Whether you’re pursuing fluency in a particular language, or you enjoy studying multiple languages at once, you’re sure to encounter verb tenses and usages that don’t correspond with your native language. On top of that, you might face a lot of confusing technical terms.
If terms like “past anterior,” “present perfect continuous,” and “future subjunctive” make your head spin, fear not!
We’re going to take a straightforward look at these concepts to develop a practical understanding that will facilitate your language learning. We’ll also consider how various languages use different verb tenses, aspects, and moods to express similar ideas.
Quite simply, a “tense” tells you when something happens — whether in the past, the present, or the future.
You’ll often see references to things like the “present perfect,” the “past imperfect,” or the “future subjunctive tense.” These tense names include their aspects or moods, which give us additional information.
A verb’s aspect can tell you if an action is completed or continuous, or if it’s done repeatedly or habitually.
A verb’s mood, on the other hand, isn’t cheerful or cranky; rather, it tells us if a statement is factual — or just something that’s likely, desirable, permissible, or demanded. Some languages even have a specific mood for asking questions.
Tenses, aspects, and moods are all grammatical categories, which are concepts we can use to talk about the relationships between words. Other familiar grammatical categories are verbs, nouns, genders, prepositions, and conjunctions.
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Here are some of the most common aspects and moods. These can refer to past, present, or future actions, depending on their tense.
The simple aspect, sometimes called the “indefinite” aspect, only tells us that an action is factual. It does not directly indicate how long the action lasts or if it’s repeated.
The progressive (continuous) aspect describes an ongoing or incomplete action. The habitual aspect talks about actions that are done regularly, over and over. Both of these can be considered part of the imperfective aspect.
The perfect or perfective aspect is used for completed or self-contained actions, which don’t repeat or continue — regardless of when they happen.
Scholars debate the relationship of perfect or imperfect aspects to the perfective or imperfective ones.
For example, some linguists consider tenses like the present perfect and future perfect to be expressions of the perfective aspect.
Others argue that languages with perfect and imperfect aspects (and corresponding tenses) can’t possibly have perfective or imperfective aspects. That’s because such languages lack specifically perfective and imperfective verbs, like those found in many Slavic languages.
For instance, Russian uses the imperfective verb говорить to mean “to talk” and “to speak” when discussing repeated, habitual, or ongoing actions. For an event that happens once, at a specific point in time, Russian employs the perfective verb сказать, which also means “to talk” and “to speak.”
To add to the confusion, imperfect often refers to a tense found in Romance languages, which expresses ongoing or habitual actions in the past — similar to the past progressive in English (“I was walking”). Some linguists might contend that the imperfect and past progressive tenses have an imperfective aspect, even if they don’t use exclusively imperfective verbs.
The imperfective aspect can also be found in the future perfect progressive. This tense describes incomplete or ongoing actions that have yet to happen. For example, “Anna will have been learning French” indicates that Anna will have started to learn French at some point in the future and will continue to do so in the more distant future.
The indicative is one of the most common verb moods. There are two main variations within the indicative mood: The declarative is used for factual statements or statements of opinion, such as “Dogs are furry,” “Cats do not bark,” and “Owls like to surf the internet.” The interrogative is used to ask questions.
The imperative mood expresses direct requests and commands.
The conditional describes what might happen under certain conditions. In English, it’s usually paired with an “if” statement, such as “I could watch the film, if I’m not too tired.”
Rare in English, the subjunctive mood makes more frequent appearances in languages like German, French, and Spanish. It’s used for hypothetical situations, wishes, and desires.
There’s no time like the present - Image source
Unless you’re learning a “tenseless” language, like Mandarin Chinese, Vietnamese, or Indonesian, you’re almost certainly going to have to deal with multiple past, present, and future tenses, which normally incorporate various aspects and moods.
We’ll take a simple verb, “to speak,” and compare each of these tenses for the first person singular of English, German, Spanish, and French, so you can see how they correspond.
Notice that in several cases, English and Spanish have a continuous tense, whereas French and German lack separate continuous tenses. This means that “ich sprache” and “je parle” would translate to both “I speak” and “I am speaking” in English.
Here are several formulas you can use to make different verb tenses in English, German, Spanish, and French. Although some tenses are formed by conjugating a single verb, others involve combinations of words.
Andrew Rossiter, a professional linguist who writes about learning English, points out that the term “present perfect” is just not logical when we consider how this compound tense is used in English — and compare it to other languages. After all, the “present perfect” tense describes past actions.
Of course, English isn’t the only language with confusing compound tenses. In various Spanish dialects, the “compound perfect past tense” can be used to refer to something that was in the past and still remains in the present, something that is either complete or incomplete, something that happened very recently, and something that happened “just this second.”
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by Alejandra | May 21, 2021
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