HOW TO LEARN THE ENGLISH TENSES SYSTEM

Abstract

Everyone who has studied English as a foreign language, and even more so those
who have chosen the profession of teaching English at school, lyceum, gymnasium or
university, knows that the greatest difficulty for Russian speakers is the "tenses" of the
English verb. Indeed, if anyone who speaks Russian as a native one knows that there
are three times, then what bewilderment should be caused by English grammars, which
assert that this language does not have three or five times, but twelve. However, the
presence of twelve tenses, recorded in grammars as a fact, very rarely raises a
bewildered question for anyone: what other tenses are there in the English language, in
addition to the present, past and future? Try to answer it! Does not work? You don't
have to waste your time. Because, apart from the three named, there are no other times
and cannot be. In no language of the world (and there are several thousand of them) the
number of verb tenses expressed in special grammatical forms does not exceed the
"magic" number "three". Less than three may be. There are languages with only two
forms of tenses (for example, "past" "unpassed"), there are languages without verb
tenses at all, but there are no languages where these tenses would be more than three.