Your textbooks LIED about "tenses." Learn this if you want to learn languages

Most of how we talk about "tenses" is wrong, especially in language learning textbooks. It's time to talk about tense, aspect, and mood. If you want to learn a language, or even become a polyglot, you can't afford to not know this.
Books recommended (Amazon affiliate links):
Tense: amzn.to/3ZqVqxi
Aspect: amzn.to/3JhmOID
Introducing Semantics: amzn.to/3ZJzVYa
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Patreon: www.patreon.com/languagejones

[@hemerythrin]

Could have used this video a few weeks ago while desperately trying to explain to someone how Japanese can have a "non-past" tense... This is definitely going in the bookmarks list

[@languagejones6784]

I'm so glad to hear that! Sometimes, when I'm making these, I I start to doubt whether anyone is going to have use for them

[@paulwalther5237]

Can you explain that now?

[@Koutouhara]

yeah and you can drop so much from a Japanese sentence and it'll still be a full sentence because it's all about the context.. they don't have plurals, you don't need to have a subject.. you could even use an onomatopoeia for a sentence. lol Very strange but I love learning it

[@elderscrollsswimmer4833]

I think Finnish is similar.

[@ekhartgeorgi4412]

​@@elderscrollsswimmer4833, On the contrary, Finnish has all the same tenses as English except the future and future perfect. It even has the same continuous tenses. And it even uses them mostly like in English. It uses the present for the future and the perfect for the future perfect.

[@LendriMujina]

I always thought things like "perfect future" sounded more like a dystopian novel title than a linguistic concept.

[@notwithouttext]

i will have appreciated making this reply for you

[@andrewdunbar828]

Perfect future does sound more like a dystopian novel title. Future perfect sounds more like a linguistic concept.

[@christopherellis2663]

Perfect only in the brochures. 😅

[@MatthewMcVeagh]

Andrew said it. "Perfect future" =/ "future perfect".

[@pattipegharjo5863]

To help my Spanish students understand the subjunctive, I first taught it to them in English. We started by singing, "I wish I were an Oscar Mayer wiener," then I introduced the English words that require the subjunctive (demand, insist, etc.) with examples. One day of English instruction helped them understand when and why to use the subjunctive; mastering its use required a good deal of practice. Introduced in year 3, more or less mastered in Spanish 5/AP.

[@linguafiles_]

Love this! Yes! I think you have to give them a ton of examples in English and then a ton of contrasting examples in Spanish (subjunctive needed vs not needed).

[@benw9949]

Getting examples and a short English grammar lesson on the subjunctive and the conditional in English sure helps. It also helps if the student knows how to use those properly in English. Even so, I have found the subjunctive present and past to be difficult in Spanish and French. (The conditional makes sense.) One problem is that English doesn't really separate subjunctive and conditional very well. -- I'm trying to re-master Spanish with my vision much worse, so my old textbooks are nearly impossible to read in print. I've been surprised how well I've done, et whew, I'm lacking so much vocabulary for everyday things, and I can tell where my grammar has become weak in ways it never was in school. Plus, I'm getting cross-grade feedback trouble between Spanish and French. (No, it works that way in French, but this way in Spanish, and no, there are not always cognates, and (haha) Spanish speakers are not going to recognize a French word, too different in sound and form.) I was encouraged with my last real test in conversation, but whew, the gaps and the errors I made! (I never had trouble with m/f agreement in school, but now, I'm making errors. Catching them usually, but I need to be better than that.) Still, it was funny and exciting.

[@paulfaulkner6299]

I agree: If they only WERE TO use the past subjunctive properly in the examples given in "Learn Spanish" books (from and English speaker's perspective) it would be so much easier. If they _DID_ that, we wouldn't be half as confused as we are! _(WERE TO DO)._

[@L.Spencer]

For a long time I didn't realize we have the subjunctive in English. I'm still not sure how to construct it, except I think it uses the past tense form. I learned the structure of English when I learned Spanish. I remember the first month of high school Spanish class, trying to understand the concept of "to be" and then the pronouns and conjugations of ser. After a while it was an aha moment! I am in awe of people that just pick up languages without formal study.

[@chazcov08]

I learned the subjunctive case in Latin and not in English class. I later learned that English also used the subjunctive, in contrary to fact conditions, as in your Oscar Mayer example.

[@diamdante]

In Singapore I'm very used to not marking tense on verbs, and even leaving tense out of sentences entirely (naturally in mandarin and malay and also informally in english), so when I was studying spanish in school I found it helped me to re-analyse the spanish tense-aspect-mood system as whole phrases in those languages. On a side note this also made me appreciate how compact the spanish verbs can get, taking into account the person and number marking too, which I find q cute

[@andrewdunbar828]

I'm in Malaysia now where shop entrances often have signs on them letting me know that I'm getting 'close'. To make up for dropping past endings on verbs that need them, just add more plural endings on nouns that don't need them. I won't be surprised if I see 'carswash' or 'keysboard'. These are both starting to seep into native English speakers usage too. I'm always reading or hearing that somebody 'is bias' or 'is prejudice', but I'm not hearing that anybody is shock yet. Maybe I am luck and just haven't notice yet (-:

[@taln1000]

I took three years of Italian in high school and never really learned a single verb. These videos are great dude!

[@SmallSpoonBrigade]

TBH, despite what teachers would likely tell you, you shouldn't bother. You should start with the bits that are relevant to communication and finish the whole thing if you've got time later on. Grammar is mainly about efficiency and clarity, you can screw up grammar in most languages pretty badly before you can't be understood at all and in many places you can communicate a lot with simple 3 word sentences even though they're usually not correct grammatically. The vocab is something that really needs to be right in most cases or the other party will have no idea what you're talking about and that's really where the attention should be. The big question tends to be what precisely is a word. Linguists have worked on that, but as a practical matter for the rest of us, it's not clear. German has a bunch of seprable prefix words where nearly the entire sentence is located within a single word, as in you start with the latter bit of the word, have most of the sentence, then get back to the beginning of that first word. English does something similar with phrasal verbs, but because of reasons, we don't ever write them as a single word even though they behave in a similar fashion to the German separable prefix words. Then you have issues with things like to morrow, to-morrow and tomorrow as they evolve from two words to one word, is that hyphenated word a single word from a practical standpoint, or not?

[@AndrzejLondyn]

Start at least at Duolingo

[@jlittlejohn97]

I'm learning Mandarin, and I've never had a teacher stop and illustrate the difference between tense and aspect. I think this contributes the the very common problem of folks who are learning Mandarin from English being totally unable to understand why the aspect marker 了 is NOT a past tense marker.

[@andrewdunbar828]

Most language teachers have not studied linguistics. Not just Mandarin teachers.

[@jlittlejohn97]

@andrewdunbar828 Most of my Mandarin teachers have studied linguistics, actually. I think it's more to do with teaching philosophy than knowledge gaps. I also wasn't trying to imply this was something specific to Mandarin teachers, I've just never had teachers for other languages so it's my only example.

[@andrewdunbar828]

@@jlittlejohn97You're pretty lucky then. I've known lots of English teachers who don't know these kinds of things, or who themselves learn them along their journey of figuring out how to teach better. There are of course lots of kinds of teachers and not all have qualifications. I don't think I've asked any qualified teach friends about it.

[@PoussinNoNeko]

Seriously, I'm an ABC (not exactly, but we'll leave it at that), Mandarin Chinese is my mother tongue. However I never paid attention to the differences between 過 and 了, and surely will never be able to explain it either. I have the feeling most native teachers don't really know either.

[@j.s.c.4355]

I learned so much about English when I started to understand the subjunctive in Spanish. “ If I were to…”

[@user-yn1ow5px2t]

I think you brought up one of the most frustrating aspects of language learning. As a native Russian speaker, at school I was bombarded with a plethora of the most bizarre explanations. I distinctly remember a teacher telling me that English has 12 tenses, while Russian has 3. It all lead to a complete mess inside my head. Reading ‘Meaning and the English verb’ by Geoffrey Leech has demystified it somewhat. I wish there was a better way to introducing tenses and aspects to ESL students. To this day, many believe that mastering the ‘tense table’ equates to mastering English. It’s as terrible as it sounds and it clears nothing. Try explaining Russian verbs the same way. Читал, for example, would be something like, ‘an action in the past that was done incompletely, as opposed to an action completed fully”. It’s pure rubbish. It’s incomprehensible for most learners. So, yeah, very frustrating 😂

[@dr.kekyll2244]

"one of the most frustrating aspects..." i see what you did there. :D

[@sdstacey46]

I’m a native English speaker and I took two years of Russian in college. My professor actually used читать/прочитать to demonstrate aspect for us. «Что ты делал вчера вечером?» «Я читал » «Я прочитал » It really helped! 🎉

[@L.Spencer]

I took a semester of Russian and that was the only time I've heard of aspect. Still not sure what it was and don't remember much from the class. Though I can say I was fluent in Russian one night, after having food poisoning from Burger King. I was fluent in my dreams that night. No joke!

[@VerticalBlank]

Sympathies. My girlfriend is from Latvia and russian is her native language. She has just reached level C1 classes in English but she still isn't very confident about the tenses. The thing is, she doesn't really have a concept of aspects. This may startle many people but most native russian speakers don't even notice it, and are perplexed when I point it out. English does in fact have similar distinctions, especailly continuous vs simple tenses, but it is analysed as a variety of tenses when in fact all the continuous tenses could be reduced to "some tense of 'to be' + some participle".

[@peceed]

@@VerticalBlank Humanists become victims of a combinatorial explosion, creating independent entities from a combination of many features.

[@LanguageSimp]

I’m first LETS GO

[@archimedes6154]

any sex tips?

[@barrysteven5964]

I've just mastered Arabic by looking at your picture.

[@languagejones6784]

Ok, but imperatives are mood, and that's a different video 😂

[@vadimkugushev7960]

Sometimes I feel like the KZbin language community only has like ten people lmao

[@Pranay.K]

Super gigachad polyglot?

[@UdderlyEvelyn]

I am so glad I found your channel! As a language dork who doesn't always have time to deep dive on my own, videos like this are helping me stay learning key stuff in a digestible format. Thank you. :)

[@dillost234]

Can't wait for the mood/modality video. I nearly broke my brain on my Mormon mission trying to conceptualize what the subjunctive "was doing" with no access to a library or internet. Keep up the great content.

[@r.p.forbes6943]

Parenthetically, hats off to Mormon missionaries abroad. When I was traveling in the south of Spain years ago, they were the best exemplars of Americans, the most polite and respectful. Whenever I ran into one, we always conversed in Spanish. “By their fruits will you know them.”

[@lilcrowlet1802]

I was taught about this when I learned English more formally, but in a veiled way, in which it was still all just referred to as being different tenses. The concept of 'aspect' was never directly adressed. Separating tense and aspect makes so much sense!

[@completelyunderstood]

I love this man, just from reading the title I knew he was going to touch on that phenomenon exactly and he always does such a good job dispelling harmful rumors. Big ups!

[@teolinek]

For me, the most fun way to express time is in sign language (though I had only a little experience with the Polish sign language). Would you consider including sign languages in your future videos? I'm really curious, about how the aspect is conveyed. And how big (or small) the differences between those languages are.

[@damian_madmansnest]

From my very limited knowledge about sign languages, aspects that describe the character of an action (fast, slow, repetitive, etc) are expressed by modifying the sign that denotes the verb (signing faster, slower, or several times). Spatial relations (come/go) and the direction of an action (e.g. who tells whom) are expressed by signing at different positions in relation to the speaker and the listener. As for the differences, there are language families just like with spoken languages. E.g. a lot of sign languages in Europe as well as the Americas either come from or have been influenced by French Sign Language. Taiwan and Korean Sign Languages are related to Japanese Sign Language, while mainland Chinese Sign Language is an isolate.

[@soundenglishar]

Thank you for dealing with these issues in such a clear yet rigorous way! Can't wait for the video in mood!

[@samuelbeltran2649]

Super interesting topic! Can’t wait for the mood and modality video! Keep up the work

[@ymdbrkr4537]

I remember studying English at school as a Russian-Belarusian speaking teen and how the only thing we all could do while studying tense and aspect was to just cram all the rules because we couldn't understand how it worked at all since aspect kinda works differently in both Russian and Belarusian (and by the way all the Russian speaking kids believe that English has like 9 tenses). And it had been that way until I started majoring in linguistics. Then it all finally started to make sense. In fact the question of time and tense was one of my favourite topics during my theoretical grammar course.

[@user-gp8oj1ci9h]

I think we are usually taught there are 12

[@ymdbrkr4537]

@@user-gp8oj1ci9h well yeah I guess it depends on the school because I remember arguing with other kids about how many tenses there are.

[@Myronsjet]

If they only were telling people that it's just like it is in old Russian. Ya izvolyu, that stuff. Very similar tenses structure.

[@nagger7271]

no, they are taught English has 16 tenses They have some ridiculously sounding tenses like "Past Future Perfect Continuous Tense". Structure: Subject + would have been + Verb(+ing)

[@ymdbrkr4537]

@@nagger7271 they actually call it future in the past

[@senasubas5985]

That's awesome! I have just discovered this channel and I am so excited to watch other videos. Thank you🙏

[@b_two]

this is by far one of the top linguist channels out there

[@mnthstc]

I love this stuff too. Even just in passing. You’ve got a wonderful presentation style.

[@tedsowards]

I’m thoroughly enjoying your videos. I’ll have questions once finish a few more of them.

[@BlueDog15391]

I really wish more language textbooks included elements of linguistics such as in this video. It would've made learning grammar much, much easier. Also, it seems like the first link in the description leads to a book on Historical Linguistics and not to the book on tenses.

[@PristinePerceptions]

This was great! I had heard these claims but had never bothered to look into it, but this explains them very clearly. Also this is one of the very few videos I have considered watching at 75% of the tempo. It takes a while to internalize what you're learning.

[@PedroStaziaki]

Man, your channel really rocks! Keep it up.

[@perrywilliams5407]

Great info. I appreciate the great examples and details of how tense and aspect differ and interact. And now, we must get into mood!

[@Rh0mbus]

This blew my mind on english future tense, especially the example of using time as a way to describe future tense instead of will. That is so crazy to think about!

[@michaelodwyer7641]

In the Irish language we have a habitual past tense that you can loosely translate as "I used to do..." The tense is fully conjugated within the verb, often as a single word with an embedded pronoun.

[@noelleggett5368]

I teach the Irish language. This poor tense often gets ignored. Unlike in most text books, I teach it before I teach the conditional. And this helps the students get a better grasp of how to speak about the past, and learn the endings properly, before they have to grapple with the conditional mood (which has the same endings tacked on to a future stem’) and its concepts.

[@newenglandgreenman]

This is awesome. I had a weak grasp on this subject after years of studying languages and dabbling in linguistics, but this video really pulled it all together. Also, it gave me a better understanding of aspect in Mandarin, which I never really got when I was studying the language a few years ago.

[@garymcdonald3803]

Just discovered your channel, really enjoyed this as an amateur linguistics nerd! My knowledge of tenses was really helped when I did Latin in school, as it seems to be the exception to be educated properly on the constructions in your native language. Comparative linguistics is fascinating, learning how other languages just don't convey ideas in the same way.

[@aok76_]

I found this video using KZbin's new "feeling lucky" feature. It was a great watch!

[@languagejones6784]

Thank you!

[@arj.1919]

I've been saying this for years to my English students. You are much clearer than I've ever been. Thanks for this.

[@michaeldriscoll8537]

This was as good an explanation as I ever heard. This really made sense to me for the first time when I learned Russian in college. Thanks

[@conniekitten2409]

Ah, I finally understand the 'imperfect' in imparfait! I get the use, but was always bewildered by rudeness of the name. Looking forward to your explanation of mood. Thanks for another insightful video.

[@Big5ocks]

My French teacher explained this concept pretty well in high school and it’s something I’ve always been conscious of learning new languages. Thanks for the clear and detailed explanation 😊

[@ericcaldwell3584]

This video I earned my subscription. Very well done!

[@gandolfthorstefn1780]

You've been a great help Languagejones. Because of you I'm starting to find linguistics very interesting. I hope one day you will tackle the Celtic languages, especially Welsh which is an Alice in Wonderland for linguists. Especially the Verb 'bod' which is the cornerstone of the language,but in itself doesn't seem to be translatable except in relation to other words and acts as a separate tense or mood marker. I have oversimplified this verb because it also acts as an auxiliary in forming most of the periphrastic tenses. All in all Celtic languages are unique in a lot of ways and I find them the most interesting except Manchurian which is really cool.

[@undekagon2264]

I love this content. new awpects before, but am always fascinated about how much easier it is to understand languages and vern conjugation when knowing about it.

[@jeremiahreilly9739]

Taylor, another great video! For me the poster child of aspect is modern Greek and the poster child of mood is ancient Greek.

[@mutlutaygut8580]

I’ve always thinking about something like the aspect you talked about. Now it made me releifed hearing about that

[@erichbrough6097]

Brilliant, concise and in-depth, not to mention satisfying - bravo! 🙌

[@gregorycain3424]

I love that your book recommendations are by Bernard Comrie. The book that got me interested in linguistics was "The world's major languages" that he edited and wrote a section in.

[@daysandwords]

Dude I did not think this would be interesting enough to watch all the way through. I loved it. I don't know enough about this to know what class it falls under but Swedish does this weird thing where it normally requires an auxiliary verb to make the perfect, just like English (e.g. "He has fallen/had fallen...") but sometimes, in a way that I've certainly not entirely mastered, is allowed to skip the auxiliary verb, e.g. "She didn't know if David would be ok, given his -fallen- from the roof." (this is a pretty bad translation, but you get the idea).

[@geminni22]

Thank you. I have been doing Chinese for 50 years. I knew everything you said and how to use all four aspect markers, but I had just not put it together in a coordinated whole. After playing with Spanish and presently learning German, everything becomes a little clearer with your video in relation to tense, aspect. Again, thank you for the video.

[@rooseveltnut]

Aspect ...never heard of it before. Thanks. I will be researching this. Oh, and Your videos are wonderful. Just found yours today.

[@SamothIorio]

Excellent video Taylor! This whole mess is just as messy in Spanish grammar teaching (for natives): people only talk about "tiempos verbales", and hardly ever about aspect, and you're expected to know what mood is but it's hardly ever explained. I only ever understood grammar when I read about (silent) grammatical features, and it was easier learning about that in English, since there are only so many ways you can mark [+REALIS] and [-REALIS] clauses, unlike Spanish. If you ever do a follow-up video or a Q&A session, would you please explain the difference between the Perfective and "the Perfect" in English? I was taught the second is a kind of combination of tense and aspect. I kinda understand that many European languages have fusional language traits, such as combining tense and aspect into a single morpheme, but I find it really hard to understand "the Perfect" in particular.

[@languagejones6784]

I literally have to google perfective/perfect every time I'm writing a paper that touches on it. I should probably dive into it and make a video, like you asked for.

[@Lawfair]

Thank you for acknowledging the difficulty that subjunctive gives native English speakers learning French and Spanish. I have no need for really learning either language, which was one difficulty I experienced when trying to learn them, but I kept going anyway, because maybe someday it would be beneficial. Then I finally encountered, subjunctive, which my brain wouldn't let me construct, it made more sense to me to think of it as conditional or future interior.

[@moongloomable]

Great video. Thank you for explaining it so well.

[@MTimWeaver]

Nice topic, and love your videos and delivery style. I was wondering if there were Wikipedia page you'd recommend as a start for this topic?

[@jameskennedy7093]

Chinese also uses the same construction for future as English. For example, 我要去。”I will go” (literally, in the sense that yào is the historical verb for “want” although in Chinese it’s still used for “want”).

[@ixchelssong]

I think when I was learning French in high school, I was very good with the tenses (etc?) we learned. But... they were the things I forgot immediately after all my studies! 😅😅

[@byronwilliams7977]

I love that Arrival reference. Chapeau a toi.

[@shannonlong4551]

I love your videos! This one was super interesting. Spanish was my second language, and I actually love the subjunctive. I think it's a useful idea to convey. I'd be interested to see how I can apply this to the language I'm currently working on: Korean. It has so many interesting endings for verbs, but most of them I think must be 'moods.'

[@mathewdallaway]

I love how this overview covers these concepts in many languages. Having the canvas painted in many colour schemes is a great teaching approach. I tell my students that "past" and "present" are misnomers for tense, as those language forms refer not necessarily to time, but at base to real vs. unreal (as in some other languages.). Past "time reference" can be derived from that. If it's not here and now... "If it rained tomorrow, we could..." Thank you for this series--lots of useful ideas here.

[@jillsmudski1811]

I just found you channel; thank you! I'm coming at this as an ESL teacher, but I don't really know any other languages. (Vague memories of HS French and currently trying to learn Hebrew [btw thanks for the Duolingo video]. Your videos are very helpful for my understanding, which I'm sure helps with my teaching!

[@jillsmudski1811]

Sorry - forgot the ) !

[@buildwithjami]

loving the style of content

[@Vera-fo3tm]

Thank you very much! This video was very useful for me. I'm learning English (my native language is Russian). When I read about the theory of tenses that you talk about in this video, I began to understand the future tense better.

[@EasterMegs]

Glad i found this channel!

[@awoteim]

"Three tenses" *English conditionals* *Future Perfect Continous* (at least in Poland I was told that English has these 12 tenses so yeah. and nobody uses it)

[@grapepie3]

It was in teaching Spanish that I finally understood aspect and tense (studying it, it was all just confusing), but it was in watching this video that I had a word to attach to the idea of aspect. So, thank you for that!

[@provideleverage]

every once in a while the reccomendations get it right. subscribed.

[@stealdream]

Great video! It's helped me have a much better understanding of the similarities and differences between tense, aspect and mood. What do you think of context in relation to tense, aspect and mood? I think the more we understand these subtle differences of tense, aspect and mood, the better we will all be at staying within context while in conversation. For me, context is the umbrella which houses tense, aspect and mood; the "big picture", if you will. However, since context can vary greatly depending on the culture, the room for misunderstanding or misinterpretation is quite great, even with a knowledge of grammar or grammatical syntax. The more and the better we understand other cultures and languages within its respective context, the better we will be a communicating with each other. Thank you, Dr. Jones.

[@emilyrln]

I'll have been thinking about mood for a while when you post the video 😂

[@dollopsofspraycream]

Looking forward to the mood video!

[@DaveTexas]

Your videos are exceptionally good! Both informative and entertaining. A lot of that is you and your excellent facial expressions…and how handsome you are. That’s what drew me in the first time, I admit. Subjunctive was the bane of my existence in middle school Spanish. I didn’t understand it at all. My teacher was from Cuba and didn’t explain tenses or aspects or anything like that. She wanted to teach us by immersion, but the school district made her use a curriculum and a specific textbook. The teacher just spoke in Spanish all the time and we were sort of on our own when it came to verbs. The ninth-grade Spanish teacher at the high school didn’t like those of us who came from that middle school for two reasons - we didn’t know our tenses well, and we all spoke with Cuban accents. She tried to train the accent out of us, but I think I still have a bit of Cuban in my Spanish. In college, I took five semesters of German. I had a better time with German, picking up verbs much more quickly. Having a third gender was a bit of a curveball. (I still hate gendered nouns..) After that, it’s been a little French and a little Italian for my job as an opera translator; I do the surtitles for an opera company, so I had to learn enough French and Italian to get by in opera. I can’t tell you much about tenses in either language, however. I can go from those languages to English well enough, but don’t ask me to translate English into either of those languages…

[@jamesgabor9284]

I’ve been struggling with all the ‘tenses’ in my German class for 3 years now and just hearing what tense and aspect are clears so much up because it was never explained.

[@cyberherbalist]

I just noticed the O'Reilly computer books in your bookshelf! At least two are part of the "In a Nutshell" series, and one of those is about Unix.

[@rugbybeef]

Hey, so I am really enjoying your channel and Beatrice Santorini changed my life with her syntax course. I am a very mathematical and logic minded person and had a very difficult time with topics in English and learning Spanish that are somewhat glossed over in primary and secondary school: expletive there & it and count and person agreement especially. I was hoping you might discuss mood distinctions that I have been encountering while reading laws and discussing philosophy: obligation; that I have heard of via Lingthusiasm: certainty or experienced personally; and also that I much discussed as a sexual health educator and medical researcher: consent/willingness. It feels like we simply get hand waving around the imperative or the conditional in American education and these are left to foreign language instruction contexts and when the subjunctive and aspect/completeness/progression are introduced. However, I was hoping you might oblige us with a tour or discussion of more nuanced moods such as the optative, the hortative, the jussive, the obligative, the necessitative, the presumptive, the interferential, and other moods with obligation, consent, and evidentiary bearing. Also, I am curious how one discusses these disjunctive potential futures and their relationship with time or closed/open potentiality as to opportunities lost/precluded (counterfactual outcomes -- "Were I to have gone to graduate school") versus open-but-as-yet-unrealized outcomes ("Were I to go to graduate school") Also, I have an interesting (possibly fun‽) sentence I wrote and have yet to send. It is a bit of a Gordian knot as every time I think about it syntactically it is crippling. I have tried to send it... each time I tried to break it down and have thus far failed (but this time I may yet overcome). > "I sing your praises to all that will hear it, and in the past to some who would rathered not done so." The part I initially became fixated on was how to express the past nature of a possible future that is now both decided and counterfactual to reality. Then I noticed that rather was seeming licensing an infinitive and I then read a paper on verbal rather which pointed out the ambiguity of a null subject (which I think is resolved by scoping), the "do so" pro-verb (which refuses to provide clarity to the subject ambiguity by tracing to either me singing praises or their past listening), whether said "do so"-"pro-verb" should be marked +[PAST] or +[PERFECT?] (which really wants an auxiliary-have → "not have done so"), but wait should it be "had not done so" or "not had done so" or ... and that's before even mentioning verbal "rather[ed?]" and its own auxiliary-have conundrum. The sentence is equally ambiguous with zero, one, or two auxiliary-haves as to who and what some would have rather or rathered not occur (but for local scoping preferring them over me). Also is the negation of them having listened despite their own best efforts not to listen or despite my insistence on singing? In the end having heard was non-consensual, but who is to blame me or themselves? (I had written this particular sentence and then spent so much time trying to determine what it was about it that it parsed quite naturally when I wrote it but upon editing left me baffled, that I never told the person of whose praises I had sung that I had done so regardless of to whom and whether they chose to listen with or without consensuality). I need to stop or this Gordian knot will continue to tug in its oh so many directions

[@fhengal]

very nicely done, sir!

[@desdafinado]

heyy great video as usual! just pointing out: as of today, your link for the "tense" book is actually directing to lyle campbell's historical linguistics (which is also great)

[@MarcusEskilsson]

This is what I have been looking for since forever! This video specifically and other videos in general. I'm a native swedish speaker, also fluent dutch+english and every now and then I get the idea I should pick up french but all "frans voor zelfstudie" books/courses leave me with a feel of "I guess I can buy a baguette, but I do not understand what is going on in this language". Now I kinda understand why things don't make sense, thanks. So now I plan to buy these books + some from another video you have. I'd love to use your affiliate links but they lead me to US amazon, I shop off of NL amazon; is there some solution to this? Also I must say that the idea from another video of telling dutch people dat nederlands een grappig taal is.. this is a complete game changer for me.

[@jjero1]

Would you consider making a video with book recommendations for those wanting to teach themselves linguistics? Books for the autodidact covering morphology, semantics, phonetics etc.

[@yahyatsb8709]

Thanks Dr Jones. I'm from Indonesia, speaking English, French, and Arabic. Your explanation about tense, aspect. mood and modality greatly improves my understanding of these languages. Also, given the fact that Indonesian language doesnt apply tense, your discussion on aspect gave me another point of view I've been looking for so long.

[@rais1953]

We English speakers have plenty to learn with Indonesian verbs though! I learned with practice, let's take an imaginary verb "verb". Berverb, terverb, diverbi, diverbkan, memverb, memverbi, memverbkan, memperverbi, memperverbkan, diperverbi, diperverbkan, pemverb, pemverban, diperverb-verbkan... and most of these forms which are perfectly natural to Indonesians are quite new to English speakers. Living in Thailand for two years I found that Thais found Indonesian/Malay very difficult as their language, like Mandarin, has no different verb forms. Anyway it may console my Indonesian friends to know that my Australian students found Indonesian verbs difficult! 😊

[@aimeekeel]

I loved this video, and will continue loving it. 😂

[@joewhite4564]

American here. I am not sure how, but after watching this vid, it became about 20% easier to understand my Taiwanese co-worker's intent. Both written and verbal. It has made life easier for us both! Thanks!

[@darrendrapkin4508]

Many years ago now, I had a discussion about how to express the future in English. I said that there are only "will" and "shall" , which are defective verbs, and references to time explicity. And that except to sound old-fashioned we have lost "shall".

[@smizmar8]

Omg, this video was great, when I was in primary school, I learned aspect and tense as 1 concept in English. I left a comment on your polyglot tricks video about verb tenses in Mandarin Chinese. This video did clear up a few of those questions. However, if one Chinese character is viewed as a word, it makes sense that there are no tenses linguistically speaking. However, as a very natural speaker of Mandarin Chinese (still quite far from native I might add) I've come to think of a 字 as a syllable, rather than a word. Is it not then a little bit harder to say there is no tenses in Mandarin?... Hmm, I think I need to join the Patreon lol.

[@julietardos5044]

The past, present, and future walked into a bar. It was tense.

[@L.Spencer]

My mind is blown, hearing you speak Chinese. I have been studying it on Duolingo (and found your channel because of your video on Duolingo) for a few years now. I have gathered that le means past, but now I'm seeing it's all much more complex. I have a BA in Spanish, and have taught ESL, but I'm not much of an expert on languages. I was flabbergasted when I was learning French, also on Duolingo, that French doesn't have a progressive tense. I thought it was just like Spanish. Anyway, I'm sure I'm going to learn a lot from your videos. Thanks!

[@stephenbouchelle7706]

Interesting. My grammar professor, Dianne Larson Freeman, used The Grammar Book for our text. It does go into detail about the tense aspect system, but less theoretically than for practical teaching approaches. As I recall, in general, the book leans on Chompsky’s grammatical theories.

[@jeffsykes4589]

I'm in the middle of the Alliterative podcast on Tense in English. I'll listen to more tonight at work

[@adapienkowska2605]

No, nobody had ever explained it at school (one English teacher actually dismissed the notion that English could be look as if it didn't have future tense, and in retrospect I think she never took a look at the idea). But I've heard about it before, in a colang video of all places, and it made so much sense! I share it with as many people as I can. Also, your explanation of differences between 在 着 过 了 is one of the best I've heard and would have saved me a lot of trouble if I had heard it before.

[@zammich3649]

if only i had had that mandarin explanation when i was in college actively studying the language. i'm pretty sure i was randomly popping them on...

[@paulwalther5237]

I vaguely remember the modal verb to want in German can sometimes be used to convey future. I like foreign languages but to be honest I fall in the camp that only gets these concepts like the subjunctive vaguely and can't properly apply them in real life when speaking a foreign language. I have to just guess and hope for the best.

[@douglasclerk2764]

I like Douglas Adams' comment on the effect of time travel on the tenses - for example future perfect fell away because it was found not to be.

[@AmandaInEly]

I really love this one. I should read some more linguistics.

[@Quantum-yz9fc]

My favorite thing is that verbs that end with "ing" act more like adjectives than anything else with some form of "to be" as the verb in the sentence.

[@baumgrt]

Participle forms are adjectives created from verbs. Sometimes, though probably rarely, they can even function as nouns, e.g. “do you mind me opening the window” vs “do you mind my opening the window”. When learning English, progressive verb forms baffled me because in standard German, this kind of aspect distinction doesn’t exist, and the present participle is hardly ever used at all. Only later did I realise that I use similar constructions all the time when speaking my native dialect.

[@damian_madmansnest]

Reading Ithkuil grammar enlightened me about possible aspects, moods, and other grammar categories.

[@tsyt7777]

My first time hearing about aspect - fascinating 😊

[@Guishan_Lingyou]

Sapir-Whorf was mentioned in passing, and it reminded me of a very interesting study on the influence of the way languages do, or do not, mark future, and the economic behavior of the speakers of the language. “The Effect of Language on Economic Behavior: Evidence from Savings Rates, Health Behaviors, and Retirement Assets” by Keith Chen. TLDR, Chen presents data that strongly imply that people who speak languages with mandatory future marking save less money than people who speak languages that do no have to mark future.

[@ptsaturn]

I only learned about aspect when studying Japanese, which has verbs that can either be used in perfective or imperfective sentences, but also verbs that can only be perfective, and the same conjugation structures convey different meanings depending on the type. At first I was very surprised that never in school had I heard of this concept, even though in Italian we have several “tenses” that only differ by aspect (and one, the “imperfetto”, that states the aspect in its name). But then I realized that in school I wasn’t even explained the usage of each tens (or mood), professors only demanding us to recite the paradigms, totally relying on us learning from use, with not so good results

[@tommyhuffman7499]

I've spent a fair amount of time studying Greek and a lot of time studying Russian. I've love to see more on this. Choosing the correct verb form is so challenging!

[@sanchellewellyn3478]

Modern Greek and Russian have a similar aspect system--though Russian struck me as more random. If you learn one, the other language becomes easier. The verbs, at least. Now, Navajo, with no tense but seven modes and twelve aspects, puts everything into perspective.

[@oakstrong1]

I remember trying to learn Russian n't couldn't get my head around some tense not existing in my language. In those days you only needed a degree in your subject to become a teacher but none of pedagogical training. It was also a time when coding was done purely on paper and the school only had one Apple machine with a tiny black screen displaying white text - a student wanting to test their code would have to book a slot in advance and get a key to the glass booth... My high school was the one of two schools in the whole country to have a computer and offer coding as a subject! 😂 So, resources outside of school were zero, including the stark lack of material in libraries... I gave up language learning pretty quickly.

[@secretagent7888]

Finally having grappled with the imperfect in French, I was introduced, years later, to the imperfect in Portuguese, which is different I am told but am flumoxed as to how. But I love this stuff; will subscribe at least.

[@wollondillyargyle281]

Well done! Why do many language teachers not know about aspect?

[@kirby_tardigrade]

this is a really good explanation!

[@meconiummagnum]

Great video as always. Watch out with Cantonese ("a Chinese language") as it does mark the verb in the past, gerundif (of which it has at least two ways of saying it). Unsure if other "Chinese languages" have these verb markers.

[@michaelheliotis5279]

My Ancient Greek teacher at university gave us this rundown of tense versus aspect as soon as we started using past tense, which helped me understand the Latin tense-aspect system that I'd already learned and which I then used to help a friend who was studying French. I feel like anyone learning a language should be taught about this, but sadly it often doesn't happen because the native-speaking teachers rarely consider it themselves.

[@ramonalavigne8953]

I'm learning French and you're scaring me. I've heard of passé composé but I haven't started the relevant textbook yet.

[@SoiledWig]

It would have been so helpful if my language classes in high school (Spanish) and college (German and Japanese) would have touched on this at all. Primarily, in the classroom setting, learning the associated culture feels like little more than tourism. Looking at linguistic aspects of a language like this is an invaluable cultural angle, as we better understand how people communicate and express themselves in the language, how to think in it.

[@unapatton1978]

I hope I got the point across when I tutored English to fellow engineering students. I had Russian in school, but I certainly did not grasp the idea of aspect then.

[@singingway]

I would like it if you would translate each word of the other-language phrases you use, in order. This helps to appreciate differences in word order and how separate word meanings combine in a phrase to make a new meaning.