There are past, present, future, continuous, if, conditional. It's too complicated. Where can we get a complete website to learn all these once and for all?
Not to mention there are other grammar topics we need to cover later.
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Someone once told me fourteen; I never bothered to count them myself to check. You're right there's a lot (ha, my first language has three indicative tenses, two conditional one of which is obsolete, and one imperative, and that's it), but they form a pretty coherent system, so it's not too hard to learn. And having no declension or even genders apart from pronouns, English is still very easy to learn as second languages go. Don't get intimidated. – Divizna Jan 09 '23 at 12:35
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English has exactly two inflectional tenses: past and present—or more accurately, past and non-past. That's all. So for example, the past tense of speak is spoke and the past tense of try is tried. It’s very easy, at least once you get past the irregular forms.
But an infinitive is not a tense. Inflecting a verb for the singular or plural is not a tense. Nor is inflecting a verb for the first or third person. Creating participles is not a tense. An aspect is not a tense. A modal verb is not a tense. A progressive construction is not a tense. A perfect construction is not a tense. A passive construction is not a tense. A conditional construction is not a tense. Those do describe certain kinds of verbal constructions, but they are not tenses.
Multiword verbal constructions like you see in could have been being told to start running are not tenses. It doesn't have a name. It doesn't need a name. It doesn't even have a tense, either. That construction certainly does exist, of course, because as you see I have just now used it. But so do infinitely many more such nameless constructions also exist.
Some people give some of these things names, and for those who do there is no limit on the number of names that people give them. You cannot learn them all, and you don't need to.
Unless, perhaps, your teacher has told you that you must or else he's going to fail you in your class. Then you have to do precisely what you're told to do, or else. Do that and you're done.
Once you get out of that class, you'll never need to know those silly made-up names. No native speaker knows them. All they know is present tense and past tense, and that's all you need to know as well.
tchrist
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2and to start my morning with this, good morning to my tenses too. Brilliant answer, as always. :) – Mohit Jan 09 '23 at 05:11
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1Good answer. It is useful for English learners to know the names of common verb constructions (such as the present perfect continuous) so that they can do their own research on those particular forms. Nevertheless, it is sufficient for English teachers to refer to "the present perfect continuous", not to "the present perfect continuous tense". – Shoe Jan 09 '23 at 08:45
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1I think it is better to say that English has two tense systems: an inflectional system contrasting preterite and present, and an independent analytic tense system contrasting perfect and non-perfect, where non-perfect is not a tense but the absence of perfect tense. The perfect tense can combine with the preterite and present tense but can also occur in clauses without inflectional tense. On that account preterite and perfect are both instances of the more general tense 'past'. Preterite is the primary (inflectional) past tense, while perfect is the secondary (analytic) past tense. – BillJ Jan 09 '23 at 12:21
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1I think it is better to restrict the technical sense tense to the two inflectional tenses and use the more general (but still thoroughly described) term construction for all of the various verbal syntactic thingies that have inflicted our verb phrases in recent centuries. Like the ones illustrated here with their "tense" names. – John Lawler Jan 09 '23 at 15:55
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Why? The perfect is a past tense, an analytic one, and is just as much a tense as the inflectional ones. – BillJ Jan 09 '23 at 17:48