What are past participles?

In every language people are able to express present (now), past and future. They do this using verbs. Verbs are words like 'go', 'do', 'feel', etc. that describe an action or a state. Look at the following sentences:

* I study English.

* I studied English.

Those two sentences are very similar but one of them is in present (the first one), and the other one is in the past. How do you know that? By the form of the verb.

study- is the present form of a verb
studied- is the past form of a verb

So verbs describe grammatical 'time'. We call this grammatical 'time' a tense. By now, you should know the present simple tense, or the past continuous tense or maybe the future tense. In every one of those tenses the verb looks a little bit different (e.g. present simple- study/studies, present continuous- is/are studying, future tense- will study).

So what is the past participle?

It is a form of a verb that you need to create the present perfect tense. Sometimes it is called V3 (verb 3 because it's the third form of a verb in a list of irregular verbs that you have to memorise).

Do you recognise this?

Yes, the list that you have to learn by heart! Past participle is the last form of the verb on that list.

Be careful though because the list is only for irregular verbs. If the verb is regular, e.g. love, talk, study, listen, etc., we create past participles by adding -ed, just like in the case of the past simple tense. So the verbs above will have the following past pariciples: loved, talked, studied, listened.

So to help you practise your past participles, I've prepared some flashcards. Look at the word and say its past participle to yourself, then click on it and the card will turn showing the correct form. If you get it right, click 'thumbs up' and the word will not repeat. If you get it wrong, click 'thumbs down' and the word will apprear again for you to try. There are 62 words in total!


Flash Card Deck created by mariolahejduk with GoConqr

Just in case you wanted to see more irregular verbs in groups (and there are about 200 of them in normal use!) please  go here.