Learn the Perfect Tenses Easily in 12 Minutes

Hello, lovely students, and welcome back to English with Lucy.

Today's lesson is truly perfect.

We're going to cover the perfect tenses.

As I have heard you loud and clear, these are the tenses that you struggle most with.

Don't worry, it's not your fault.

I often feel frustrated when I see

lessons on the perfect tenses or explanations in grammar books.

I don't feel like they're clear enough.

In this video, I'm going to teach you how

to use the perfect tenses, and you will probably find that the way I explain them

is different from how you've been taught before.

I promise you that when you're done with

this lesson, you're going to feel much more confident about how to use the past,

present and future perfect simple tenses in 3 key ways.

To help you even more, I have also created the perfect ebook.

This is a digital PDF that ended up being so big it's become an ebook.

I'm letting you have this for free.

It contains everything that we cover in

today's video in more detail with more examples, and there is a secret link to

access our interactive exercise pack.

This isn't available anywhere else.

These are really gorgeous exercises that you can use to test your understanding of

what I teach you today.

If you would like to download The Perfect

Ebook and gain access to the perfect tenses exercise pack, just click on the

link in the description box; you enter your name and your email address, and

that PDF containing that secret link will arrive directly in your inbox.

After that, you'll automatically receive my free weekly PDFs, news, course

updates, and offers.

It's a free service; you can unsubscribe

at any time.

Okay, back to the perfect tenses, or

should I say the perfect aspect?

I don't normally talk about tense versus

aspect in my videos, but I think it's important and useful to mention it today.

We only have two tenses in English, present, I go, she goes, and past, I

went, she went.

Aspects add information about the way we

view a verb.

For example, an aspect can show whether

an action is complete or continuing.

When we use the perfect aspect, we look

back from a certain point in time to another point in time.

I'm going to explain lots more about this, and I will give you lots of examples.

I am going to refer to them as the perfect tenses from now on because I

think that's the name most of you are familiar with; we don't have to

overcomplicate this.

Let's talk about how we form the perfect tenses.

The present perfect simple, and the past perfect simple have very similar forms.

We form positive sentences in the present perfect simple with subject + have

or has + past participle.

We form the past perfect simple with

subject + had + past participle.

I have been to London.

I had been to London.

To form negative sentences, we add not

after have, has, or had.

For example, she has not been to London.

She had not been to London.

And to form questions, we invert the

subject and have, has, or had.

Had she been to London?

We form positive sentences in the future perfect simple with subject + will

have + past participle.

I will have been to London.

To form negative sentences, we add not after will.

I will not have been to London.

And to form questions, we invert the

subject and will.

Will they have been to London?

In speech and informal writing, we often use contractions.

Have is often contracted to ‘ve and has is often contracted to ‘s, pronounced

/s/ or /z/.

Depending on whether an unvoiced or voiced sound comes before it.

For example, I've been to London.

He's been to London.

Pat's been to London.

In negative sentences, we usually

contract have not to haven't and has not to hasn't.

You haven't been to London.

She hasn't been to London.

Had is often contracted to ‘d.

He'd been to London.

In negative sentences, had not is often contracted to hadn't.

We hadn't been to London.

Will is often contracted to ‘ll.

They'll have been to London.

Notice that I pronounce have as /Əv/

when I'm speaking quickly.

They'll have been to London.

And will not is usually contracted to won't.

I won't have been to London.

Okay, now all of that's out the way, let's talk about the uses of the perfect tenses.

In very general terms, we use the present perfect simple to look back from the

present time.

We use the past perfect simple to look

back from a point in the past.

And we use the future perfect simple to

look back from a point in the future.

It all makes sense.

Let's talk about the 3 key uses.

First, life experiences.

We use the perfect simple tenses to talk about life experiences up to a specific

point in time.

We don't say exactly when these life

experiences happened when we use a perfect tense.

We use the present perfect simple to talk about life experiences up to now.

The experiences happened in the past, but we are looking at them from the present.

For example, I have been to New York.

That means at some point in my life up to

now, I went to New York.

You don't know when exactly, but you know

it was before the present time and that this event is completed.

I am no longer in New York.

You can learn about using the perfect

tenses to say how many times something happened and negative sentences in The

Perfect Ebook that goes with this lesson.

Link is down below.

We can use the past perfect simple to talk about life experiences that happened

before a point in the past.

For example, I had been to New York by

the time I was 25.

In this example, the point from which we

are looking back is age 25, and the sentence tells you that before I was 25,

I went to New York.

We use the future perfect simple to talk

about life experiences that will be complete by a specific point in the future.

Here is that same example again.

I will have been to New York by the time

I am 35.

Age 35 for me is in the future.

This sentence tells us that before I am 35, I will visit New York.

You don't know when, but the action of visiting New York will happen before I am 35.

The next use I want to talk about is for unfinished states and actions.

We can use the perfect tenses to talk about states and actions that begin

before a point in time and continue up to that point.

This usage often tells us the duration of the action up to a certain point.

We can sometimes use the perfect simple or perfect continuous tenses when talking

about how long something lasts, and I've explained this in more detail in The

Perfect Ebook.

In this video, we're just focusing on the

simple tenses.

We use the present perfect simple to talk

about states or actions that began in the past and continue to the present.

We don't know if they will continue in the future.

Here is an example.

I have lived in Manchester for 5 years.

I started living in Manchester 5 years ago, and I still live there now.

We use the past perfect simple to talk about states or actions that began in the

past and continued up to a later point in the past.

I had lived in Manchester for 5 years by the time I was 23.

This means that I started living in Manchester when I was 18, and I still

lived there when I was 23, 5 years later.

You don't know if I continued living

there after that.

That's not clear in this sentence.

We use the future perfect simple to talk about states and actions that will

continue to a point in the future.

I will have lived in Manchester for 5

years by the time I am 33.

In this sentence, the starting point for

living in Manchester is age 28.

Which is in the past.

5 years later, I will be 33 and still living in Manchester.

Okay, time for the final use.

I'm calling this use consequences.

We can use the perfect simple tenses to talk about things that happened before a

point in time but are relevant at that point.

It's like talking about the consequences

of an action or event.

We use the present perfect simple to talk

about an event that happened in the past but it is important in the present.

For example, I've been out every night this week so I'm really tired today.

That's a past action with a present consequence.

I was out every night up to now and I am

tired now.

We use the past perfect simple to talk about an event that happened in the past

that was important at a later date in the past.

For example, I’d been out every night that week so I was really tired.

A past action with a past consequence.

I went out every night of the week in the past and the next day, I was tired.

Both of those events are in the past.

And the future perfect simple.

We use the future perfect simple to talk about something that will happen before

a point in the future that will be relevant at a later time.

For example, I will have been out every night that week so I will be tired.

It's a future action with a  likely future consequence.

I will go out every night for a week in the future and then I will be tired.

Okay, that is everything I want to say about the perfect tenses today.

Of course, there are more ways we use these tenses, but I think these are the

most useful for you.

I go into so much more detail in The

Perfect Ebook, which you can download by clicking the link in the description box.

You will also get access to the exercise pack where you can test your understanding.

I would also love to see you complete the homework where you practise using some of

these tenses in the comments section.

You can use my examples in the video and

personalise them to you.

If you like the way I teach grammar and

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If you are interested, visit englishwithlucy.com.

I will see you soon for another lesson.