Name: SIMPLE PAST or PRESENT PERFECT? When + how to use them!
Uploaded: 2025-06-19T18:10:50.000Z
Duration: 20 min 28 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Speaking of complicated, Mr. E wants us to do a lesson on the simple past or the present perfect.

I know for many of you students, it's very difficult because they both seem to be talking about the past.

Today is your lucky day because I'm going to give you three simple things you can work on that will help you to know when you should use the simple past and the present perfect.

And why I'm going to give you that is because you're going to look here and say, oh my gosh, this looks harder than I know.

But really, this is how your brain is working and I'm going to simplify it for you.

You've got the confusion, I'm going to make it simple.

So, why don't we go start at the beginning?

First thing we want to look at is the simple past.

So, we've got I, she, he, it, you, we, and they.

When we do the simple past, we just take the verb and we put it in its past tense.

Now, I'm only going to do regular verbs for this particular class.

I'm not going to go into the irregular verbs like the verb to be.

It's complicated, so let's keep it simple, shall we?

Now, what you get is the verb and it's in the past tense.

All of this, I worked, would be this one, would be...

If I use this as an example, I worked, she worked, it worked, we worked, they worked.

So, this is one of the first things we want to pay attention to.

When we do the present perfect, it's interesting because the perfect might...

You might say perfect stands for participle, because really we get I have, and for simplicity, I'm going to put this, PP, and this is participle.

And then we have she, and this is the first difference we can see here, she, it has, and that's because they are taking in the present.

This stays in the present while the second one takes on the past participle, so it's a past form of the word.

That still doesn't help us tell me, well, when should I use them?

I know, we're getting there, but we have to understand how these things look before we can know what they do.

So, not just writing it, but you can understand it when you read it yourself.

Then I'm going to put some examples up here for you.

So, if we're looking here, and I have the past, okay, well, let me just make a correction here.

Because first we want to look at a verb, and we're going to put a verb here, and then we're going to look at what would that verb be like in the past, and what would that be like in the present, and I'm shortening this for space, perfect.

But if we do present perfect, I have to say have or has worked.

Some of you just finally figured that out.

But when we go here, now pardon me, I'm going to go off-screen for a second, and we can see how it changes.

It seems similar to the actual verb itself, but we have the present tense and the past participle.

Because it's not the same as the past word.

So, has gone, have gone, has worked, have worked, simple past, worked, and that's the present perfect.

So, that's using two examples showing how they will change if we use them.

Now, how, this is the question, do I use it?

Or how do I know what it means when I see it?

So, the first thing I want to show you is time frame.

When we talk about time frame, what we're trying to say is we want to understand when this is happening.

If you notice, I have here, I have simple past.

The reason why I have that is because it is a...

So, simple past is a specific point in time, and that's what this is.

S, P, you go right here, it's like right here, right now, at this point.

Words we use to show this time frame are things like yesterday.

Yesterday is a specific time in history, right?

That's a time reference, so you might go, well, time frame, well, what about for present perfect?

We're looking here, and we look at the present perfect.

But it doesn't connect, it stops before we get there.

So when we look at it, it goes, okay, it's happened some time back here.

It's not connected directly here, but we're talking now.

And we use things to say, like, this, in my life is the time frame.

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SIMPLE PAST or PRESENT PERFECT? When + how to use them!

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