Name: Learn English Tenses: Past Simple, Past Continuous, Past Perfect, or Present Perfect?
Uploaded: 2017-07-06T09:13:38.000Z
Duration: 12 min 52 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...

Future simple

I'm Rebecca from engVid, and this lesson is going to save you years of English mistakes.

In just a few minutes you'll find out what you know and don't know regarding

First, you can focus on what you don't know and improve those areas and improve quickly,

and second because the past tenses are among the most important tenses that we use in English.

And at the end of the lesson after you've done the exercise and you find out what you

might get wrong or right, I'll show you exactly how to improve, what you can do.

So, number one: "It rains all day yesterday."

So these are all sentences in the past tense.

There are four tenses we're covering: Past simple, past continuous, present perfect,

So, all of these sentences have some mistakes.

So, we're talking about yesterday so we know it's in the past, so what's wrong is here,

this verb is right now in the present simple.

So then this sentence should be in the past simple.

Number two: "Have you seen Maria last week?

When we say: "Have you seen", that's which tense?

But then we go on to say: "Have you seen Maria last week?"

That's a problem, because when we use the present perfect tense, we cannot use a finished

If you use a finished time, like last week, then you have to change this question and

For example: "Did you see Maria last week?"

And the other way, if we wanted to keep it present perfect-right?-we would say:

"Have you seen Maria this week?" for example.

Of course, that has a different meaning, but if you're going to use this tense then if

you have a timeframe you can only talk about time which is either still going on, like

this week, today, this month, this year, and so on.

So if you made a mistake here, remember to review present perfect.

There is a little mistake there, and it's here.

This should be: "Gary was studying"-right?-"when I arrived".

So, why do we need past continuous there?

Because the action of studying takes some time.

So he was studying, and studying, and studying, and then in the middle of this studying I arrived.

"Arrived" doesn't take time, so "arrived" can be in the past simple tense.

But Gary was studying, and studying, and studying, and studying, and I came in the middle of that.

So these are the kinds of things you have to know about these tenses in order to use

So, if you made a mistake here, remember to review past continuous.

Remember at the end of the lesson I'll tell you exactly how you can review these.

Next, number four: "When have you sent the email?"

So, the problem here, again, is that the tense that's used is present perfect.

But with present perfect we cannot use the word "when".

If you use the question word "when", then you need to change this entire question to

Because when I ask you that question you're going to tell me sometime in the past that's

So that's past simple, and not present perfect.

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