Past Tenses in English Grammar with Examples: Past Simple, Past Continuous, Past Perfect

hey everybody your English teacher Chris americo's is back with another English lesson and today's lesson is about the difference between past simple past continuous and past perfect so if you're not sure how to use these three verb tenses or maybe you don't know what the difference is you don't know the difference in their meaning or which situations you should use these three verb tenses then today I'm going to help you understand that but first let me tell you that if you want to get speaking practice with me and other professional native speaking teachers then click the link under this video to join our everyday English program okay so first of all let's talk about past simple past simple is used when we have a concrete time in the past and an action that is completely finished and that means that it won't happen again it's completely finished but we can also use past simple to talk about consecutive actions consecutive means one after the other so for example first second third this would be consecutive so I might say first I woke up then I went to work then I ate lunch and so in this situation we used past simple that's it now the second verb tense that we're going to talk about today is past continuous but some people call it past progressive so if you call it past continuous or past progressive it doesn't matter it's the same thing and we use past continuous or past progressive to talk about actions that happen at the same time so if one thing is happening and another thing is happening but this is in the past then we can say that they were happening at the same time for example I was watch TV and my brother was playing basketball so this tells us that two things happen at this same time the same moment and it can also tell us about interrupted actions interrupt means that something breaks or stops in the middle so maybe somebody is talking to you and then you start talking before that person is finished speaking so if you speak before he is finished speaking you interrupted him so we can use past continuous or past progressive to talk about interrupted actions so we might say John was speaking when Mike interrupted him all right past continuous or past progressive also focuses on a process not a result so we don't have a result here and we don't know what happened in the end and the last verb tense that we're going to talk about today is past perfect past perfect is quite difficult and past perfect talks about two actions in the past and one of them happened before the other so usually we're going to have one verb in past perfect and one verb in past simple for example when I came home I understood I had forgotten my keys so understood is past simple came home is past simple right this was our consecutive actions from past simple first I came home then I understood and then I want to talk about something that happened before those things before I understood before I came home and that's when I can use past perfect I had forgotten my keys now those are some different examples for us to understand to help us understand these three verb tenses but now let's look at the same sentence and we will change the verb and we will understand how the meaning changes okay so hope you're ready yeah the first example is with past simple now if we look at this timeline we can see that past simple is one action that happens before now and here's our sample sentence when I came home she cooked dinner this is about my personal life because I'm not good at cooking and my wife usually cooks so when I came home she cooked dinner and you can see that this happened before now right one action in the past when I came home she cooked dinner so this is first and then second first I came home then she cooked dinner first I came home then she cooked dinner first second these are consecutive actions and we use past simple to talk about that now when we use past continuous or past progressive it looks a little different we can say when I came home she was cooking dinner so first we have past simple and then past continuous or past progressive was cooking and this is what it looks like on our timeline before now there's a process right and this process goes forward in time it moves forward in a head from the past towards the present and it started in the past but we don't have a result it's not finished so she was cooking dinner when I came home she was cooking dinner so this means she started cooking dinner and she was still in the process when I came home so there was no result there was a process happening and then I came home in the middle of this process so I interrupted this process like we talked about before and our third example here with past perfect when I came home she had cooked dinner and if we look at the timeline we see two past actions when I came home she had cooked dinner before that right so first she cooked dinner then I came home and I saw the result so here you can see that the same sentence has a very different meaning when we change the verb here we have past simple past continuous or progressive and past perfect again when I came home she cooked dinner this means first I came home and then she cooked dinner when I came home she was cooking dinner this means she started cooking dinner and was still in the process when I came home and when I came home she had cooked dinner this means first she cooked dinner then I came home and I saw the result so I hope that quick short lesson helps you understand the difference between these three past tense verbs and remember that if you want to practice your English and you want to practice using the grammar that you learn then come over to our everyday English program and speak English with us every day we have a lesson every day Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday every day and I almost dropped my marker there and you can come over and practice speaking with me with other teachers and these are teachers from english-speaking countries and students from all over the world we have a lesson every day for 60 minutes about different topics and so just click the link under this video to come over and join our everyday English lessons okay I hope you like this lesson feel free to press like write a comment if you liked it and share it with your friends alright I will see you in the next video bye bye

Channel: English With Kris Amerikos

Views: 90,556

Keywords: past tenses in english grammar with examples, English grammar, past simple tense, past continuous tense, past perfect tense, past simple and past continuous, past simple and past perfect, past continuous and past simple, past continuous tense in english, learn tenses, tenses in english grammar, learn past tense, learn english grammar step by step, english tenses, learn english tenses, english grammar lessons, kris amerikos, kris amerikos youtube, kris amerikos tenses

Id: w6WLubz32cg

Length: 8min 37sec (517 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 08 2019