The First Basic Concept

On the last lesson we started learning about a very important factor:

The Trick to Understanding
English Verb Tenses

So… What’s the trick?

As mentioned on the previous lesson, English verb tenses can be made very complicated, but they really don’t have to be.

You just need to understand 2 basic things. These 2 key things can make your life a lot easier…

On this lesson we will discuss them in detail.

So what are these 2 things?

Here goes:

Time + Aspect

Every verb in the English language gives us information about two important factors:

1) Time

2) Aspect

Time

Now, understanding time is easy, right? When does it happen?

An hour ago? Yesterday? Tomorrow? Right now? This week? By 2054?

What is the time of the action?

In English we basically have 3 possibilities:

The past, the present and the future.

Each of the following sentences shows different time:

“I ate an apple yesterday.” (Time = past)

“You eat apples.” (Time = present)

“She will eat an apple.” (Time = future)

Watch the following video (you can change it to full screen):

So we discussed “time,” but what is an aspect?