How many tenses are there in English answer?
The three tenses in English are: Present Tense. Past Tense. Future Tense.
Learning English verb tenses can be challenging for non-native speakers because there are so many rules to remember. By using a chart, you can simplify the task of learning all 13 tenses by breaking them down into different sentence structures.
- past simple. present simple. future simple.
- one. two. three.
- present continuous. future continuous. future perfect continuous.
Traditional English Grammar includes 12 tenses. This number is supported by many linguists of specialized web sites. Self-teaching guidebook by Tatiana Trofimenko indicates 26 tenses. Based on authoritative online sources, there are 16, 24, and even from 2 to 4 tenses.
A Spanish verb has six present-tense forms, and six each in the preterite, imperfect, future, conditional, subjunctive and two different past subjunctives, for a total of 48 forms.
16 Verb Tenses
One other answer that you will see sometimes is that there are 16 tenses. This response includes the 12 tense/aspect combinations mentioned above, as well as the 4 future-in-the-past constructions: Future in the Past. Future Continuous in the Past.
The simple tenses (past, present, and future) are the most basic forms, but there are 12 major verb tenses in English in all.
While there are 16 verb tenses in the English language, not all of them are commonly used. For example, the progressive tense is typically only used when describing ongoing actions, while the perfect tense is used to describe actions that have been completed.
How Many Tenses are There in Japanese? Japanese has only two verb tenses, which are the present tense and the past tense. The present tense is also used to express things about the future in Japanese, so there's no clear distinction between the present tense and the future tense.
For the sake of simplicity, Learners of English as a Foreign or Second Language are usually taught that - taking into account aspect and future modals - there are 12 tenses in English.
How many tenses does Russian have?
However, you can breathe a sigh of relief: there are only three tenses in Russian—present, past, and future.
Examples of tenseless languages are Burmese, Dyirbal, most varieties of Chinese, Malay (including Indonesian), Thai, Yukatek (Mayan), Vietnamese and in some analyses Greenlandic (Kalaallisut) and Guaraní.

In total, the German language has six different tenses, which are used to describe events and actions from the past, present and future. In other words, the tense you choose will depend on when the event or action you are describing is actually taking place.
Italian has a total of 21, divided into two forms (compared to 12 tenses in English) and a total of seven moods, also split into two categories. (Here's a full explanation of what that means.) But all this can feel a bit much when you're still perfecting your coffee order. All of these tenses are still in use in Italy.
Across multiple sources, Mandarin Chinese is the number one language listed as the most challenging to learn. The Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center puts Mandarin in Category IV, which is the list of the most difficult languages to learn for English speakers.
Hungarian
The grammar of Hungarian is significantly different from that of Indo-European languages such as English. The language has no grammatical gender and it uses suffixes instead of prepositions which makes Hungarian one of the most difficult languages in the world.
The present perfect tense is the most difficult tense in English because there are so many unpredictable situations and contexts which throw a spanner into the works of the 'current relevance' argument.
In Korean, they have only three tenses: past, present, and future.
Past, present and future are the three main types of tenses.
Tenses that normally appear together in sentences: present simple and present perfect, present simple and present continuous, past simple and present perfect, past simple and past continuous, past simple and past perfect.
How many future tenses are there in English?
There are four future verb tenses in English.
Unlike French, German or English, Chinese has no verb conjugation (no need to memorize verb tenses!) and no noun declension (e.g., gender and number distinctions).
There are 16 tenses in Spanish, but some Spanish experts consider "conditional" to be a tense, which can also be considered a "mood." It's important to understand the basics of how verbs are conjugated before we talk about all of them. There are three types of regular verbs in Spanish.
Verbs in Hindi can be put into 3 aspects (habitual, progressive, perfective), 5 moods (indicative, presumptive, contrafactual, subjunctive, imperative), and 3 tenses (present, past, future).
Separate them - Separate the tenses as we've done - the past, the present, and the future. Focus on a single category - Don't go learning all the tenses at once. Take your time, otherwise, there'll be confusion. Start from the past, master it, and then move on.
Unlike English, Japanese does not have separate tenses for present and future - both "I eat" and "I will eat" are covered by the verb form (tabemasu). But anything that took place in the past is covered by the past tense, which ends in (shita).
Tense. There are three tenses in Arabic: the past tense (اَلْمَاضِي al-māḍī), the present tense (اَلْمُضَارِع al-muḍāriʿ) and the future tense.
In the indicative mood there are seven tenses: present, imperfect, future, aorist (the equivalent of past simple), perfect, pluperfect, and future perfect. (The last two, especially the future perfect, are rarely used).
Tenses that normally appear together in sentences: present simple and present perfect, present simple and present continuous, past simple and present perfect, past simple and past continuous, past simple and past perfect.
- Simple Present Tense.
- Simple Past Tense.
- Simple Present Tense.
- Present Continuous Tense.
- Simple Future Tense.
- Simple Past Tense.
- Present Perfect Tense.
- Present Perfect Tense.
Is there a language with no tenses?
As noted at the outset of this article, Chinese is usually classified as a tenseless language, as its verbs are not inflected for overt morphological tense markers.
Present | Past | |
---|---|---|
Simple | I walk | I walked |
Progressive | I am walking | I was walking |
Perfect | I have walked | I had walked |
Perfect Progressive | I have been walking | I had been walking |
The tenses in Korean are simpler than English as well. In Korean, they have only three tenses: past, present, and future. In English, we have those tenses, as well as present progressive and present perfect. Because there are fewer tenses in Korean grammar, there is less conjugation.
Tense | Indefinite | Perfect Continuous |
---|---|---|
Present | I play | I have been playing |
Past | I played | I had been playing |
Future | I shall play | I shall have been playing |
In total, the German language has six different tenses, which are used to describe events and actions from the past, present and future. In other words, the tense you choose will depend on when the event or action you are describing is actually taking place.
The Nine Chinese Verb Tenses.