3 mins read
Last Updated on February 18, 2026
If Tenses are the toughest part in English for you, you are not alone. In this post, I try to break down why Tenses in english are a cause for huge confusion.
Given that there is already enough confusion without the verb forms for future tense, you would expect the terminology used to study the grammar to be intuitive and easy to learn. You couldn’t be more wrong. Grammar Terminology is as broken as the language itself, if not more so. Don’t worry. We will break down the mess created by the language scholars.
First and foremost, we have to begin with the most intuitive thing that needs no explanation. That is there are 3 kinds of time for events to occur – Past, Present and Future.
Verb forms don’t cover all the tenses. do they? I mean…English doesn’t have the verb forms for all the times – Past, Present and Future. Certainly not for Future tense as we have to learn a new set of words called “Modals”.
English might not have 3 verb forms for 3 tenses. But, it surely has 3 verb forms for Present, Past and Past Participle.
This is where all the confusion starts. So we have to ask ourselves this question – Did the events described by the Past Participle happen in the past, present or future?. Now, you might have found out by yourself that even the question we just asked had begun with the word “Did” and that tells you everything you need to know about the time(Past or Present or Future) in which Past Participle falls.
Having understood this, now you might realize what you had already known until you were confused by Grammar terminology, which is, there is only one kind of “Past” and not two kinds. However, there are 2 kinds of verb forms to express the 2 events in the past that happened one after another. – “Simple Past” & “Past Participle”.
Learning Past Participle along with Present and Past simply confuses the understanding of Past. For a non-grammarian/non-linguist, it seems that Past Participle is already in past, especially for second language learners. I understand that English teacher will tell you “Past Participle” is different from “Simple Past”. They would say “Past Participle” is “past before past” or “past of the past” or “An action completed prior to another point in the past.”.
You shouldn’t let this fool you into thinking that somehow the first event that happend before the second event is not in the past. As with anything, once it goes to past, it is not coming back. Is it? English has got two ways to talk about the 2 events that happen one after another. – “Simple Past” and “Past Participle”.
An action completing prior to another point in the past can also be expressed with just “Simple Past”. Obsession of Native speakers of English with the completion of something before another thing in the past led to the invention of “Past Participle”. I guess they don’t like to use the words “before” and “after”.
In the following example, we can see how the 2 events can be expressed with both “Simple Past” and “Past Participle”
For e.g.:
Simple Past: The movie started before we arrived.
Note: You must use “before” or “after” to clarify the order.
Past Perfect (Past Participle): The movie had started when we arrived.
Note: The “had + started” automatically tells the reader which happened first.
Ofcourse, simple past can also be used for only one event in the past.
For e.g.:
The movie started at 7 in the evening.
This begs the question – If verb forms and tenses are so confusing, what is the best way to start learning them? why learning “finite” verbs and “non-finite” verbs first before learning verb forms or tenses preempts the confusion? Click here to read all about it in the next post.
