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Hi everyone, welcome to my channel. Today I'm talking about the past progressive
- that's verbs like this -, and I'm talking about the past simple, that's verbs like this,
and - that's just the form -, and I'm also talking about interrogatives - like this -, and
negatives, like this. Hope you enjoy it!
I'm going to start with the past progressive, then I'll look at the past simple.
OK, here's Maria, and yesterday she was walking to college, when it started to rain.
So, we have WALK, add -ING to make WALKING, then use WAS with 'I, he, she or Maria'.
That's when it's one person, but here there are two of them; Maria and Sam were walking
together So, we have WALK again, add -ING to make WALKING,
then we use WERE, and we use WERE with 'we, they, and Maria and Sam'.
So the first group is singular, and the second group is plural
And there's one more word to go: YOU. YOU goes in the middle, because it's singular
or plural - but the verb is always plural. YOU started life as plural, but now it's both.
Now let's ask a question, and I'll use a different verb: CYCLE.
Here it is: She was cycling But it's a question, so we take the auxiliary verb WAS, and the
subject SHE, and we change the order like this, and we add a question mark:
Was she cycling to college? And the same in the plural:
They were cycling to college We change the order to make a question, like
this: Were they cycling to college?
And don't forget the question mark And we use question words like WHO, WHAT,
WHERE and WHEN What were they doing? Where were they going?
Who was she texting? When was he coming? Now going back to the first two questions,
the answer is NO, so we take the sentences again, and we put in NOT after the auxiliary
verbs WAS or WERE, like this: She was not cycling to college. They were
not cycling to college. That's the emphatic version, but we mostly use a contraction,
and instead of WAS NOT we say WASN'T. But it's good to remember about the emphatic versions,
because that'll come up again when we're talking about the past simple.
OK, now let's move on to the past simple. Here's Maria again: She walked home after
class But we can say that another way, with emphasis;
we can say she did walk home after class. And the -ed has gone, because the past tense
is right here, in DID. This emphatic form, which years ago we used
to use much more for the past tense, we now use to make questions, like this; we take
the SHE and the DID, and we change them around, and we get
Did she walk home with Sam? don't forget the question mark.
And here's the same sentence again, this time to make a negative: we take NOT, we push the
verb over a bit, and we put the NOT in, and there we have a negative sentence:
She did not walk home with Sam. And just as before, we mostly use a contraction,
and say DIDN'T. She didn't walk home with Sam
Now I've just looked at regular verbs, which form the past tense by adding -ED to the base
form, and that's true of most verbs in English. But unfortunately it's not true of the hundred
or so most common verbs in the language, which are irregular:
We have sit, past tense sat; buy, past tense bought, go, past tense went and so on.
We have several other videos on irregular verbs, but I want to say now that the emphatic,
interrogative and negative forms are exactly the same as for regular verbs, like this:
He went home is past tense, but we also have emphatic He did go home, and that gives us
an interrogative, did he go home? and a negative, he didn't go home.
There are other videos about how we use the past simple and progressive; look at my channel,
and you'll find them in the playlist Verb Tenses, or look in the Index at the top.
OK, that's all for today, hope you found it useful. Bye for now!