Do You Know the Names of All Tenses in English?

There is an interesting fact that a lot of students in Indonesia cannot remember the names of the tenses in English even though, maybe, they have already studied English for their entire life. The most popular ones are Simple Present Tense, Simple Past, Present Continuous and Future Simple, perhaps, the rest is just stored in the text. How many names of tense do you know especially with a long name such as past future perfect continuous? The answer could be few.

Actually, there is a simple way to get to know the list of names in English tense. Go on reading this article then you’ll find out the answer in just less than 5 minutes.

Firstly, let’s answer this question. What is tense? According to online dictionary -dictionary.cambridge.org- tense is any of the forms of a verb which show the time at which the action happens. So tense is basically a verb form. If you ever learnt that eat can be changed into ate and eaten, so you can conclude that this alteration is actually affected by time.

The names of tense in English are formed by two things; the time name and the aspect name. The former has 4 names which are Past, Present, Future, and Past Future while the latter also has four; simple, continuous, perfect and perfect continuous. The names of the tense are derived from the combination between the names of the tense with the names of the aspects. Starting to get befuddled? Take it easy. Look at this table to get you enlightened.

	Simple	Continuous/progressive	Perfect	Perfect continuous/progressive
Past
Present
Future
Past Future

There are 16 blank spaces under these two names. The names are simply formed by dragging the time names rightward and the aspect names downward. Let’s put an example from the first row of tense name; past; with the first column of aspect name; simple; . The result is Past Simple.

	Simple
Past	Past Simple

The same way is done with the other tenses. By filling all the blanks, we will get the rest names of the tense.

	Simple	Continuous/progressive	Perfect	Perfect continuous/progressive
Past	Past Simple	Past Continuous/Progressive	Past Perfect	Past Perfect Continuous/Progressive
Present	Present Simple	Present Continuous/Progressive	Present Perfect	Present Perfect Continuous/Progressive
Future	Future Simple	Future Continuous/Progressive	Future Perfect	Future Perfect Continuous/Progressive
Past Future	Past Future Simple	Past future Continuous/Progressive	Past Future Perfect	Past Future Perfect Continuous/progressive

What do you think after doing this simple practice on how to name the tense? Is the list of tense’s names getting more familiar and easier for you? Well, I do hope that this method will drive you more on learning English Grammar. Lately, I found an interesting anonymous quote saying that Using incorrect grammar is like wearing the underwear on the outside of the clothes. You’re covered but you still look like an idiot. Surely, we don’t expect to look like an idiot since it is never cool to look like ones, even Superman has already got the underwear inside nowadays.