Introduction to verb tense | The parts of speech | Grammar | Khan Academy

Hello grammarians! Today, I want to introduce the idea of the verb tense. The way I want to do that is to express the following: if you can master grammatical tenses, you will become a time wizard—a literal, actual time wizard. Because tense is nothing more than the ability of verbs to situate themselves in time, specifically in three different times: in the past, the present, or the future.

It can happen when we're talking about a verb. A verb can happen now, a verb can happen later, and a verb can have happened in the past. Then that's basically it! If you master tenses, you will be able to tell stories that span all of time.

Uh, I think that that ability is kind of astonishing— that language can express that sort of idea. To just give a very simple example, I'll take the word "talk" and put it in these three basic tenses. Now, it does get more complicated than this, sure, but we'll cover that later.

So if I say, if I take the verb "to talk," and I put it in the present, I would just say "I talk," the most basic iteration. In the future, I would say "I will talk," and in the past, I would say "I talked." This is the simple form of every English tense: past, present, future. If you can command all of these, you will be a time wizard. That's you! You can learn anything.

David out.