Simple Past Vs Past Progressive Vs Past Perfect | English Tenses for Beginners

Want to speak real English from your first lesson? Sign up for your free lifetime account at englishclass101.com. >> Hi everybody. My name is Alicia. In this lesson, we're going to look at the differences

between simple past tense, past progressive or continuous tense, and past perfect tense. Let's get started. First, let's take a look at simple past tense, the most basic past tense.

When do we use simple past tense? We use simple past tense to talk about actions that started and ended in the past. So, the beginning and the end of the action are in the past.

On this timeline here, which shows us the past at this side, the present at the star, and the future in this direction, we have two points. This blue point is the check mark. This is the start point of the action.

And here, this X is the end point of the action. Both points are in the past for this action. So, we can express this with a simple past tense statement.

For example, I ate breakfast. Very basic simple past tense statement, right? Here is our past tense verb. I ate breakfast. So, this action started and ended in the past, right?

Very basic. Let's look at the second example sentence. My roommate worked out this morning. My roommate worked out this morning. Here, I have the verb work out, but in past

tense, worked out. Again, the action, the workout, started and ended before the present. So, we use simple past tense to express that. The final example sentence, we studied after dinner.

We studied after dinner. Study is the verb here. This shows us, because it's in simple past tense, the action started and ended before the present moment. So, all of these are very, very basic, simple past

tense sentences. In part two and in part three of this lesson, we are going to build on these sentences to see different ways that we can express ideas in similar manners with different grammar points.

So, let's keep this in mind and go to part two. In part two, we're going to look at past progressive or past continuous tense. When do we use this tense?

We use past progressive for actions that were continuing in the past. So, this means an action started in the past and it didn't just start and finish, but we want to talk about an action that was continuing in the past.

We want to emphasize this continuing part of the action for some reason. So, let's look at some examples that have kind of a similar feel to our first three example sentences. Let's take a look at the first example sentence here.

So, our first example here is at 9:00 a.m. I was eating breakfast. At 9:00 a.m. I was eating breakfast. So, here we see was, which shows us this is

a past action, and eating, which shows this was a continuing action. So, this shows at this point in time, at 9:00 a.m., this action was continuing. The action of eating was continuing.

This sentence doesn't say exactly when the action started, we just want to express the action was continuing at this time, okay? So, let's move on to our second example sentence now. My roommate was working out this morning.