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.

Past Perfect

What a discussion we had about Past Perfect yesterday! I'm happy to see that you are so inquisitive and try to go deeper into understanding this grammar point. So the most important thing for you is to recognise it and understand why it is used.

So to recognise it you need to know that we form it by using had and past participle. 

E.g. When I arrived Ann had just left. 

You also need to know that we use Past Perfect to:

• to show that one action happened before another action in the past: I did not have any money because I had lost my wallet.
• to show that something started and continued for a period of time in the past up until another action in the past: I had already studied for two years at university by the time I was 20. 

On the other had, you need to keep it in perspective. Past Perfect is quite a low frequency tense and so be careful not to overuse it. In every day speech, when you recall events in a chronological order you just use Past Simple: 

I switched on the TV and I went to the kitchen to have something to eat. 

rather than

I had switched on the TV and  I went to the kitchen to have something to eat. (Although this sentence is correct, there is no need to use Past Perfect in the first part of it.)


For further practice with how to create it watch the video and do the following exercises.


6 exercises (practice with the use of Past Perfect)

Exercises to practise the form of Past Perfect