English Language and Grammar - Tenses and Aspects

Learn all about tenses and aspects. Each lesson looks at once tense/aspect combination, showing how to form it, when to use it and plenty of examples.

We also cover reported speech.

Each tense/aspect combination video has a downloadable PDF file for you to use and reference offline.

Reading is a great way to improve your language skills. I can't recommend it highly enough.

As a form of project, next time you read some English text, really concentrate on the verbs, especially the tenses used. Do you recognise the tenses that were used and why a particular tense was used? Can you identify the aspects that were used, and why they were used.

If you do this exercise regularly, you will find that you will gain more insight into the subtext. For example, if the present simple is used to describe someone's job, then you know that this job is their normal, full-time job. However, if the present continuous is used, then you will know that this only is a temporary position.

Without knowing how tenses and aspects are used, this (possibly important) information might have been overlooked or misunderstood.