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?!
Your eating example would be solved by use of conjunctions. If you use “while”,”after” and “before”, the information in the verb becomes rendundant.
Secondly, this does not compute. You list four independent categories with two options each. That amounts to 16 distinct possibilities. Having these in past, present and future would leave us with 48 distinct forms.
I suggested that there were three tenses (past, present, and future) each with four types (simple, progressive (also known as “continuous”), perfect, and perfect progressive). Four times three is twelve.
A complete list would be:
1. Present Simple
2. Present Progressive
3. Present Perfect
4. Present Perfect Progressive
5. Past Simple
6. Past Progressive
7. Past Perfect
8. Past Perfect Progressive
9. Future Simple
10. Future Progressive
11. Future Perfect
12. Future Perfect Progressive
Perhaps I wasn’t clear when writing “progressive/continuous,” but I suspect you knew the British and American differences in that tense name.
Regarding my eating example — you’re right. But then we could take it to the next logical step, as Chinese does, and have only one tense…
Indeed one tense would do.
Your list is certainly good for the students, but it leaves me with questions.
1. How do you treat:
“We would walk the dog on sunny days.”
2. How do map the tense to meaning? It seems to express three features:
a – tense: before,while,after
b – perfectivity
c – progression
Yet, it doesn’t seem so simple. I’d say: “They left 500 years after Atlantis had vanished.”
Yet: They are leaving 500 years after Atlantis vanished.”
First, “We would walk the dog” is the subjunctive voice. It can just as easily be in the past as in the present: “We would have walked the dog.”
As far as mapping tense to meaning, I’m not a linguist, so I’ve no idea. I would think that technically “tense” means temporal placement and nothing else. The rest are aspects of the activity.
I’m not so sure I get your final point.
If there are simply three tenses and independent of that the categories of perfectivity and progression the system will be easy.
But this is not the case. To simply indicate that something happened before something else happened, you use a past perfect in combination with the simple past. Yet you cannot simply shift this into the present without altering the meaning beyond a change of time only. So the simple system perfectly explains how the several forms of an English verb are formed, but not how they are used. Quite wicked. The Polish (slavic in general, in fact) system is quite hard, but the difficulty openly stares you in the face. You need to learn two forms per verb, period.