Nina, at The Other Side of the Ocean, recently complained about necessary tenses in English.
Writing about learning English, she says, “As a new kid on the English-speaking block, I had to come to terms with the fact that English has sixteen verb tenses. You truly are insane.”
Indeed, most Poles when they learn that there are more than three tenses in English have a similar reaction.
The actual number of tenses is a somewhat fluid issue. Nina maintains sixteen. I would argue that there are only three tenses: past, present, and future. Within each of those, though, there are four types:
- simple
- progressive/continuous
- perfect, and
- perfect progressive/continuous.
A total of twelve, for I don’t count conditionals as tenses.
This does seem somewhat excessive but think of the versatility of the English tense system.
With a single verb tense you can:
- Show whether it happened before or after another action;
- Indicate whether or not it is a temporary action;
- Show whether or not it was a completed action; and,
- Indicate whether it was habitual or not.
Think of the enormous difference between these sentences:
- When you called I was eating.
- When you called, I had eaten.
In situation one, you’d better apologize; in situation two, you’re fine.
But some of the tenses do indeed cause problems with Polish learners, none more so than present perfect (i.e., “I have eaten sushi.”). It’s problematic because it sometimes refers to the past (“I’ve been to China. I went last year.”) and sometimes to the present (“I’ve lived in Poland for seven years.”). The first example would be translated to past tense in Polish, while the second would be present tense. Then there’s the difference between “I’ve eaten sushi” and “I ate sushi.”
It’s a nightmare that some students never fully work out.
I, on the other hand, have problems fitting all those possibilities into tense-deprived Polish. Polish does have something sort of like a continuous tense, but instead of being a different tense, it’s a different verb! “Obejrzełem” is “I watched” whereas “ogladałem” is more like “I was watching.”
How’s that for difficulty?!