What Are the Active Tenses Used in English?
Despite being native speakers of English, we do not necessarily know the grammar of our own language. Strictly speaking, it is not necessary, for the most part we can recognise when something is grammatically incorrect because we have spoken the language all our lives but it is useful to know if we are going to enter some form of teaching. The grammar of the English language is replete with rather unedifying labels, this is because those that came to construct a grammar of English were schooled in the classics and tried to shoe horn Latin and Greek structures into our Germanic based English grammar. This article will try to break those labels down to simplify the concepts. Tenses are to do with time. The labels that we used are all prefaced with either past, present or future. The second part of the label we use are simple, progressive (U.S) or continuous (UK), perfect and perfect continuous. As we have three time frames and four tense types so we can say that there are 12 active tense
