English grammar is something you can study your entire life and you would still not know or understand everything at the end of it. You can get by with basic knowledge of English grammar to communicate what you want to say. This is what Masami and I do in our lessons; help Japanese people communicate in English. Using perfect English grammar doesn’t mean that you are expressing what you truly want to say nor that the listener will understand you anyway!
When I hear the word grammar, I think it’s a difficult, intellectual, huge subject. In reality, grammar is just the structure and rules of any language. Knowledge of it grows a little at a time to get to your next level of communication.
How Many Verb Tenses!?
Verb tenses are used to identify the time period when an action occurred. Question, how many verb tenses are there in English? Three? Twelve? Sixteen? As an English language student, you may know. For native English speakers, unless they have studied English or another language, they probably don’t know all of them by name.
The simple answer is, there are three main verb tenses: Past, Present, Future. Knowing these tenses, you can give context to what you want to say. Three verb tenses, simple.
Within these three main verb tenses are four aspects: Simple. Continuous. Perfect. Perfect continuous. These combine with the three main verb tenses; past simple, past continuous, past perfect, past perfect continuous, present simple, etc.
Four aspects for each main verb tenses (4×3) make twelve verb tenses. With these verb tenses, you can talk about an action with a time period so the listener knows if it’s in the past, present, future or, a combination of these time periods. Twelve verb tenses give a better understanding of when something happened, is happening or, will be happening. Better.
A few English schools include conditional verb tenses; phrases that include; would, would be, would have, would have been. If you include these, that’s sixteen verb tenses. There are debates between language experts on how many verb tenses there are, which are different to three, twelve or sixteen. As I wrote earlier, you can study English grammar all your life and still not know or understand it, the experts can’t agree!
Three Simple. Twelve Detailed.
Depending on your level of English, there are three or twelve verb tenses to help you communicate what you want to say. Before I learnt how to teach English, I would have said without thinking there are three verb tenses. Now, I would say twelve, although, if I look into it more, I could change again, so I won’t!
【あなたの心が伝わるあなただけの英語】
英語でのコミュニケーションを、あなたらしい英語で。
一人一人のレベル、能力、興味に合った教材や方法での英語レッスンプログラムを
オンラインで学べます。
”あなたの英語”でコミュニケートしたい方は、まずは無料カウンセリングをご予約ください。
