The video will give you an overview of all the tenses, when they are used and which tenses are the most important ones to master. You can also download the list of tenses with an example and a description for each one. 

Transcript: 

Let's start at the beginning, and what are the tenses that you need to know in English? Let's have a look. You have to know that English has 12 tenses in total, and we are now going to have a look at each of those tenses, starting with the present tenses. Now, you'll probably recognize most of these. We have the present simple, which is "I do", "he goes", "we don't think", the one that you learn first. Then we have present continuous: "I'm doing", "we're going", "he's not thinking", and then, yes, the present perfect is actually a present tense in English. This is confusing because in French, you use this as a past tense, but you will see why when we look at the present perfect, why it's actually a present tense. "I have done", "we have eaten", "he's never been", and then continuing from the present perfect is a present perfect continuous, so you can see there's a pattern here. You've got simple, and then you've got continuous, and the continuous is always made with some form of the verb to be.

Now let's go to the past tenses. The basic, the simple past, which is also known as the preterite, but I'm going to call it the past simple, is using the second form of the verb in that famous verb list. For example, "I did", "he didn't go", "we thought". Then we have the past continuous, and again you're using the past form of the verb to be: "I was doing", "he wasn't going", "we weren't thinking". Then we have the past perfect, which in a way is the past of the past: "I had eaten before I got there", and the past perfect continuous.

Then it's on to the future tenses. We don't have an actual future tense in English. There are different ways to talk about the future, but the easiest one is using "will". For example, "I will do". Then we have the continuous again, using the verb to be: "I will be doing". The future perfect, which is looking at the past from the future: "In five years' time, I will have finished this course", hopefully before then. And then the future perfect continuous: "I will be drinking a glass of wine at seven o'clock tonight", for example.

So those are all the future tenses. Now, in this course, we're going to concentrate on some key tenses, and here you will find a list of the 12 different forms in English and a list in order of how many times they are used. This was research taken from academic writing. Academic writing is more formal than just general conversation, even business conversation, but even here, you can see the results.

The present simple and the past simple are overwhelmingly used more than the other tenses. So we're going to concentrate in this program on the top tenses: the simple tenses, present simple, past simple, and the top five, including in that we'll have present perfect, future simple, and present progressive because these are the tenses that you need to know to communicate really well in English.

I will give you a brief overview in your worksheets of the rest of the tenses, but these are not tenses that we use a lot, especially in speaking, and I can show you that. This is some research done on using the past and present progressive, which is the continuous, as compared to the perfect and the simple. So you've got present simple, present perfect, present continuous, past simple, past perfect, past continuous, and you can see that in conversation overwhelmingly, we are using the simple aspect, so we are using present simple and past simple way more than the other tenses.

Downloads

• English tense overview.pdf