Sooner or later most of the students learning the English language begin to feel depressed facing difficulties in understanding and using the seemingly complicated English tense system. The main task of the teacher is to show them what the English have so many tense forms of the verb for. Unlike as in many modern European languages that are inflected, in English, the word order is essential to the meaning of a sentence. Thus, we have to distinguish carefully between the subject and the predicate of the English sentence and remember that the change in word order brings with it a fundamental change in meaning. The suggested system of signs was designed to help students understand how, when and what for English tense forms are used.
CONTENTS ENGLISH TENSES GUIDE ENGLISH TENSES – TABLE PASSIVE VOICE WORD ORDER / THE ORDER OF ADJECTIVES CONDITIONALS / REPORTED SPEECH / REPORTED SPEECH IN SIGNS THE INFINITIVE AND THE -ING FORM / THE -ING FORM / GERUND / INFINITIVE OR -ING FORM