Table of English tenses

I don't know about you but I had always problems with tenses of English verbs, maybe because I've learned English by myself rather than in school. Anyway, English grammar is not impossible to learn if you find a pattern that is easy to follow and remember. Below I have compiled a table of English tenses.

In English we have only three main tenses along the time axis:

• past

• present

• future

Each of these main tenses is divided in four other subdivisions:

• simple

• continuous

• perfect

• perfect continuous

The resulted English tenses is just a Cartesian product of these two sets:

When to use what? - that's somewhat obvious:

• past for events started and finished in the past or that are no longer true at the moment of speaking

• present for events that happen at the moment of speaking or that are scheduled to happen in the near future

• future for events that will happen in the future

How are these tenses constructed? Can we find and use a pattern? Yes, we can:

	Past	Present	Future
Simple	verb+ed	verb+s/es*	will+verb
Continuous	was/were+verb-ptp	am/is/are+verb-pp	will+be+verb
Perfect	had+verb-ptp	has/have+verb-ptp	will+have+verb-ptp
Perfect continuous	had+been+verb-pp	has/have+been+verb-pp	will+have+been+verb-pp

where:

• verb is the verb at infinitive form

• verb-ptp is the past participle of the verb

• verb-pp is the present participle of the verb

• * applies only when used in third person

In addition to the above links

, one good online resource that I treasure a lot is Seonaid's website called "Perfect English Grammar". Seonaid is a British native speaker of English. She has a Master's degree (M Phil) from Cambridge University in English and Linguistics.

Have fun!