Learn English Tenses: Introduction to Perfect Tenses

In this video, I'm going to give you an overview of the advanced tenses in English.

Now, if you've been following our www.engvid.com series on English tenses, you may have already

seen this board.

And then, you will know that here, we have all twelve of the active tenses in English.

Probably, if you're watching this lesson, you have already learned the basic tenses,

the first six.

Now, you're ready to move on to the advanced tenses, which are the perfect tenses.

And it doesn't matter if you know the names of these tenses or not, or if you understand

the examples that I'm going to read in a second, but as we go along, you will learn each one,

step by step.

How to use it, when to use it, just like you did up here.

But let's get a quick idea of what's coming up.

So here, we will learn present perfect, present perfect continuous, past perfect, past perfect

continuous, future perfect, future perfect continuous.

What do you notice?

Okay, again, we have a pattern.

We have the perfect and then we have the continuous form of it, alright?

So, now let's look at a little example of each one.

I have worked - I have been working.

I had worked - I had been working.

I will have worked - I will have been working.

Yes, believe it or not, by the end of this program, you will understand and be able to

use tenses like this.

That will help you not only to express yourself more effectively - whether it's for academic

purposes or in a business context, or just in general English, but also to understand

exactly what people mean when they're using these different tenses around you, okay?

Now, the best part is that many of the rules that you learned up here, with the basic tenses,

will help you when you learn the advanced tenses.

Because you'll see, there are continuous forms throughout.

For example - and also here, many of the verb forms are the same.

What is a little bit different is that here, we will be using the verb, the helping verb

"to have", and here, the helping verb "to have" + the helping verb "to be" in a special

way, which you will learn.

So, don't worry about anything.

We're going to go forward, step by step, and all you have to do now is go on to watch the

next video in this series, which is on the present perfect tense.