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Verb tenses
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Introduction to verb tense
Video transcript
- [Voiceover] Hello grammarians. Today I wanna introduce
the idea of the verb tense, and the way I wanna 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 so 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, and
if you master tenses, you will be able to tell
stories that span all of time, and I think that ability
is kind of astonishing that language can express
that sort of idea. To just give a very simple example, I'll just 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 take the verb to talk and I put it in the
present, I would just say, "I talk," the most basic iteration, "I talk." In the future, "I will talk," and in the past, "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.