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Introduction to verb tense

Verb tenses allow verbs to express when an action occurred (past, present, or future). For example, in the verb "talk" in can be expressed as something happening in the past ("talked"), in the present ("talk"), or in the future ("will talk").

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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.