When I was a kid, I enjoyed building things. I made a lot of model cars, planes, and ships. I also liked going to the beach. Every summer, I spent lots of time swimming and playing at the beach. One day, my parents told me we were going to get a swimming pool. I was so excited!
Today, let’s have a look at the simple past tense in English. Most regular verbs form the past tense by adding ed to the end of the verb:
- work → worked / help → helped / play → played / walk → walked
Verbs that end in e form the past tense by adding d to the end of the verb:
- live → lived / dance → danced / shave → shaved / hope → hoped
Many verbs that end in one vowel + one consonant (except w & y) double the final consonant and add ed to form the past tense:
- hop → hopped / plan → planned / rub → rubbed / stop → stopped /
For verbs that end in consonant + y, change the y to i and add ed to form the past tense:
- cry→cried / study→studied / dry→dried / hurry→hurried
Then, there are a lot of irregular verbs that have special spellings for their past tense form:
- eat→ ate / go →went / put →put /have →had
So what do we use the simple past tense for? Well, we use the past to talk about completed actions at a specific point in time in the past.
- Jack completed his accounting report this morning.
- We went to Miami last April.
- Gloria and Sal got married in 1959.
- The package from the bookshop arrived yesterday.
We also use the simple past when we tell stories:
- A long, long time ago, an old man lived in the mountain. The mountain was near the sea, and few other people lived there.
If you know anyone who might be interested in this English language point, why not help them out! Just share this lesson with them. Thanks for studying today!
