The past tense | The parts of speech | Grammar | Khan Academy

Hello friends and welcome to the distant past!

Because today we're talking about the past tense, which refers to stuff that has already happened. There are many ways to form the past tense, but for right now, I just want to focus on the basic version, which is just adding "ed."

So if you take a word like "walk," as in "I walk to the store." No, not the store, to the moon! I'm going to the moon on foot. Try and stop me! Um, that's in the present tense. But if I wanted to put that in the past, I would say, "I walked." I walked to the moon! I got very strong legs and good shoes.

So this sentence is happening now; it's the present. This sentence happened earlier, and it's the past. So the simplest way to figure out whether or not something is in the past tense, or if you want to put something in the past tense, is this thing: this "ed" ending.

So you go from "walk" to "walked," "talk" to "talked," "sneeze" to "sneezed," "jump" to "jumped," and "open" to "opened." So if it doesn't end with an "e," you add "d." If it does end with an "e," you just add the "d." That's how to form the past tense.

That's what the past tense does; it's stuff that's already happened. And most of the time, when you want to form the past tense out of a word, you just add "ed." You can learn anything!

David out.