_
1:51 Terraria hurt sounds
3:26 The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
the video was filled with intensity
I found it a bit naggy. Like she was trying too hard to prove something of no consequence.
It got deep at the very end.
i was lost
Haha. Funny comment.
I've never really understood the different tenses; however, this video has cleared up the questions I've had for the past four years of my life. Thank you so much for all the great videos you post, TED Ed!
“Tense” instructions unclear - muscles stuck in static hold/pose.
post my comment here again.
hey, Chinese doesn't use verb tense to express time. Coz time is a more environmental thing than people's activities. In Chinese, time adverb is more effective and economic than English to waste too many words/forms to express the time of every activity. English is more accurate than Chinese most of the time. But that doesn't mean English is a perfect language. And the most important thing is, time doesn't exist. So, English isn't a good language for the future of all humans on earth.
Lmfao
Gplayer do you speak Chinese?
I do
@@loocie4636 Okay, I've seen the original commenter before a few times and you look almost EXACTLY like Justin y who I see almost EVERYWHERE!!!!
As a foreigner, what we've learned from english grammar based education is like that. When you say "How are you?", we can only say "I'm fine and you?"
Yes, more language videos!
That part which mentions that there are auxiliary words also applies to all of those words like "have, will, was, are, have been, will be," and so on. So while English does essentially have those concepts, that's not actually grammatical tense (Also, most of those are aspect rather than tense, since it's referring to how the actions occurred in relation to time). Grammatical tense and aspect mean that the language has a different form of a verb to refer to that tense or aspect, like how French has "Je saute" - "I'm jumping," "Je sautais" - "I was jumping," and "Je sauterais" - "I will jump." Each is a different form of the same verb, but each means all of that tense and aspect information in just one word, and there are. French has, essentially, 20 different forms of each verb based on combinations of tense, aspect, and mood (a third category of verb modification which shows the speaker's attitude about the action). English, by contrast hasn't got nearly as many. It has three, four in the case of some irregulars. One for present: "jump," one for present participle: "jumping," one for past: "jumped." And the case for most irregulars: One for present: "see," one for present participle: "seeing," one for past: "saw," and one for past participle: "seen." There isn't even a future. You express future by putting the word "will" in front of your verb. The concepts are there, of course, just not baked into the grammar.
This video would be much more helpful (and accurate) if it could help viewers distinguish between sentences like "I ate" and "I have eaten." The narrator states that the "perfect aspect" (as used with the present tense in the second sentence) "describes actions that are finished." This is wrong and unhelpful. It is wrong because verbs can take both the perfect and progressive aspects, and therefore the "perfect" aspect does not imply completion. The verb in "We have been waiting for over an hour" takes the perfect aspect, but obviously represents an ongoing activity, not a "finished" one. It is unhelpful because it fails to distinguish the "present perfect" from the past. Isn't the past tense designed to "describe actions that are finished?"
It is much more useful and correct to use the term "consequential aspect" rather than "perfect aspect," and to define its use correctly. The consequential aspect indicates "status-as-consequence," that is, it indicates that a particular action or state of being (whether in the past, present, or future tense), is the consequence of a previous action or state or being. For instance, the statement "I ate" makes a claim about a past event, but "I have eaten" makes a claim about my current state as a consequence of previous eating, thereby implying that I'm no longer hungry.
Consider the statement "I have lost my keys." Notice that this is fundamentally distinct from the simple past "I lost my keys," precisely because the first sentence implies that my current status is a consequence of a past action (thereby implying that I no longer have my keys). The statement "I lost my keys yesterday, but found them today" is perfectly sensible, but "I have lost my keys yesterday, but found them today" is not.
This makes a lot of sense, thanks!
Ok, but most strictly, English only has two grammatical tenses: past and present. Even if we talk about the future, we're using present tense forms of helper verbs (typically "will").
So if you say "I will be out of town tomorrow", you're talking about a future action with a statement technically in the present tense, so it requires an explicitly established temporal context to be understood as the being in future. This is why "I am going to the store" can mean either I'm going right now or I'm going later, unless I specify a time i.e. "I'm going to the store tomorrow/later/in a while, etc."
I am in the last year of engineering, I did my education up until now all in English but today I truly understood tenses. Thanks TED Ed
Future is not a "tense" but a "time" A tense is a bare infinitive case + a suffix (s/es for the present and ed for the past) Since there is no suffix for the future and it can only be formed with auxiliary verbs, it is considered a time and not a tense in grammar.
And i never learned anything in school. From TED-Ed i have learned so much new things. Thank you!
Nolian Alicka the fact that you can read and write tells me that you learned something.
Or Ted-ed ous refreshing what you learned. There's no way this video could actually teach you anything unless you already learned something.
many*
English doesn't have a future tense. Every structure used for the future can be used to describe the present, and vice versa. Some of you will be shaking your head right now (but this sentence has just used 'will' for a present prediction). And even English books recognise that 'I fly tomorrow' and 'I'm flying tomorrow' are perfectly fine, but they give them ridiculous names like 'Present continuous for future use'. Such a mouthful! Just accept the facts: You're going to feel better for it (and 'going to' is actually present continuous structure that we sometimes pretend is a tense in its own right).
This isn't surprising since 'will'/'going to' etc are just words in their own right. They're not as strongly codified into a proper tense yet. This is what you get when you have linguists using terminology and concepts from Latin and applying it to every language, whether it fits nicely or not.
Similar deal with the 'perfect aspect' here. Using 'have' doesn't mean finished per se, it means 'finished in reference to the time frame we're talking about'. And if you don't specify a time frame, it means 'in your whole life' as in, 'I have the experience of X'. Have you been to a boring English class? Yes, I have.
my life in 'simple aspect' :-
I cry :'(
A "tense" is when a verb physically changes to show time. English only has two tenses- present (which only changes to add the "s" to the third person singular) and simple past (which is usually +ed give or take about 200 exceptions). All the rest is aspect. We do not have a future tense- to talk about the future we may use simple present (I leave for Warsaw tomorrow), present continuous (I'm leaving for my vacation next Monday), be going + infinitive [sic] (What are you going to do for your project next month?) and the modal "will" or (rarer) "shall" (She will be here in an hour.)
When students learn this, it makes English so much easier! Then, rather than teaching them about the 14 or so "tenses" in English [sic], we can delve into the meaning behind the uses for the aspects of the verb (like this video attempts to do) and so we can talk about simple tenses as "FACT" and the continuous aspects as "TEMPORARY" and "TAKES TIME". We can look at the perfect aspects as "LOOKING BEFORE" (Present Perfect, looking before now; Past Perfect, looking before a past fact; Future Perfect, jumping to a future time and looking before that).
A good reference for this information is Michael Lewis' book The English Verb.
1:52 Terraria?
yup, i was looking for this comment
I was playing earlier and thought I left my game open and was being attacked
I was thinking the same thing!
You know it
Yessir
Technically English only has 2 tenses: past and non-past. Future isn't technically a tense since an auxiliary verb is needed and there is no future tense morpheme in English. For example, in Spanish "estudiaré" which means "I will study"; Spanish, and some other languages actually have a future tense morpheme and they don't need an auxiliary verb (i.e. - will). And aspect is something different from tense since aspect shows the state of the action, not the time. Using the perfect for example, "She has gone" vs. "She had gone", it's the same aspect, showing that the action of going is relevant to the time of the utterance, but the tense is put on the auxiliary verb, not the main verb.
*Laughs in spanish*
jajajaja
Why? Are there more tenses than there are in English?
Roben JAJAJAJAJA CLARO QUE SÍ AMIGO
@@robenkhoury7079 yes. A lot more verbal tenses combined with more forms that represent the same aspect and tense. Spanish also has a complex verb conjugation system. Don't forget that it also has a subjunctive form
@@robenkhoury7079 Spanish has 23 tenses
This brings back memories of studying ancient Greek with all its tenses and aspects. How I loved it ...
How i loved it...
I love English grammatical tense!
Thanks, TED-Ed!
zeryphex I hate it, especially Present perfect, past perfect, future perfect.
English has two verb tenses -- present and past. All other temporal ideas require auxiliary verbs. Even if we were to grant future and perfect in the tenses (they qualify in some languages) it only brings it up to 6. "Aspect" is a different idea and does not contribute to tenses any more than an infinitive does. It would arguably contribute to the number of verb forms. But it is independent of tense.
I think the future perfect is rarely used in speech as it seems awkward to use it. I'm a native speaker of English and not even myself seem to know how to use it right because I constantly replace it with simple future tense. In fact, this is not usually taught in schools; this is an advanced feature for writing. Also, the video didn't say anything about the subjunctive mood outside of "if one were" which I know how to use it only by reading online.
f
By this time next year, I bet you WILL HAVE CHANGED your mind. 😉
I'm still learning English and I can tell you future perfect is the most difficult for me, like you said it's not really used that much in movies/music where most of my vocabulary came from lol
I hope by the time you finish reading this comment, you *will have learned* one way to use future perfect.
Future simple tense is for if you know when you will do something at some specified time in the future. I *will make* dinner after writing this comment.
Future perfect is for when you don't know/care *when* something will happen, but you know the deadline it *will have been done* by. I *will have eaten* my dinner by the time you read this.
People probably use it more often than they think, but without thinking about it, and yeah, it's still not often.
Combine a deadline and a duration and you get future perfect continuous, as in, when I finish writing this comment I *will have been writing* for, say a minute.
yeah, except that English itself uses auxiliaries instead of tenses in so many of your examples!
it's not at all obvious that there is a true "future tense" in English - not in the same way there's a past. The past is conjugated in a verb (run, ran; go, went; walk, walked), but the future isn't, it's an auxiliary construction (going to / will run, gonna / will go, gonna / will walk).
And, we often use the present tense to talk about the future. "I'm running in the marathon tomorrow" is a perfectly acceptable sentence, but that "I am running" there is the present continuous. "I run" is technically present simple, but it's really only used as the habitual. (In general, I run. I'm a runner).
Your video totally glosses this over, accepts all the Latin-derived "English" grammar, and then says English works just like other Indo-European languages when it really doesn't... And then says other languages use auxiliaries instead of tense, when English does the same thing!!!!
Linguistically speaking aspects arent considered part of tense.
Exactly. I’m amazed that they could get this so wrong. She claims that English has twelve tenses. No, it has two: past and present. And different ways to refer to the future (or ‘future time’). The rest is aspect, not tense. This video is pure disinformation, and it’s irresponsible for them to put it out there.
In total English has 16 tenses
@@АнастасияЛаговская-у8о It doen't. It has past, present and a semi-tense future, but that is debatable. Everything else is expressed through aspects. For example, past perfect is the past tense, but the perfect aspect.
@@pragmatastic Agreed. One minor point, the two English tenses are better described as "past" and "not-past", not "present", as it is also used to speak about the future.
ethan Yeah, you’re right. ‘Non-past’ is indeed more accurate and useful, especially as, for instance, it is only through continuous/progressive aspect that the present can be present. With simple aspect, the present simple isn’t really about the present at all! And let’s not get started on the deictic issues with whether or not references to the future can ever be about the future or whether they are instead about the present. However, I teach, and talking about the non-past would just confuse everyone! I find the tense vs aspect separation to be useful in helping my language learners to understand, but I’m not going to push it too far, lol.
This video actually describes aspects rather than tenses. English only has two tenses: the Present and the Past. We use the Present tense with future markers such as 'will' and 'going to' to express the future. Sometimes, we simply use the Present tense to express the future, for example, the train leaves at seven o'clock tomorrow morning.
;-)
That ending statement is the plot for Arrival
and English uses the simple present and present progressive together with an indicator to show future action:
"The train leaves the station at 11"...a scheduled event.
Or "I'm staying home this evening"...something the person intends to do.
If I weren't such an enthusiast for learning languages and knew what was going on here I think I would be utterly confused by this video.
If I remember correctly an aspect or mode does not make a new tense. English only has two tenses: Past and Present. All other "tenses" are modified versions of those; be it through aspect or mode.
1:52 borrows soundbyte from terraria
I think a really important aspect of learning the grammar of another language is to understand how your own first language's grammar functions. so this is pretty handy since I'm currently covering l'imperfetto in italian
Their animation is awesome
I learned more from this brief video than from four years of high school English classes. We are taught the politics of writing rather than the structure on which it is built.
lets be honest, Ted ed has so many subscribers because of teachers
IM NOT SAYING THIS CHANNEL IS BAD, IT IS AMAZING!
I have always seen it like this:
Simple + Past + Future = 3
Progressive doubles them: 6
Perfect or simple doubles again: 12
Then we have passive voice: 24
Some crazy stuff can come from this, like past perfect progressive in passive voice: "had been being played"
Animation was really funny on this one, amazing job!
Sidenote: 1:52 Terraria's male pain grunt.
English, morphologically speaking, only has 2 tenses: past and non-past. Because in "I cried", "I cry" and "I will cry", the past tense form is the only one with a separate word. The future is made with two words, will and cry
1:56 We all live in a yellow submarine
Or are we living
thank you for the confusion XD
10/10 Video, 200% Learning speed compared to my class subject.
3:33, "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog"
I love our German word for past perfect "Plusquamperfect". Vietnamese is the same as Chinese, no verb tenses. It's great and easy.
I’m so confused 😐. This is why I stopped taking anymore English classes than I needed lmao
Edit: makes me glad that I was born in an English-speaking country so I don’t ever have to go through whatever this video was 😂😂
really TedEd couldn't think of something better
1:52 is that the terraria male character going "Oof"? xd
I love the Terraria damage sound at 1:51
English technically only has two tenses plus the gerund: 1) the present and 2) the simple past. All other forms require helping verbs (e.g. to have, to be, to go, will/shall) to specify aspect.
Why is the animation so amazing she's just talking about words?
Great work
1:52 Don't know how I spotted the terraria noise
same here
its just a stock noise
Anybody else noticed the sound your character does in Terraria when it gets hurt? 1:52 at the second weight lift.
0:01 Nice one unknown author.
I have to Tell I have Never Met such an Exceptional Team Of 15 Like This One ! *Salute Ted Ed*
Important for Latin especially.
every English teacher in the world will use that video, I guarentee it...
Good day beautiful people..
"English has only two morphological tenses: the present (or non-past), as in he goes, and the past (or preterite), as in he went. The non-past usually references the present, but sometimes references the future (as in the bus leaves tomorrow)." Grammatical Tense - Wikipedia
I have been studying English for, like, 12 years now, and this is one massive headache.
why do you have to use so many tenses
I'm a native English speaker and this video gives me a headache. I really don't know
bravo!
this is concise and very profound way to tell hard things about tenses the plenty of grammar books fail to explain.
Longest 4 mins of my life
thanks, you summed the entire tenses that I have found hard for years
1:52 is it what i think it is?
The answer seems obvious- past, present and.... there is no future tense. English uses modals (auxiliaries) to add time or other interpretations to the verb. There are also tense-like forms using the past participle of a verb plus ‘have’ to carry the time. Not mentioned in the video, English does not have a conditional tense. Conditional sentences use ‘if’ and several different syntaxes to establish a conditional clause.
English has evolved from several historical languages that have been erratically merged ad hoc. (that’s an example right there)
Yeah, and the same can be said of all the Germanic languages: they contrast past with non-past. To correct you, the perfect (represented in English with a form of "have" + the past participle) was mentioned.
Keith Gaughan
I missed it. I stopped paying attention early on. Oops
When will you upload a riddle??
Isn't this exactly an aspect of a tense? My English studying friend told me once that 'to have' and 'to be' words as auxiliary verbs don't change tense as we are used to think. She said that according to grammar rules the word (break-broke-broken) has to change to be considered there's a separated tense and in the sense of it there's no future tenses in English because verbs stay the same, didn't make another form (Polish: łamię-złamałem-złamię). What about that?
1:52 hold up, was that the hurt sound from terraria?
Yet don't English regular copular/transitive/intransitive verbs only indicate two tenses, present and past? The other tenses are marked by modal or auxiliary verbs. Our university's prof used to be pretty insistent about incorrectly marked tenses so that's what I've been conditioned to.
1:52 - I heard the terraria sound effect for being hurt
On my CELTA course they said that there are just two tense, present and past. While it's useful to teach 12 tenses there are strictly speaking two tenses + aspects and future marker language is used to talk about the future.
Buli & Tukang Besi? That's Malay/Indonesian words for 'bully' and 'blacksmith' 😅 *idk why these words are in the videos tbh*
They are also names of languages en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buli_language_(Indonesia) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tukang_Besi_language
ini gimana coba bahasa buli sama tukang besi? kaga pernah denger, tau aja ngga :'v
If you consider progressive, perfect etc as "aspect" and as tense, the surprising truth is that English just has two different tenses: present and past.
Using verb forms of these two you can build all the other 12 tenses.
0:55 The big guy 😁
I studied linguistics in college. Linguists say there are two because there are two inflected tenses. Normal people vary between three, which includes the future and is constructed using a modal verb and twelve because the don't know the difference between tense and aspect.
I feel like this is more complicated then math
I agree with you😭😭😭
0:40 Perfect aspect. This confused me.
The cup has been washed describes an act that is finished.
But if I said "I have beem sailing for 3 months." wouldn't that generally be understood as "I am still sailing"?
Reverse mermaid!
Truly a prize for a noble huntsman.
The reason why most native english speakers don't learn this in schools, is because it is so simple. English conjugation is in no way as complex as French for example where the verbs in each of the tenses demand a different suffix. And to make matters harder, all verbs in english finish in "ing" and thus are all subject to the same conjugation pattern. French has 3 different types of Verbs each with their own set of suffixes and indeed...irregularities
1:52 ayo bruh is that the terraria hurt sound effect
Furthermore, Verbs in English only have 4 forms: simple, 3rd person, gerund and past (participle hardly counts as not all verbs have this form and it is never used in its own) The tangle of tenses described in the video is formed with only these forms and mixing with various auxiliaries.
Except, as you noted, some have 5 (take/takes/taking/taken/took), and also some have just 3 (hit/hits/hitting, put/puts/putting), some have just 2, at least among the auxiliaries (can/could, will/would), some have just 1 (must, ought), and one has 8 (is/am/are/was/were/be/being/been). But yeah, most have 4 distinct forms.
¿12? En español podemos tener fácil 25 tiempos verbales, ¿no?
Sí, en español tenemos todos los simple, los compuestos más los diferentes modos, la forma de usted, las personas cambian mucho. Creo que es lo mas dificil para los extranjeros de aprender
If you trully want feedback here is the thing you wrote translated to english(im not a professional so it might not be 100% accurate):
"That is because I love spanish! it is an easy language and makes sense. I have studied Spanish for almost 3 three in school and I can see the difference between english. Sorry for my grammatic(idk if this word exists in english but that last part is correct)."
Translated to english it doesn't seem that bad but if you see it in spanish it has some important flaws.
First, you start with "eso es por qué..." / "That is because..." if you want us to understand you first you must say what "that" means, for example you could say "¡He aprendido español porque (it is written "porque" instead of "por qué" in this context) me encanta el español!" or "I have learned spanish because I love spanish!"
The next flaw is "Es una lengua fácil y tiene sentida" / "It is an easy language and makes sense" here you say "sentidA" which should be "sentidO" because even if a lot of words change because their gender "sentido" does not, "sentido" does exist, "sentida" doesn't exist.
This one I don't know how it happened but "Yo he estudiado español por casi 3 tres en colegio y puedo ver la diferencia entre inglés" / "I have studied Spanish for almost 3 three in school and I can see the difference between english." you can see that you say "3" and "three" when i think you meant "3 años/meses" or "3 years/months". At the end of the sentence you do a very similar thing to what you did at the start, you say "puedo ver la diferencia entre inglés" "I can see the difference between english." both in English and in spanish you cannot compare only 1 thing, you must compare 2 or more things so it should be "puedo ver la diferencia entre español e inglés"("e" is same as "y" but if the next word (inglés) starts with "i" or "y" you must write "e" instead of "y"(just like in english you write "an" instead of "a" if the next word starts with a vowel)) / "I can see the difference between Spanish and English"
Lastly "Perdón la horrible gramática mía." i don't think if that is entirely wrong but it sounds akward, it would feel more natural if you say instead "Perdón por mi horrible gramática" / "Sorry for my horrible grammatic" as you can see is almost the same in English.
Qiao hui Xu
LOL, I bet every Spanish speaker is now shaking their heads at me tight now. Thanks for taking your time to reply to my comment.
The only thing I don't agree with is that you translated por qué as because when really porque = because and por qué = why. Also, i was refering to the original comment when I wrote the first sentesce. Other than that, I'll edit the rest of the mistakes. It's a pain sometimes when you get something wrong, but---eh---I'll live. 😅😅
dani8906 Wow, thanks for taking the time to pick that apart! I know I learned something. But I need to point out that you wrote "bowel" instead of "vowel" which is… not unlike a potato with 47 anuses
Deborah Mutombo
Don't you have a hard time telling all those tenses apart and learning them? (I'm a Spanish native speaker and I wouldn't be able to list all tenses) Especially for translations, isn't it difficult to translate into another language with fewer tenses?
In fact, in english there is not such a thing as the future tense, you can talk about the future using "will" but you never modify the verb itself, you say "walk, walking, walked" and that is when talking about present, past and a continuous action, but for talking about future you don't touch the verb but add a particle (will)
Well, but first we're gonna have to talk about parallel universes
thanks Ted-Ed for making many things clarified in an intellectual simple 5 minutes video which i bet these 5 minutes had you weeks or so to build them.
much appreciated.
Y’all English people don’t know this?
Why do we learn it in school if it has to be explained in English to English people...
Andor_Yoko because you are not native speaker. English language doesn't occur to you naturally.
f
We learned about German tenses in my German class as well... and I am German. This video confuses me, because I was under the impression that everybody learns the verb tenses of their mother tongue in elementary school...
No offense to the native English speakers who didn't learn about them in school (after all, you can't control what your school system deems necessary to teach)
It just seemed like something rudimentary.
This will be useful for people who are taking up English as their second language in schools. Like me :)
Honestly, we know how to use it without really being able to distinguish between the various tenses.
Only ted-ed video where I knew more than the video!
Don't you study all this in your English classes? That's what people who study English as their second language do. At least where I live we study all the grammar of our native tongue; we approach them differently, but in the end, we just know all the grammar.
That video is so basic, it feels like the next one may as well be about how to brush my teeth: not obvious, some do it wrong, but it's nothing life-changing, it's not "an idea worth spreading".
No, this is generally not taught to English native speakers unless they study a foreign language like French or Spanish. In that case this would be taught if French or Spanish class.
Well that’s kind of a silly question. I was talking to by dad (has spoken Spanish since birth, and I am taking Spanish as a 2nd language) about the different tenses, i.e. “can you help me with the imperfecto...” bla bla bla and he said how he just grew up speaking it but doesn’t know all the specific names, categories, and rules of each tense.
For native English speakers, we just learn the language through context and listening, we don’t learn this sort of grammatical structure like tenses. Sure, we learn the basic grammar in school (verbs, adjectives, nouns, adverbs, yay!) but not usually stuff like this. This is why learning a second language is so important because it can actually help you with grammar in your first language and understand how languages work in general.
English speakers don't study this. 'Cuz logic.
Unpleasant need to disparage.
This hardly covers all the verb tenses. There is also voice, which describes whether you were the subject or the object (active vs passive); mood, which describes, for lack of a better term, the mood of a verb (indicative, conditional, imperative, interrogative and subjunctive (this one's a bit archaic, but still exists)); conditional mood (subset of mood really), describing how likely a verb is to happen (could, should, would and things of that sort); and probably dozens more which I've missed. The point is, verbs aren't simple, and there a lot more than 12 tenses.