Basic tenses in English

The question that I am very often asked by my students is, 'How many tenses are there in English?' They usually ask this question because they've heard that there are so many of them and it simply scares them that there is so much grammar to learn before they can be confident speakers.

In this post, I'm going to tackle the issue and hopefully make learning tenses less scary. But let's start with the basics. Have a look at the picture below: 

This is a visual representation of what we can do in every language in the world: express present, past and future. This is called a language property and it gives us a unique opportunity not only to talk about what's happening now, but also recall past events and even talk about things that haven't happened yet (animals can communicate too, but they are not able to 'talk' about anything other than now). 

In order to be able to express past, present and future, we need tenses. Tense is a grammatical time. By now, at Entry 3, you would have heard names like Present Simple, Past Continuous, Future Simple, etc. They all are tenses and they all describe different 'times' in grammar. 

So, how many tenses are there? Grammarians still argue about this because they can't reach a consensus of what a tense exactly is, but if you really need to know the number, it's (lucky :))13. 

It seems a lot, but don't worry, there is a logic in them and they tend to repeat themselves in different 'times', e.g. there is Present Continuous and Past Continuous; Present Simple and Past Simple; Present Perfect and Past Perfect. And if you know one in the pair of tenses, you'll learn the other one quickly because they are very similar. For example, 'I am writing' is Present Continuous; 'I was writing' is Past Continuous. The only difference is 'am' and 'was'- so the verb 'to be'. The -ing form stays the same in both tenses. So if you know that for Present Continuous you need 'to be' + verb + -ing', the formula is the same for Past Continuous too, but the verb 'to be' has to be in the past. 

What's more, some of the tenses are rather rare so you might not even come across them very often in every day speech. An example of such tense is Past Perfect, a tense that expresses very distant or more distant past. For example, you can say: 'I had spoken to my friend before I spoke with my mother'. In this sentence, the first part is in more distant past hence Past Perfect (had spoken). The second part  (spoke) in 'closer' past hence Past Simple. But speakers of English like to simplify things, so instead of using Past Perfect, they just say: 'First, I spoke to my friend, then I spoke with my mother', using Past Simple in both parts of the sentence instead.

OK, so if you don't need all the tenses to be a good user of English, how many do you actually need? Below is a mind map that shows the basic tenses in English. There are only 8 tenses. At your level, you should have seen them all by now: 

Mind Map created by mariolahejduk with GoConqr

So there they are- the most important tenses in English and the 'time' they express. Don't worry if you don't know them yet or if you don't quite know when to use them. But that's a topic for another post...