Learn English grammar: tenses, modes and verbs
To learn to conjugate verbs in English, you must follow a basic rule: you will have to learn to analyze the way in which we conjugate verbs in Spanish to understand how they also work in English. After all, the reasoning of the times is very similar.
In Spanish we use the present, past and future indicative, in addition to having a subjunctive mood. In English, on many occasions we differentiate the use of one or the other depending on whether the action is finished or not and whether it has consequences in the present or not.
On the other hand, the timing is also different.
In English two auxiliaries are used, the verb to be ( to be ) and the verb to have / have ( have ).
Yo soy
you are
He / She / It is
We are
you are
They are
I have
You have
He / She / It has
We have
You have
They have
In the past, we used them as follows: Learn English grammar: tenses, modes and verbs
I was
You were
He / She / It was
We were
You were
They were
I had
You had
He / She / It had
We had
You had
They had
As you can see, English has a very simple structure. The tenses used are: present simple, present continuous, past simple, past continuous, present perfect, present perfect continuous, past perfect, future, conditional and imperative.
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It may seem like a lot, but as soon as you start to analyze each of these times, you will see that its construction is much simpler than ours.
The present simple is used to describe an action that has not finished, a habit, general purposes or things that affect us. Example: I eat everyday , I want to go to South America .
The present continuous is used to talk about an action that is in progress or, in some cases, to talk about something that is going to happen in the near future. Example: I am leaving tomorrow , You are arriving to Paris , etc.
To express an action that has already ended, we use the past tense. Irregular verbs form the past tense by adding -ed (study-studied, look-looked, jump-jumped). Irregulars are conjugated in different ways ( eat-ate, read-read, write-wrote).
If we want to talk about an action that was occurring at a time in the past and suffered an interruption, we use the past continuous, which is constructed with the auxiliary to be and the present participle: I was sleeping when he arrived. , They were walking when it started to rain .
To talk about actions that have just happened, but that have a consequence in the present, we use the present perfect, which is constructed as follows: have + past participle.
Do you know how to talk about an action that has already occurred but has no effect in the present? Well, for that we use the past perfect : had + past participle. Example: I had been to Italy twice when I went a third time , He had been working there for two years .