how to use the present simple tense to talk about the past.

Are you ready?

Now, this lesson was inspired by another

video I did for you in which I taught you how to use the past to talk about

the future. If you want to watch that video, click up there.

But today, we're going to look at how to use the present tense,

the present simple tense, to talk about the past.

Now, this is quite a strange concept using the present simple to talk about things

that happened and we only use it in certain situations.

So I'm going to give you these four

different situations that we use the present tense to talk about the past

and give you a few examples so that you can see it in action.

And the first one is related to football.

And when you're watching football

on television in English, or if you're listening to football

on the radio in English, the commentator, the person who is describing what is

happening uses the present simple to talk about things that have just happened.

So the commentator doesn't say things like

Henderson passed it to Salah, Salah shot and Salah scored,

even though when he's speaking, these things happened in the past.

Nope.

Instead, he says, Henderson passes it to Salah, Salah shoots

and scores... Where each action is in the present simple tense.

The second situation where you will see the present tense being used to talk about

the past is in newspaper headlines or not necessarily newspapers,

but if you read the news on the Internet, the headline,

which is the title of the news article, this uses the present tense to describe

something that has already happened in the past.

So, for example: Man saves cat in tree.

Lion escapes from London Zoo.

Politician lies about money.

These are all stories of things that happened in the past.

But because it's a newspaper headline, they use the present simple.

The next scenario is with anecdotes,

an anecdote is just a funny story, something that really happened to you

in your life, which is funny, and you tell your friends about it, an anecdote.

And often when we're telling an anecdote

to somebody, we use the present simple tense,

even though it happened in the past. For example...

So I walk all the way to his house and knock on the door and guess what?

He's not there.

And then a minute later, someone taps me on the shoulder and it's him.

Look at all the verbs in that story.

They're all in the present simple tense,

even though this story clearly happened in the past,

simply because it's an anecdote and it's a funny story that I'm telling to a friend.

Now, a really, really interesting alternative of this...

I don't recommend you speak like this...

I don't speak like this but

I know people who do.

This is what happens.

They use the third person singular when they're talking about "I".

So instead of I go, they say "I goes", yep, it's crazy.

I'm not sure if it's a regional thing,

it's definitely not formal,

every English student learns that it's not "I goes", it's "I go".

Yet some native speakers, when they're telling an anecdote use "I goes".

So I goes all the way to his house, I knocks on his door

and guess what, he's not there. Crazy.

But hey, don't be surprised if sometimes

you hear native speakers saying: I goes, I walks,

I takes. OK, another situation where we use the present

simple to talk about the past is with jokes, and we love telling jokes.

We do. There are many types of jokes and

some of these types of jokes always begin the same way.

Like, for example: A man walks into a bar...

That is a very common way of starting a joke.

A man walks into the bar... And not just

in that type of joke, but in most types of joke you will use the present

simple, even though we're talking about a story,

an imaginary story that happened in the past.

A horse walks into a bar,

takes off his coat, orders a beer, and the barman says, Why the long face?

So now you know how to use the present to talk about the past,

I really want to teach you how to use the past to talk about the future.

So join me in that lesson and I will teach you all about that there.

And if you want to learn more English tenses, click down there.

Thanks for watching. And bye for now!