​When people talk they don't stay just within one tense.

​They use all other tenses.

​

​When people speak in the past they not only speak in simple past.

​They use a combination of tenses:

​Like the simple past, the past continuous and the past perfect (among others)

​Let's look at examples of people speaking in the past:

​

​Let's talk about simple past:

things that happened or existed before now.​

​There are two kinds of verbs:

Regular and Irregular

​

For Regular verbs you add -(e)d at the end

​

​Irregular verbs can either:

• ​Change completely.

• ​Change only in one letter.

• ​Stay the same

• ​Stay the same but with different pronunciation.

​To make a positive sentence in the simple past:

​Subject + verb conjugated in past.

​" She knew I wasn't coming"

​

​To make a negative sentence in the simple past:

​Subject + did+ not+ verb in base form

​"She did not (didn't) know I wasn't coming"

​

​To make a question in the simple past:

​Did + subject + verb in base form.

"Did she know I was coming?"

​Let's talk about the past continuous:

​Be careful to use to correct auxiliary

​I

​You Was

​We

​They

​He

​She Were

​It

​Now we're only missing the past perfect.

​We can use the past perfect to show the order of two past events. The past perfect shows the earlier action and the past simple shows the later action

In this tense​ we use the past participle

​

​To create a sentence in the past perfect