Thinking about a situation when you would use the verb is much better: ‘I saw Dave yesterday and he had just seen Taylor Swift coming out of Tesco.’ Alright, so Taylor Swift isn’t likely to be heading out of your local supermarket, but you get what I mean. Plus, chanting ‘see, saw, seen’ isn’t anyone’s idea of a fun night in. Learning endless lists of irregular verbs is useless if you don’t have a sentence to put them in. Heaven, surely.Ĭhoose your plan Learn irregular past tenses within their context And then, BANG! Out of nowhere, interrupting your drive pops a McDonald’s. Imagine ‘I had been driving all day’ written in the endless desert soil. I had been driving all day and I was starving when suddenly, McDonald’s appeared on the horizon.’ Picture yourself, bursting hot and sweaty onto the platform, staring regretfully at the train: ‘I arrived’ in a comic book-style speech bubble. Paint the phrase ‘the train had left’ into the smoke coming from the disappearing train’s chimney. ‘When I arrived at the station, the train had already left’. If you’re a visual learner, picturing past tenses can help. Visualize your action when forming the past tense We had been living in the UK for 2 years before we moved to Germany. Let’s be honest, doing thousands of gap fills can’t replace real-life practice, so don’t overdo it.įor longer actions in the past for background informationįor events that were completed before another event in the pastįor continuous actions which were completed in the past Once you know this, do a few exercises and then take your skills out into the wild. In order to use them, you need to know how they are formed and what they do. The four main past tenses are past simple, past continuous, past perfect, and past perfect continuous. (Actually, a few native speakers could do with a refresher course too.) Unless you’re lucky and you’re a native English speaker, you need to learn the grammatical structure of past tenses. Understand the basics of English past tenses
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