Everything English

Verb is one of the most important parts of a sentence. It conveys the action part of a sentence – come, go, sit, stand, dance, write, read, run, climb etc. Tense is the form with which the verb must be presented in a sentence.

Examples:

I go home.

I’m going home.

I have gone home.

I have been going home.

I went home.

I was going home.

I had gone home.

I had been going home.

I will go home.

I will be going.

I will have gone home.

I will have been going home.

Notice here that the word “go” is being used in 12 different forms in order to convey 12 different meanings. All of these 12 forms emerge from the three basic tenses of the verb “go”:

Go (present tense), went (past tense), and gone (past participle) or,

Go (simple tense), went (past tense), and will go (future tense)

Let’s take another set of examples and identify the 12 verb tenses accordingly:

She breaks her hand –Simple Present Tense

She is breaking her hand — Present Continuous Tense (suggests an ongoing action in the present tense)

She has broken her hand — Present Perfect Tense (suggests a completed action in the present tense)

She has been breaking her hand — Present Perfect Continuous (suggest an ongoing action to be completed in the present tense)

She broke her hand — Simple Past Tense

She was breaking her hand — Past Continuous Tense (suggests an ongoing action in the past tense)

She had broken her hand — Past Perfect Tense (suggests a completed action in the past tense)

She had been breaking her hand — Past Perfect Continuous Tense (suggests an ongoing action to be completed in the past tense)

She will break her hand — Simple Future Tense

She will be breaking her hand — Future Continuous Tense ((suggests an ongoing action in the future tense)

She will have broken her hand — Future Perfect Tense ((suggests a completed action in the future tense)

She will have been breaking her hand — Future Perfect Continuous Tense (suggests an ongoing action to be completed in the future tense).

Unless it is a grammar school, not many English speaking people bother about identification of tenses. Their usage comes naturally with the fluency of the language.