Simple Aspect | The parts of speech | Grammar | Khan Academy

Hello gramians. Now previously, we had spoken about just the basic idea of verb aspect, which is kind of like tenses for tenses. I know that's a little "wheels within wheels," ridiculous, um, but we'll make sense of it.

What aspect allows you to do is situate more exactly your verbs in time. So if you're telling a story and you want to indicate when something happened in that story, then you would use verb tense to indicate when it happened.

The next layer of complexity after that, in terms of being specific about when stuff happens in time, is aspect. But I'm going to teach you today about the simple aspect, which I don't really need to teach you about, to be frank, because you already know what it is. It's been staring at us this entire time.

The simple aspect is really just the bare tense of whatever conjugation you choose to do. So if you're talking in the present tense right here, you say "I walk." That's it. That's simple. It doesn't indicate anything else about whether or not the walking is completed or the walking is ongoing. It's just "I walk."

Same thing with the future: "I will walk." Same thing with the past: "I walked." If it doesn't have any helper verbs for the past or the present, and the only helper verb it has for the future is "will," then it's simple. That's it.

It's the bare minimum required to express the idea using that tense. That's the simple aspect. You can learn anything.