No teacher or student is surprised when tenses become a point of frustration in the learning process. Notorious for being difficult to apply, tenses are dreaded my most ESL learners. Even though English tenses are not nearly as complicated as the tenses of say French or Spanish, they are still tricky to grasp. The most complicated part is that there are a lot of rules and when we look at all of them in totality, the task of remembering all of them seems impossible. This leaves you feeling defeated before you start.
The key aspect of tenses is to study one tense until you understand it and can apply it. There is a great temptation to want to rush through all of the twelve tenses because we assume that once we absorb the information, we will miraculously be able to apply them to our thinking and our speech. Tenses cannot be learned in this way. Although it may be frustrating to slow down and wait a longer time to be able to understand and use all the English tenses, if you pace yourself and study verb conjugation in a calm and relaxed way, your brain has a far better chance of comprehending and successfully applying these complicated linguistic dance moves.
Most students find the rules for each tense relatively easy to understand but the difficulty comes in when you have to figure out which tense to use in the moment as you are speaking. This is particularly difficult for ESL learners with a B1 or B2 level who have who have taken a big break from English classes but have continued to speak English incorrectly (usually in their jobs) for many months or years. You would be surprised by how many students I have taught who were in this situation! Why is this so threatening to your English fluency? The danger is that your brain absorbs patterns.
So, put simply, when you use a particular tense incorrectly, over and over again, it becomes extraordinarily difficult to go back and correct the pattern you have established in your mind. Your mouth is now moving faster than your ability to remain aware of what you are saying and how you are saying it. This causes massive frustration for students and, most unfortunately, can become a path to giving up and building a blockage towards learning English. When this happens, your goals suffer; your motivation and confidence diminish too. Once this begins to happen, your original drive to improve your English fades into the background and your career, job, travel plans – whatever it was that made you want to improve your English – begin to pay the price.
The real key is to learn tenses the correct way, at a slow pace, right from the beginning. Start with one and do not move on from that tense until you are sure you understand its use and you are able to apply it to your own thinking and speech. Of course, please do not think you will not make mistakes. Verb conjugation in all languages is multi-faceted and complex. Remember, fluency is about noticing and correcting your mistakes before your teacher does. Fluency has nothing to do with speaking a language perfectly.
In my next article, I will be taking a closer look at the concept of time and how it can impact our use and comprehension of language.
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