Talking about the Past

The past tense is used a lot among English learners or even English native speakers. Without the past tense, we cannot have clear divisions of time periods. In addition to referring to past events, the past tense can also be used in certain contexts to indicate the present or future. Now if you would like to learn more, follow the article.

The past simple tense shows the action or state that happened at an earlier time.
Whether or not the action continued for a period of time or was repetitive is not important; what's important is that it began and ended. It can be a definite time in the past or it can be indefinite. Look at the examples:

The past continuous shows the time span or repetition of past actions or events and the timing of one activity to another, for example, it is used to describe a background action that was in progress while another action interrupted it, which would be described by the past simple tense. For example:

We use past simple and past continuous to talk about something that was true for some time in the past. Take a look at some examples:

We can use the past simple or past continuous for stories or lists of events. Take a look at some examples:

We use the 'past perfect tense' to talk about the order of two past events. The past perfect shows the earlier action and the past simple shows the later action. So, if there are two actions following each other, for the action closest to the present use Simple Past, and for the action that came before it use Past Perfect.

We use the 'past perfect tense' to talk about something that started in the past and continued up to another action or time in the past. Just remember, when the sequences of the actions are obvious do not use the 'past perfect tense.' Here are the examples for more clarification.

This usage is specific to state verbs, not actions. We use past perfect with verbs such as like, think, love, hate, believe, etc. to refer to a state that started in the past and continued up to some time in the past. Take a look at some examples:

We use the 'past perfect continuous' tense to talk about longer actions in the past before another action in the past. This means the longer action has happened sooner than the shorter action. For example:

We use be going to in the past tense to refer to events that we expected or predicted to happen at some point in the past. Here are the examples:

We can use 'be going to' in the past tense to talk about what we planned to be done in the past, but mostly they did not happen. Check out the examples!

Learning the past tense is one of the essentials in English because it helps us talk about events that took place in the past. In this lesson you have learned:

Each tense can refer to past events in their own special way. Now let us compare them with each other. Look at the table below: