Could have used this video a few weeks ago while desperately trying to explain to someone how Japanese can have a "non-past" tense... This is definitely going in the bookmarks list
yeah and you can drop so much from a Japanese sentence and it'll still be a full sentence because it's all about the context.. they don't have plurals, you don't need to have a subject.. you could even use an onomatopoeia for a sentence. lol Very strange but I love learning it
@@elderscrollsswimmer4833, On the contrary, Finnish has all the same tenses as English except the future and future perfect. It even has the same continuous tenses. And it even uses them mostly like in English. It uses the present for the future and the perfect for the future perfect.
To help my Spanish students understand the subjunctive, I first taught it to them in English. We started by singing, "I wish I were an Oscar Mayer wiener," then I introduced the English words that require the subjunctive (demand, insist, etc.) with examples. One day of English instruction helped them understand when and why to use the subjunctive; mastering its use required a good deal of practice. Introduced in year 3, more or less mastered in Spanish 5/AP.
Love this! Yes! I think you have to give them a ton of examples in English and then a ton of contrasting examples in Spanish (subjunctive needed vs not needed).
Getting examples and a short English grammar lesson on the subjunctive and the conditional in English sure helps. It also helps if the student knows how to use those properly in English. Even so, I have found the subjunctive present and past to be difficult in Spanish and French. (The conditional makes sense.) One problem is that English doesn't really separate subjunctive and conditional very well. -- I'm trying to re-master Spanish with my vision much worse, so my old textbooks are nearly impossible to read in print. I've been surprised how well I've done, et whew, I'm lacking so much vocabulary for everyday things, and I can tell where my grammar has become weak in ways it never was in school. Plus, I'm getting cross-grade feedback trouble between Spanish and French. (No, it works that way in French, but this way in Spanish, and no, there are not always cognates, and (haha) Spanish speakers are not going to recognize a French word, too different in sound and form.) I was encouraged with my last real test in conversation, but whew, the gaps and the errors I made! (I never had trouble with m/f agreement in school, but now, I'm making errors. Catching them usually, but I need to be better than that.) Still, it was funny and exciting.
I agree: If they only WERE TO use the past subjunctive properly in the examples given in "Learn Spanish" books (from and English speaker's perspective) it would be so much easier. If they _DID_ that, we wouldn't be half as confused as we are! _(WERE TO DO)._
For a long time I didn't realize we have the subjunctive in English. I'm still not sure how to construct it, except I think it uses the past tense form. I learned the structure of English when I learned Spanish. I remember the first month of high school Spanish class, trying to understand the concept of "to be" and then the pronouns and conjugations of ser. After a while it was an aha moment! I am in awe of people that just pick up languages without formal study.
I learned the subjunctive case in Latin and not in English class. I later learned that English also used the subjunctive, in contrary to fact conditions, as in your Oscar Mayer example.
American here. I am not sure how, but after watching this vid, it became about 20% easier to understand my Taiwanese co-worker's intent. Both written and verbal. It has made life easier for us both! Thanks!
In Singapore I'm very used to not marking tense on verbs, and even leaving tense out of sentences entirely (naturally in mandarin and malay and also informally in english), so when I was studying spanish in school I found it helped me to re-analyse the spanish tense-aspect-mood system as whole phrases in those languages. On a side note this also made me appreciate how compact the spanish verbs can get, taking into account the person and number marking too, which I find q cute
I'm in Malaysia now where shop entrances often have signs on them letting me know that I'm getting 'close'. To make up for dropping past endings on verbs that need them, just add more plural endings on nouns that don't need them. I won't be surprised if I see 'carswash' or 'keysboard'. These are both starting to seep into native English speakers usage too. I'm always reading or hearing that somebody 'is bias' or 'is prejudice', but I'm not hearing that anybody is shock yet. Maybe I am luck and just haven't notice yet (-:
I'm learning Mandarin, and I've never had a teacher stop and illustrate the difference between tense and aspect. I think this contributes the the very common problem of folks who are learning Mandarin from English being totally unable to understand why the aspect marker 了 is NOT a past tense marker.
@andrewdunbar828 Most of my Mandarin teachers have studied linguistics, actually. I think it's more to do with teaching philosophy than knowledge gaps. I also wasn't trying to imply this was something specific to Mandarin teachers, I've just never had teachers for other languages so it's my only example.
@@jlittlejohn97You're pretty lucky then. I've known lots of English teachers who don't know these kinds of things, or who themselves learn them along their journey of figuring out how to teach better. There are of course lots of kinds of teachers and not all have qualifications. I don't think I've asked any qualified teach friends about it.
Seriously, I'm an ABC (not exactly, but we'll leave it at that), Mandarin Chinese is my mother tongue. However I never paid attention to the differences between 過 and 了, and surely will never be able to explain it either. I have the feeling most native teachers don't really know either.
I am so glad I found your channel! As a language dork who doesn't always have time to deep dive on my own, videos like this are helping me stay learning key stuff in a digestible format. Thank you. :)
TBH, despite what teachers would likely tell you, you shouldn't bother. You should start with the bits that are relevant to communication and finish the whole thing if you've got time later on. Grammar is mainly about efficiency and clarity, you can screw up grammar in most languages pretty badly before you can't be understood at all and in many places you can communicate a lot with simple 3 word sentences even though they're usually not correct grammatically. The vocab is something that really needs to be right in most cases or the other party will have no idea what you're talking about and that's really where the attention should be. The big question tends to be what precisely is a word. Linguists have worked on that, but as a practical matter for the rest of us, it's not clear. German has a bunch of seprable prefix words where nearly the entire sentence is located within a single word, as in you start with the latter bit of the word, have most of the sentence, then get back to the beginning of that first word. English does something similar with phrasal verbs, but because of reasons, we don't ever write them as a single word even though they behave in a similar fashion to the German separable prefix words. Then you have issues with things like to morrow, to-morrow and tomorrow as they evolve from two words to one word, is that hyphenated word a single word from a practical standpoint, or not?
Can't wait for the mood/modality video. I nearly broke my brain on my Mormon mission trying to conceptualize what the subjunctive "was doing" with no access to a library or internet. Keep up the great content.
Parenthetically, hats off to Mormon missionaries abroad. When I was traveling in the south of Spain years ago, they were the best exemplars of Americans, the most polite and respectful. Whenever I ran into one, we always conversed in Spanish. “By their fruits will you know them.”
I think you brought up one of the most frustrating aspects of language learning. As a native Russian speaker, at school I was bombarded with a plethora of the most bizarre explanations. I distinctly remember a teacher telling me that English has 12 tenses, while Russian has 3. It all lead to a complete mess inside my head. Reading ‘Meaning and the English verb’ by Geoffrey Leech has demystified it somewhat. I wish there was a better way to introducing tenses and aspects to ESL students. To this day, many believe that mastering the ‘tense table’ equates to mastering English. It’s as terrible as it sounds and it clears nothing. Try explaining Russian verbs the same way. Читал, for example, would be something like, ‘an action in the past that was done incompletely, as opposed to an action completed fully”. It’s pure rubbish. It’s incomprehensible for most learners. So, yeah, very frustrating 😂
I’m a native English speaker and I took two years of Russian in college. My professor actually used читать/прочитать to demonstrate aspect for us. «Что ты делал вчера вечером?» «Я читал » «Я прочитал » It really helped! 🎉
I took a semester of Russian and that was the only time I've heard of aspect. Still not sure what it was and don't remember much from the class. Though I can say I was fluent in Russian one night, after having food poisoning from Burger King. I was fluent in my dreams that night. No joke!
Sympathies. My girlfriend is from Latvia and russian is her native language. She has just reached level C1 classes in English but she still isn't very confident about the tenses. The thing is, she doesn't really have a concept of aspects. This may startle many people but most native russian speakers don't even notice it, and are perplexed when I point it out. English does in fact have similar distinctions, especailly continuous vs simple tenses, but it is analysed as a variety of tenses when in fact all the continuous tenses could be reduced to "some tense of 'to be' + some participle".
For me, the most fun way to express time is in sign language (though I had only a little experience with the Polish sign language). Would you consider including sign languages in your future videos? I'm really curious, about how the aspect is conveyed. And how big (or small) the differences between those languages are.
From my very limited knowledge about sign languages, aspects that describe the character of an action (fast, slow, repetitive, etc) are expressed by modifying the sign that denotes the verb (signing faster, slower, or several times). Spatial relations (come/go) and the direction of an action (e.g. who tells whom) are expressed by signing at different positions in relation to the speaker and the listener. As for the differences, there are language families just like with spoken languages. E.g. a lot of sign languages in Europe as well as the Americas either come from or have been influenced by French Sign Language. Taiwan and Korean Sign Languages are related to Japanese Sign Language, while mainland Chinese Sign Language is an isolate.
I love this man, just from reading the title I knew he was going to touch on that phenomenon exactly and he always does such a good job dispelling harmful rumors. Big ups!
I was taught about this when I learned English more formally, but in a veiled way, in which it was still all just referred to as being different tenses. The concept of 'aspect' was never directly adressed. Separating tense and aspect makes so much sense!
This blew my mind on english future tense, especially the example of using time as a way to describe future tense instead of will. That is so crazy to think about!
@languagejones I know I'm late to the party, but as a Brazilian who has spoken Brazilian Portuguese since I first learnt to speak and English since I was 7, I've never understood what Perfect and Imperfect Past Tenses actually meant, and I've just graduated uni. You taught me in 10min what years of formal education could never 😂 Now I want to know what "Pretérito mais-que-perfeito" or 'More-than-perfect past tense' means, in your words! Lots of love from Brazil! 🎉❤
In the Irish language we have a habitual past tense that you can loosely translate as "I used to do..." The tense is fully conjugated within the verb, often as a single word with an embedded pronoun.
I teach the Irish language. This poor tense often gets ignored. Unlike in most text books, I teach it before I teach the conditional. And this helps the students get a better grasp of how to speak about the past, and learn the endings properly, before they have to grapple with the conditional mood (which has the same endings tacked on to a future stem’) and its concepts.
I remember studying English at school as a Russian-Belarusian speaking teen and how the only thing we all could do while studying tense and aspect was to just cram all the rules because we couldn't understand how it worked at all since aspect kinda works differently in both Russian and Belarusian (and by the way all the Russian speaking kids believe that English has like 9 tenses). And it had been that way until I started majoring in linguistics. Then it all finally started to make sense. In fact the question of time and tense was one of my favourite topics during my theoretical grammar course.
no, they are taught English has 16 tenses They have some ridiculously sounding tenses like "Past Future Perfect Continuous Tense". Structure: Subject + would have been + Verb(+ing)
I think I would have enjoyed this video more had I known I was going to be thinking about it tomorrow. Update: I wrote that convoluted yet grammatically "correct" sentence yesterday to demonstrate how a short English sentence can include a multitude of tenses, aspects and moods and must be utterly confusing to folks trying to learn English. When I was a small child (~ages 7 to 9.5) I lived in Mali and learned/spoke a little French. Now as a retired semi-old guy, I'm dipping my toe in the water and thinking about actually learning French for real; all these on-line resources are potentially very helpful. It's easy to complain about the complexity of the French verb tenses but, as speakers of English, we really can't throw too many stones. By the way, I used the words tense, aspect and mood as though I truly understand the linguistic meanings and nuances of these three words; I truly don't (LOL). I will re-watch this video at some point in the near future and hopefully it will be crystal clear.
This was great! I had heard these claims but had never bothered to look into it, but this explains them very clearly. Also this is one of the very few videos I have considered watching at 75% of the tempo. It takes a while to internalize what you're learning.
Dude I did not think this would be interesting enough to watch all the way through. I loved it. I don't know enough about this to know what class it falls under but Swedish does this weird thing where it normally requires an auxiliary verb to make the perfect, just like English (e.g. "He has fallen/had fallen...") but sometimes, in a way that I've certainly not entirely mastered, is allowed to skip the auxiliary verb, e.g. "She didn't know if David would be ok, given his -fallen- from the roof." (this is a pretty bad translation, but you get the idea).
0:00: 🕒 Linguists explain the concepts of tense and aspect in language, debunking common misconceptions about tenses. 2:09: 🕒 Tense refers to when an event happens relative to the moment of speaking. 4:13: 🔢 Chinese does not encode past and future tenses grammatically on the verb, but instead expresses them in a different way. 6:25: 🗒 The video discusses how tense and aspect are combined in different languages and how they are taught in foreign language classes. 8:57: 📚 The speaker initially hated studying linguistic approaches to English, but now recommends books on tense and aspect for understanding and using a new language. Recap by Tammy AI
I love this content. new awpects before, but am always fascinated about how much easier it is to understand languages and vern conjugation when knowing about it.
I really wish more language textbooks included elements of linguistics such as in this video. It would've made learning grammar much, much easier. Also, it seems like the first link in the description leads to a book on Historical Linguistics and not to the book on tenses.
Thank you. I have been doing Chinese for 50 years. I knew everything you said and how to use all four aspect markers, but I had just not put it together in a coordinated whole. After playing with Spanish and presently learning German, everything becomes a little clearer with your video in relation to tense, aspect. Again, thank you for the video.
In my (UK) French lessons, the presentation of verb conjugation seemed to be targeted specifically to cause confusion and failure. However, I've always considered this to be due a failure to teach English formally - there was no effort made to explain anything more than the simplest parts of speech in English, so there was no comparative framework on which to build a foreign language.
Verbal aspect was one of the most frustrating parts of learning Russian when I started in 2017-both the idea of when to use the imperfective/perfective form and the need to learn two verbs for every verb! I’m now two years married to a native Russian/Ukrainian speaker (who didn’t know English when we met) and as a result of using it at home ever since, I’ve developed the Slav brain bumps that let me use aspect instinctively and form perfective-imperfective pairs off verbs I haven’t heard before in the other form. The current question is whether our daughter will say an English or a Russian word first. Right now her favorite syllable is дя/тя, a sound that doesn’t exist in English, so it may be the latter!
Just discovered your channel, really enjoyed this as an amateur linguistics nerd! My knowledge of tenses was really helped when I did Latin in school, as it seems to be the exception to be educated properly on the constructions in your native language. Comparative linguistics is fascinating, learning how other languages just don't convey ideas in the same way.
Slavic verbs come in more than pairs e.g. читать, прочитать, почитать, почитывать, прочитывать (to read, to have read completely, to read for a while, to read now and then, and the last one implies multiple instances of having read completely).
Chinese also uses the same construction for future as English. For example, 我要去。”I will go” (literally, in the sense that yào is the historical verb for “want” although in Chinese it’s still used for “want”).
learning ancient greek and my professor and my textbook called all these stems we were learning "tenses," but they were really refering to aspects with tense being shown mostly by a mutation of the stem, and once i realized this, it all made SO much more sense, and even made my understanding of latin "tenses" better retroactively (i learned latin before greek)
Thank you for acknowledging the difficulty that subjunctive gives native English speakers learning French and Spanish. I have no need for really learning either language, which was one difficulty I experienced when trying to learn them, but I kept going anyway, because maybe someday it would be beneficial. Then I finally encountered, subjunctive, which my brain wouldn't let me construct, it made more sense to me to think of it as conditional or future interior.
Excellent video Taylor! This whole mess is just as messy in Spanish grammar teaching (for natives): people only talk about "tiempos verbales", and hardly ever about aspect, and you're expected to know what mood is but it's hardly ever explained. I only ever understood grammar when I read about (silent) grammatical features, and it was easier learning about that in English, since there are only so many ways you can mark [+REALIS] and [-REALIS] clauses, unlike Spanish. If you ever do a follow-up video or a Q&A session, would you please explain the difference between the Perfective and "the Perfect" in English? I was taught the second is a kind of combination of tense and aspect. I kinda understand that many European languages have fusional language traits, such as combining tense and aspect into a single morpheme, but I find it really hard to understand "the Perfect" in particular.
I literally have to google perfective/perfect every time I'm writing a paper that touches on it. I should probably dive into it and make a video, like you asked for.
Turkish learner here. A fascinating thing about Turkish verbs is that because of the agglutinating form and it's almost perfect regularity (there are five irregular verbs, and it mostly only shoes up in the equivalent of the simple present form) it's really like a lego set. There are past, present and future tenses, positive and negative forms, there's conditional aspect, there's habitual versus imperfective (kind of works like the difference between simple and progressive forms in English), and inferential (i.e. retold). You can have a lot of weird combinations there, for example past + inferential = plusquamperfect. Anyways, I find the inferential form absolutely fascinating. "Evinden almış" = "He/she/they supposedly took it from his/her/their home". If you are using it in first person singular, e.g. evimden almışım, it's like "I guess I got it from my home" or "dude, I was so drunk I have no clue how that happened" :D
Thanks Dr Jones. I'm from Indonesia, speaking English, French, and Arabic. Your explanation about tense, aspect. mood and modality greatly improves my understanding of these languages. Also, given the fact that Indonesian language doesnt apply tense, your discussion on aspect gave me another point of view I've been looking for so long.
We English speakers have plenty to learn with Indonesian verbs though! I learned with practice, let's take an imaginary verb "verb". Berverb, terverb, diverbi, diverbkan, memverb, memverbi, memverbkan, memperverbi, memperverbkan, diperverbi, diperverbkan, pemverb, pemverban, diperverb-verbkan... and most of these forms which are perfectly natural to Indonesians are quite new to English speakers. Living in Thailand for two years I found that Thais found Indonesian/Malay very difficult as their language, like Mandarin, has no different verb forms. Anyway it may console my Indonesian friends to know that my Australian students found Indonesian verbs difficult! 😊
Dude! Back in the 90s I slogged through learning Mandarin (just barely into "advanced") with mainland Chinese language books (while immersed in China society). But I never heard Tense, Aspect, Mood introduced so clearly like this! This would have made it so much clearer for me if I had known this before!!
heyy great video as usual! just pointing out: as of today, your link for the "tense" book is actually directing to lyle campbell's historical linguistics (which is also great)
Your videos are exceptionally good! Both informative and entertaining. A lot of that is you and your excellent facial expressions…and how handsome you are. That’s what drew me in the first time, I admit. Subjunctive was the bane of my existence in middle school Spanish. I didn’t understand it at all. My teacher was from Cuba and didn’t explain tenses or aspects or anything like that. She wanted to teach us by immersion, but the school district made her use a curriculum and a specific textbook. The teacher just spoke in Spanish all the time and we were sort of on our own when it came to verbs. The ninth-grade Spanish teacher at the high school didn’t like those of us who came from that middle school for two reasons - we didn’t know our tenses well, and we all spoke with Cuban accents. She tried to train the accent out of us, but I think I still have a bit of Cuban in my Spanish. In college, I took five semesters of German. I had a better time with German, picking up verbs much more quickly. Having a third gender was a bit of a curveball. (I still hate gendered nouns..) After that, it’s been a little French and a little Italian for my job as an opera translator; I do the surtitles for an opera company, so I had to learn enough French and Italian to get by in opera. I can’t tell you much about tenses in either language, however. I can go from those languages to English well enough, but don’t ask me to translate English into either of those languages…
I think when I was learning French in high school, I was very good with the tenses (etc?) we learned. But... they were the things I forgot immediately after all my studies! 😅😅
Thank you very much! This video was very useful for me. I'm learning English (my native language is Russian). When I read about the theory of tenses that you talk about in this video, I began to understand the future tense better.
This is awesome. I had a weak grasp on this subject after years of studying languages and dabbling in linguistics, but this video really pulled it all together. Also, it gave me a better understanding of aspect in Mandarin, which I never really got when I was studying the language a few years ago.
I love that your book recommendations are by Bernard Comrie. The book that got me interested in linguistics was "The world's major languages" that he edited and wrote a section in.
It was in teaching Spanish that I finally understood aspect and tense (studying it, it was all just confusing), but it was in watching this video that I had a word to attach to the idea of aspect. So, thank you for that!
*This* is quite interesting, and I've never heard it put this way. I am learning Spanish, and learning about the way that language is put together makes me more curious about English and the nuts and bolts of it all. I will check out those books, thank you.
Being native English and all those years of English class, i didn't realize how little i understand English until trying to help Spanish and a French speaker with it
My first foreign language was Latin, with its 6 tenses (as we were taught). That system informs how Spanish, French, and Italian approach their verbs--and also English and German in that English and German grammars were subjected to the rules of Latin. Then came Russian with its tenses and aspects. Easy-peasy, as you say, just three tenses, but two verbs expressing a single English idea. Now there is Hungarian, also very simple verb systems ... except for definite and indefinite conjugations (basically, is there a specific direct object?) ... and verbal prefixes, which sometimes express aspect and sometimes completely change the meaning of the root verb. (And I discover that infinitives can take personal endings, and so, yeah, not so simple after all.) In other words, thinking of verb systems in terms of tense AND aspect is a very useful perspective. Thank you.
I’ve been struggling with all the ‘tenses’ in my German class for 3 years now and just hearing what tense and aspect are clears so much up because it was never explained.
Many years ago now, I had a discussion about how to express the future in English. I said that there are only "will" and "shall" , which are defective verbs, and references to time explicity. And that except to sound old-fashioned we have lost "shall".
ASL handles tense similarly to Mandarin. Eg "yesterday I went to the store" would be YESTERDAY I GO STORE. The sign for go is the same regardless of what time period you're talking about. However, many verb signs encode aspect in whether you do a single or repeated motion, and directionality by changing the direction of movement. You can even do a thing called indexing where you assign a location relative to you to a particular noun/noun phrase, and then you can use pointing to that location like a pronoun, and you can move verbs to or from that location to indicate subject vs object.
I love your videos! This one was super interesting. Spanish was my second language, and I actually love the subjunctive. I think it's a useful idea to convey. I'd be interested to see how I can apply this to the language I'm currently working on: Korean. It has so many interesting endings for verbs, but most of them I think must be 'moods.'
The English Verb by Michael Lewis (the other one, who didn’t write Moneyball) is also a short, excellent exploration of this stuff in English. It’s aimed primarily at teachers of English, but the ground it covers is valuable for all.
It's not just the space in writing, it's also that it's not obligatorily on the verb, and in fact "will" acts like another verb in many ways. For instance, an adverb can intervene: "He will {hungrily} devour the hamburger." But not "he devour {*hungrily} ed the hamburger."
Interestingly, Hungarian uses a similar technique to English for the future - sometimes. You conjugate the verb "fog" then add the infinitive of the verb you mean eg sétálni fogok - to-walk I-shall. However, more often you just use the present and context - Holnap sétálok - tomorrow I-am-walking ie I will walk tomorrow. Love all your videos.
Sapir-Whorf was mentioned in passing, and it reminded me of a very interesting study on the influence of the way languages do, or do not, mark future, and the economic behavior of the speakers of the language. “The Effect of Language on Economic Behavior: Evidence from Savings Rates, Health Behaviors, and Retirement Assets” by Keith Chen. TLDR, Chen presents data that strongly imply that people who speak languages with mandatory future marking save less money than people who speak languages that do no have to mark future.
I find the way we decide what is attached to the verb or not interesting. Spanish has a future tense, but it evolved from a phrase. So while “I will eat” is expressed in one word, “comeré”, that word comes from a combination of the infinitive “comer” and a conjugated form of “haber” (to have). So, “comeré” is just “to eat, I have”, but contracted. There’s a reason the future conjugations in Spanish are the same as the present tense conjugations of “haber”, just with the silent h dropped. This change happened in Vulgar Latin before Spanish was really Spanish, so it’s not something everyone recognizes. It’s similar in other Romance languages. So what makes that different from English “will eat”? The space? The fact that “will” comes before “eat”?
My Ancient Greek teacher at university gave us this rundown of tense versus aspect as soon as we started using past tense, which helped me understand the Latin tense-aspect system that I'd already learned and which I then used to help a friend who was studying French. I feel like anyone learning a language should be taught about this, but sadly it often doesn't happen because the native-speaking teachers rarely consider it themselves.
Ah, I finally understand the 'imperfect' in imparfait! I get the use, but was always bewildered by rudeness of the name. Looking forward to your explanation of mood. Thanks for another insightful video.
I love how this overview covers these concepts in many languages. Having the canvas painted in many colour schemes is a great teaching approach. I tell my students that "past" and "present" are misnomers for tense, as those language forms refer not necessarily to time, but at base to real vs. unreal (as in some other languages.). Past "time reference" can be derived from that. If it's not here and now... "If it rained tomorrow, we could..." Thank you for this series--lots of useful ideas here.
Good video! Often my Central American friends and I like to compare English and Spanish. A verb like “walk” has these forms: walk, walks, walked, plus have walked and will walk. Spanish has too many forms of “caminar” to count, which reflect tense, aspect, mood, and speaker. I’ve found most Spanish-speakers prefer “caminara” over “caminase”, which are interchangeable.
Verbs conjugate in most European languages. Spanish is not unique. It's rather English that almost completely got rid of verb conjugation (except for the third person singular).
I studied ancient Greek and did well! I still read from time to time. Aspect was always more confusing and underexplained than it should have been. Thanks.
Great video as always. Watch out with Cantonese ("a Chinese language") as it does mark the verb in the past, gerundif (of which it has at least two ways of saying it). Unsure if other "Chinese languages" have these verb markers.
I remember trying to learn Russian n't couldn't get my head around some tense not existing in my language. In those days you only needed a degree in your subject to become a teacher but none of pedagogical training. It was also a time when coding was done purely on paper and the school only had one Apple machine with a tiny black screen displaying white text - a student wanting to test their code would have to book a slot in advance and get a key to the glass booth... My high school was the one of two schools in the whole country to have a computer and offer coding as a subject! 😂 So, resources outside of school were zero, including the stark lack of material in libraries... I gave up language learning pretty quickly.
You've been a great help Languagejones. Because of you I'm starting to find linguistics very interesting. I hope one day you will tackle the Celtic languages, especially Welsh which is an Alice in Wonderland for linguists. Especially the Verb 'bod' which is the cornerstone of the language,but in itself doesn't seem to be translatable except in relation to other words and acts as a separate tense or mood marker. I have oversimplified this verb because it also acts as an auxiliary in forming most of the periphrastic tenses. All in all Celtic languages are unique in a lot of ways and I find them the most interesting except Manchurian which is really cool.
Interesting. My grammar professor, Dianne Larson Freeman, used The Grammar Book for our text. It does go into detail about the tense aspect system, but less theoretically than for practical teaching approaches. As I recall, in general, the book leans on Chompsky’s grammatical theories.
It would have been so helpful if my language classes in high school (Spanish) and college (German and Japanese) would have touched on this at all. Primarily, in the classroom setting, learning the associated culture feels like little more than tourism. Looking at linguistic aspects of a language like this is an invaluable cultural angle, as we better understand how people communicate and express themselves in the language, how to think in it.
This is fascinating! What tense/aspect are command words/the imperative? It looks like the present tense in English ("Sit", "eat", "give me that", etc.), but the action would conceivably occur in the future (after you say the command) and represents an unfinished task.
My first language was English (arguably Spanglish), followed by Spanish, Latin, and French. Recently, however, I started playing around with 中文, and I was SO pleasantly surprised by the way time markers work. I may be the odd one out, but it genuinely made the language make more sense to me, more quickly, than finding similar structures and cognates in the interrelated languages I'd studied before. It almost felt like balancing an equation.
In English, the present time and past time are conjugated for, whereas the future and conditional are formed periphrastically. This is also the case in other germanic languages. But broadly speaking I think it helps to think of Time and Aspect as components of a grammatical algorithm which we call tense. This makes naming them intuitive in English. We have 4 aspects simple, continuous, perfect and perfect continuous, and we also have 4 "times" where we can situate the action, the present, the past, the future (relative to the present) and the future (relative to the past). This second "future" is often called the conditional. Combining these 4 times and 4 aspects, naming the 16 tenses becomes intuitive, at least in English.
I have been a biblical languages student for a few years now, and not a single one of my teachers have ever actually explained what aspect is, only that it was different than tense. This was especially frustrating with Hebrew. One teacher explained a little that it was related to something being completed, but vaguely. I need to go back and read the verb sections of my textbooks because THIS MAKES SO MUCH SENSE AND IT'S NOT THAT HARD TO EXPLAIN AND WHY DIDN'T ANY OF MY LANGUAGE PROFESSORS ACTUALLY JUST SAY THIS!? It makes me wonder if they fully understood what aspect was... Thanks a lot!
the funny thing is that the bible teaches here in Israel do not explain anything about biblical grammar, which is somewhat different from modern Hebrew grammar - so we just read it, with no understanding that the ו (vav, "and") actually flip the tenses, so past becomes future and vice versa (ויאמר "modern hebrew: "and he will say"; biblical hebrew: "he said" etc...). Only after I've read about this online did I understand that I can actually read the bible quite easily
Participle forms are adjectives created from verbs. Sometimes, though probably rarely, they can even function as nouns, e.g. “do you mind me opening the window” vs “do you mind my opening the window”. When learning English, progressive verb forms baffled me because in standard German, this kind of aspect distinction doesn’t exist, and the present participle is hardly ever used at all. Only later did I realise that I use similar constructions all the time when speaking my native dialect.
I teach English to mostly Russian software engineers. When they have a low level to start with, I just say, "This is future tense. Don't worry about it." When they are at a more advanced level, I tell them there is no future tense, blow their minds with a verb chart analysis, and try to undo a lot of what they learned in school. When we get to mixed type conditionals, the real headache begins. "Yes, this is a past form. No, it is not past tense."
I really think that deserves its own video. Learning about shall/should, can/could, will/would -- and the fact that the same kind of thing happens in other languages, was mind expanding for me!
I'm interested: why is "walked" a past tense of "walk" but "will walk" isn't a future tense? Is it simply some sort of technical definition like if you modify the verb without introducing a space into the written form, it counts, but not if the modification includes a space in the orthography? ('Cos that'd seem a bit arbitrary, functionally-speaking, if it's something like that! And possibly another one of those hangovers from historic linguistic theories that assumed everything should work like Latin?)
@@zak3744 the reason is will is a verb and ed is not. sure, it's hard to say what the verb MEANS, but the conjugation is just like "can". i will, you will, he will, she will, we will, they will, i would, you would, he would, she would, etc
@@zak3744 "to go to" is also a way of showing the future, as in "i'm going to answer your question". (it doesn't make much sense to say "i went to answer your question" though)
I've spent a fair amount of time studying Greek and a lot of time studying Russian. I've love to see more on this. Choosing the correct verb form is so challenging!
Modern Greek and Russian have a similar aspect system--though Russian struck me as more random. If you learn one, the other language becomes easier. The verbs, at least. Now, Navajo, with no tense but seven modes and twelve aspects, puts everything into perspective.
I vaguely remember the modal verb to want in German can sometimes be used to convey future. I like foreign languages but to be honest I fall in the camp that only gets these concepts like the subjunctive vaguely and can't properly apply them in real life when speaking a foreign language. I have to just guess and hope for the best.
I’m first LETS GO
any sex tips?
I've just mastered Arabic by looking at your picture.
Ok, but imperatives are mood, and that's a different video 😂
Sometimes I feel like the UA-cam language community only has like ten people lmao
Super gigachad polyglot?
Could have used this video a few weeks ago while desperately trying to explain to someone how Japanese can have a "non-past" tense... This is definitely going in the bookmarks list
I'm so glad to hear that! Sometimes, when I'm making these, I I start to doubt whether anyone is going to have use for them
Can you explain that now?
yeah and you can drop so much from a Japanese sentence and it'll still be a full sentence because it's all about the context.. they don't have plurals, you don't need to have a subject.. you could even use an onomatopoeia for a sentence. lol Very strange but I love learning it
I think Finnish is similar.
@@elderscrollsswimmer4833, On the contrary, Finnish has all the same tenses as English except the future and future perfect. It even has the same continuous tenses. And it even uses them mostly like in English. It uses the present for the future and the perfect for the future perfect.
To help my Spanish students understand the subjunctive, I first taught it to them in English. We started by singing, "I wish I were an Oscar Mayer wiener," then I introduced the English words that require the subjunctive (demand, insist, etc.) with examples. One day of English instruction helped them understand when and why to use the subjunctive; mastering its use required a good deal of practice. Introduced in year 3, more or less mastered in Spanish 5/AP.
Love this! Yes! I think you have to give them a ton of examples in English and then a ton of contrasting examples in Spanish (subjunctive needed vs not needed).
Getting examples and a short English grammar lesson on the subjunctive and the conditional in English sure helps. It also helps if the student knows how to use those properly in English. Even so, I have found the subjunctive present and past to be difficult in Spanish and French. (The conditional makes sense.) One problem is that English doesn't really separate subjunctive and conditional very well. -- I'm trying to re-master Spanish with my vision much worse, so my old textbooks are nearly impossible to read in print. I've been surprised how well I've done, et whew, I'm lacking so much vocabulary for everyday things, and I can tell where my grammar has become weak in ways it never was in school. Plus, I'm getting cross-grade feedback trouble between Spanish and French. (No, it works that way in French, but this way in Spanish, and no, there are not always cognates, and (haha) Spanish speakers are not going to recognize a French word, too different in sound and form.) I was encouraged with my last real test in conversation, but whew, the gaps and the errors I made! (I never had trouble with m/f agreement in school, but now, I'm making errors. Catching them usually, but I need to be better than that.) Still, it was funny and exciting.
I agree: If they only WERE TO use the past subjunctive properly in the examples given in "Learn Spanish" books (from and English speaker's perspective) it would be so much easier. If they _DID_ that, we wouldn't be half as confused as we are! _(WERE TO DO)._
For a long time I didn't realize we have the subjunctive in English. I'm still not sure how to construct it, except I think it uses the past tense form. I learned the structure of English when I learned Spanish. I remember the first month of high school Spanish class, trying to understand the concept of "to be" and then the pronouns and conjugations of ser. After a while it was an aha moment! I am in awe of people that just pick up languages without formal study.
I learned the subjunctive case in Latin and not in English class. I later learned that English also used the subjunctive, in contrary to fact conditions, as in your Oscar Mayer example.
The past, present, and future walked into a bar.
It was tense.
Nah, it was, is and will tense.
I always thought things like "perfect future" sounded more like a dystopian novel title than a linguistic concept.
i will have appreciated making this reply for you
Perfect future does sound more like a dystopian novel title. Future perfect sounds more like a linguistic concept.
Perfect only in the brochures. 😅
Andrew said it. "Perfect future" =/ "future perfect".
this is by far one of the top linguist channels out there
American here. I am not sure how, but after watching this vid, it became about 20% easier to understand my Taiwanese co-worker's intent. Both written and verbal. It has made life easier for us both! Thanks!
In Singapore I'm very used to not marking tense on verbs, and even leaving tense out of sentences entirely (naturally in mandarin and malay and also informally in english), so when I was studying spanish in school I found it helped me to re-analyse the spanish tense-aspect-mood system as whole phrases in those languages. On a side note this also made me appreciate how compact the spanish verbs can get, taking into account the person and number marking too, which I find q cute
I'm in Malaysia now where shop entrances often have signs on them letting me know that I'm getting 'close'. To make up for dropping past endings on verbs that need them, just add more plural endings on nouns that don't need them. I won't be surprised if I see 'carswash' or 'keysboard'.
These are both starting to seep into native English speakers usage too. I'm always reading or hearing that somebody 'is bias' or 'is prejudice', but I'm not hearing that anybody is shock yet. Maybe I am luck and just haven't notice yet (-:
I'm learning Mandarin, and I've never had a teacher stop and illustrate the difference between tense and aspect. I think this contributes the the very common problem of folks who are learning Mandarin from English being totally unable to understand why the aspect marker 了 is NOT a past tense marker.
Most language teachers have not studied linguistics. Not just Mandarin teachers.
@andrewdunbar828 Most of my Mandarin teachers have studied linguistics, actually. I think it's more to do with teaching philosophy than knowledge gaps. I also wasn't trying to imply this was something specific to Mandarin teachers, I've just never had teachers for other languages so it's my only example.
@@jlittlejohn97You're pretty lucky then. I've known lots of English teachers who don't know these kinds of things, or who themselves learn them along their journey of figuring out how to teach better. There are of course lots of kinds of teachers and not all have qualifications. I don't think I've asked any qualified teach friends about it.
Seriously, I'm an ABC (not exactly, but we'll leave it at that), Mandarin Chinese is my mother tongue. However I never paid attention to the differences between 過 and 了, and surely will never be able to explain it either. I have the feeling most native teachers don't really know either.
@@PoussinNoNekoHave no idea how to explain 我吃过了I’ve eaten to an English speaker
I am so glad I found your channel! As a language dork who doesn't always have time to deep dive on my own, videos like this are helping me stay learning key stuff in a digestible format. Thank you. :)
I took three years of Italian in high school and never really learned a single verb. These videos are great dude!
TBH, despite what teachers would likely tell you, you shouldn't bother. You should start with the bits that are relevant to communication and finish the whole thing if you've got time later on. Grammar is mainly about efficiency and clarity, you can screw up grammar in most languages pretty badly before you can't be understood at all and in many places you can communicate a lot with simple 3 word sentences even though they're usually not correct grammatically.
The vocab is something that really needs to be right in most cases or the other party will have no idea what you're talking about and that's really where the attention should be. The big question tends to be what precisely is a word. Linguists have worked on that, but as a practical matter for the rest of us, it's not clear. German has a bunch of seprable prefix words where nearly the entire sentence is located within a single word, as in you start with the latter bit of the word, have most of the sentence, then get back to the beginning of that first word. English does something similar with phrasal verbs, but because of reasons, we don't ever write them as a single word even though they behave in a similar fashion to the German separable prefix words. Then you have issues with things like to morrow, to-morrow and tomorrow as they evolve from two words to one word, is that hyphenated word a single word from a practical standpoint, or not?
Start at least at Duolingo
Can't wait for the mood/modality video. I nearly broke my brain on my Mormon mission trying to conceptualize what the subjunctive "was doing" with no access to a library or internet. Keep up the great content.
Parenthetically, hats off to Mormon missionaries abroad. When I was traveling in the south of Spain years ago, they were the best exemplars of Americans, the most polite and respectful. Whenever I ran into one, we always conversed in Spanish. “By their fruits will you know them.”
I think you brought up one of the most frustrating aspects of language learning. As a native Russian speaker, at school I was bombarded with a plethora of the most bizarre explanations. I distinctly remember a teacher telling me that English has 12 tenses, while Russian has 3. It all lead to a complete mess inside my head. Reading ‘Meaning and the English verb’ by Geoffrey Leech has demystified it somewhat.
I wish there was a better way to introducing tenses and aspects to ESL students. To this day, many believe that mastering the ‘tense table’ equates to mastering English. It’s as terrible as it sounds and it clears nothing. Try explaining Russian verbs the same way. Читал, for example, would be something like, ‘an action in the past that was done incompletely, as opposed to an action completed fully”. It’s pure rubbish. It’s incomprehensible for most learners.
So, yeah, very frustrating 😂
"one of the most frustrating aspects..." i see what you did there. :D
I’m a native English speaker and I took two years of Russian in college. My professor actually used читать/прочитать to demonstrate aspect for us.
«Что ты делал вчера вечером?»
«Я читал »
«Я прочитал »
It really helped! 🎉
I took a semester of Russian and that was the only time I've heard of aspect. Still not sure what it was and don't remember much from the class. Though I can say I was fluent in Russian one night, after having food poisoning from Burger King. I was fluent in my dreams that night. No joke!
Sympathies. My girlfriend is from Latvia and russian is her native language. She has just reached level C1 classes in English but she still isn't very confident about the tenses. The thing is, she doesn't really have a concept of aspects. This may startle many people but most native russian speakers don't even notice it, and are perplexed when I point it out. English does in fact have similar distinctions, especailly continuous vs simple tenses, but it is analysed as a variety of tenses when in fact all the continuous tenses could be reduced to "some tense of 'to be' + some participle".
@@VerticalBlank Humanists become victims of a combinatorial explosion, creating independent entities from a combination of many features.
For me, the most fun way to express time is in sign language (though I had only a little experience with the Polish sign language). Would you consider including sign languages in your future videos? I'm really curious, about how the aspect is conveyed. And how big (or small) the differences between those languages are.
From my very limited knowledge about sign languages, aspects that describe the character of an action (fast, slow, repetitive, etc) are expressed by modifying the sign that denotes the verb (signing faster, slower, or several times). Spatial relations (come/go) and the direction of an action (e.g. who tells whom) are expressed by signing at different positions in relation to the speaker and the listener.
As for the differences, there are language families just like with spoken languages. E.g. a lot of sign languages in Europe as well as the Americas either come from or have been influenced by French Sign Language. Taiwan and Korean Sign Languages are related to Japanese Sign Language, while mainland Chinese Sign Language is an isolate.
I love this man, just from reading the title I knew he was going to touch on that phenomenon exactly and he always does such a good job dispelling harmful rumors. Big ups!
I was taught about this when I learned English more formally, but in a veiled way, in which it was still all just referred to as being different tenses. The concept of 'aspect' was never directly adressed. Separating tense and aspect makes so much sense!
This blew my mind on english future tense, especially the example of using time as a way to describe future tense instead of will. That is so crazy to think about!
I learned so much about English when I started to understand the subjunctive in Spanish. “ If I were to…”
@languagejones I know I'm late to the party, but as a Brazilian who has spoken Brazilian Portuguese since I first learnt to speak and English since I was 7, I've never understood what Perfect and Imperfect Past Tenses actually meant, and I've just graduated uni. You taught me in 10min what years of formal education could never 😂
Now I want to know what "Pretérito mais-que-perfeito" or 'More-than-perfect past tense' means, in your words!
Lots of love from Brazil! 🎉❤
In the Irish language we have a habitual past tense that you can loosely translate as "I used to do..." The tense is fully conjugated within the verb, often as a single word with an embedded pronoun.
I teach the Irish language. This poor tense often gets ignored. Unlike in most text books, I teach it before I teach the conditional. And this helps the students get a better grasp of how to speak about the past, and learn the endings properly, before they have to grapple with the conditional mood (which has the same endings tacked on to a future stem’) and its concepts.
I remember studying English at school as a Russian-Belarusian speaking teen and how the only thing we all could do while studying tense and aspect was to just cram all the rules because we couldn't understand how it worked at all since aspect kinda works differently in both Russian and Belarusian (and by the way all the Russian speaking kids believe that English has like 9 tenses). And it had been that way until I started majoring in linguistics. Then it all finally started to make sense. In fact the question of time and tense was one of my favourite topics during my theoretical grammar course.
I think we are usually taught there are 12
@@АлександрМалахов-ш1л well yeah I guess it depends on the school because I remember arguing with other kids about how many tenses there are.
If they only were telling people that it's just like it is in old Russian. Ya izvolyu, that stuff. Very similar tenses structure.
no, they are taught English has 16 tenses
They have some ridiculously sounding tenses like "Past Future Perfect Continuous Tense".
Structure:
Subject + would have been + Verb(+ing)
@@nagger7271 they actually call it future in the past
I love this stuff too. Even just in passing. You’ve got a wonderful presentation style.
I've been saying this for years to my English students. You are much clearer than I've ever been. Thanks for this.
I think I would have enjoyed this video more had I known I was going to be thinking about it tomorrow.
Update: I wrote that convoluted yet grammatically "correct" sentence yesterday to demonstrate how a short English sentence can include a multitude of tenses, aspects and moods and must be utterly confusing to folks trying to learn English. When I was a small child (~ages 7 to 9.5) I lived in Mali and learned/spoke a little French. Now as a retired semi-old guy, I'm dipping my toe in the water and thinking about actually learning French for real; all these on-line resources are potentially very helpful. It's easy to complain about the complexity of the French verb tenses but, as speakers of English, we really can't throw too many stones. By the way, I used the words tense, aspect and mood as though I truly understand the linguistic meanings and nuances of these three words; I truly don't (LOL). I will re-watch this video at some point in the near future and hopefully it will be crystal clear.
Possibly it should be "the next day", rather than "tomorrow".
This was great! I had heard these claims but had never bothered to look into it, but this explains them very clearly.
Also this is one of the very few videos I have considered watching at 75% of the tempo. It takes a while to internalize what you're learning.
I’m thoroughly enjoying your videos. I’ll have questions once finish a few more of them.
Dude I did not think this would be interesting enough to watch all the way through. I loved it.
I don't know enough about this to know what class it falls under but Swedish does this weird thing where it normally requires an auxiliary verb to make the perfect, just like English (e.g. "He has fallen/had fallen...") but sometimes, in a way that I've certainly not entirely mastered, is allowed to skip the auxiliary verb, e.g. "She didn't know if David would be ok, given his -fallen- from the roof." (this is a pretty bad translation, but you get the idea).
0:00: 🕒 Linguists explain the concepts of tense and aspect in language, debunking common misconceptions about tenses.
2:09: 🕒 Tense refers to when an event happens relative to the moment of speaking.
4:13: 🔢 Chinese does not encode past and future tenses grammatically on the verb, but instead expresses them in a different way.
6:25: 🗒 The video discusses how tense and aspect are combined in different languages and how they are taught in foreign language classes.
8:57: 📚 The speaker initially hated studying linguistic approaches to English, but now recommends books on tense and aspect for understanding and using a new language.
Recap by Tammy AI
Thank you for dealing with these issues in such a clear yet rigorous way! Can't wait for the video in mood!
I love this content. new awpects before, but am always fascinated about how much easier it is to understand languages and vern conjugation when knowing about it.
I really wish more language textbooks included elements of linguistics such as in this video. It would've made learning grammar much, much easier.
Also, it seems like the first link in the description leads to a book on Historical Linguistics and not to the book on tenses.
Thank you. I have been doing Chinese for 50 years. I knew everything you said and how to use all four aspect markers, but I had just not put it together in a coordinated whole. After playing with Spanish and presently learning German, everything becomes a little clearer with your video in relation to tense, aspect. Again, thank you for the video.
Super interesting topic! Can’t wait for the mood and modality video! Keep up the work
In my (UK) French lessons, the presentation of verb conjugation seemed to be targeted specifically to cause confusion and failure. However, I've always considered this to be due a failure to teach English formally - there was no effort made to explain anything more than the simplest parts of speech in English, so there was no comparative framework on which to build a foreign language.
Verbal aspect was one of the most frustrating parts of learning Russian when I started in 2017-both the idea of when to use the imperfective/perfective form and the need to learn two verbs for every verb!
I’m now two years married to a native Russian/Ukrainian speaker (who didn’t know English when we met) and as a result of using it at home ever since, I’ve developed the Slav brain bumps that let me use aspect instinctively and form perfective-imperfective pairs off verbs I haven’t heard before in the other form.
The current question is whether our daughter will say an English or a Russian word first. Right now her favorite syllable is дя/тя, a sound that doesn’t exist in English, so it may be the latter!
Just discovered your channel, really enjoyed this as an amateur linguistics nerd! My knowledge of tenses was really helped when I did Latin in school, as it seems to be the exception to be educated properly on the constructions in your native language. Comparative linguistics is fascinating, learning how other languages just don't convey ideas in the same way.
Slavic verbs come in more than pairs e.g. читать, прочитать, почитать, почитывать, прочитывать (to read, to have read completely, to read for a while, to read now and then, and the last one implies multiple instances of having read completely).
Chinese also uses the same construction for future as English. For example, 我要去。”I will go” (literally, in the sense that yào is the historical verb for “want” although in Chinese it’s still used for “want”).
Chinese is so fun. 要 can mean want, will or must, depending on context.
learning ancient greek and my professor and my textbook called all these stems we were learning "tenses," but they were really refering to aspects with tense being shown mostly by a mutation of the stem, and once i realized this, it all made SO much more sense, and even made my understanding of latin "tenses" better retroactively (i learned latin before greek)
Thank you for acknowledging the difficulty that subjunctive gives native English speakers learning French and Spanish. I have no need for really learning either language, which was one difficulty I experienced when trying to learn them, but I kept going anyway, because maybe someday it would be beneficial. Then I finally encountered, subjunctive, which my brain wouldn't let me construct, it made more sense to me to think of it as conditional or future interior.
Excellent video Taylor! This whole mess is just as messy in Spanish grammar teaching (for natives): people only talk about "tiempos verbales", and hardly ever about aspect, and you're expected to know what mood is but it's hardly ever explained. I only ever understood grammar when I read about (silent) grammatical features, and it was easier learning about that in English, since there are only so many ways you can mark [+REALIS] and [-REALIS] clauses, unlike Spanish. If you ever do a follow-up video or a Q&A session, would you please explain the difference between the Perfective and "the Perfect" in English? I was taught the second is a kind of combination of tense and aspect. I kinda understand that many European languages have fusional language traits, such as combining tense and aspect into a single morpheme, but I find it really hard to understand "the Perfect" in particular.
I literally have to google perfective/perfect every time I'm writing a paper that touches on it. I should probably dive into it and make a video, like you asked for.
Turkish learner here. A fascinating thing about Turkish verbs is that because of the agglutinating form and it's almost perfect regularity (there are five irregular verbs, and it mostly only shoes up in the equivalent of the simple present form) it's really like a lego set.
There are past, present and future tenses, positive and negative forms, there's conditional aspect, there's habitual versus imperfective (kind of works like the difference between simple and progressive forms in English), and inferential (i.e. retold). You can have a lot of weird combinations there, for example past + inferential = plusquamperfect.
Anyways, I find the inferential form absolutely fascinating. "Evinden almış" = "He/she/they supposedly took it from his/her/their home". If you are using it in first person singular, e.g. evimden almışım, it's like "I guess I got it from my home" or "dude, I was so drunk I have no clue how that happened" :D
Man, your channel really rocks! Keep it up.
Thanks Dr Jones. I'm from Indonesia, speaking English, French, and Arabic. Your explanation about tense, aspect. mood and modality greatly improves my understanding of these languages. Also, given the fact that Indonesian language doesnt apply tense, your discussion on aspect gave me another point of view I've been looking for so long.
We English speakers have plenty to learn with Indonesian verbs though! I learned with practice, let's take an imaginary verb "verb". Berverb, terverb, diverbi, diverbkan, memverb, memverbi, memverbkan, memperverbi, memperverbkan, diperverbi, diperverbkan, pemverb, pemverban, diperverb-verbkan... and most of these forms which are perfectly natural to Indonesians are quite new to English speakers. Living in Thailand for two years I found that Thais found Indonesian/Malay very difficult as their language, like Mandarin, has no different verb forms. Anyway it may console my Indonesian friends to know that my Australian students found Indonesian verbs difficult! 😊
My first time hearing about aspect - fascinating 😊
I'm more worried about the lack of pluperfect. Had English got one, that previous clause would be 25% more efficient.
Dude! Back in the 90s I slogged through learning Mandarin (just barely into "advanced") with mainland Chinese language books (while immersed in China society). But I never heard Tense, Aspect, Mood introduced so clearly like this! This would have made it so much clearer for me if I had known this before!!
heyy great video as usual! just pointing out: as of today, your link for the "tense" book is actually directing to lyle campbell's historical linguistics (which is also great)
every once in a while the reccomendations get it right. subscribed.
That's awesome! I have just discovered this channel and I am so excited to watch other videos. Thank you🙏
Your videos are exceptionally good! Both informative and entertaining. A lot of that is you and your excellent facial expressions…and how handsome you are. That’s what drew me in the first time, I admit.
Subjunctive was the bane of my existence in middle school Spanish. I didn’t understand it at all. My teacher was from Cuba and didn’t explain tenses or aspects or anything like that. She wanted to teach us by immersion, but the school district made her use a curriculum and a specific textbook. The teacher just spoke in Spanish all the time and we were sort of on our own when it came to verbs. The ninth-grade Spanish teacher at the high school didn’t like those of us who came from that middle school for two reasons - we didn’t know our tenses well, and we all spoke with Cuban accents. She tried to train the accent out of us, but I think I still have a bit of Cuban in my Spanish.
In college, I took five semesters of German. I had a better time with German, picking up verbs much more quickly. Having a third gender was a bit of a curveball. (I still hate gendered nouns..)
After that, it’s been a little French and a little Italian for my job as an opera translator; I do the surtitles for an opera company, so I had to learn enough French and Italian to get by in opera. I can’t tell you much about tenses in either language, however. I can go from those languages to English well enough, but don’t ask me to translate English into either of those languages…
Great info. I appreciate the great examples and details of how tense and aspect differ and interact. And now, we must get into mood!
I think when I was learning French in high school, I was very good with the tenses (etc?) we learned. But... they were the things I forgot immediately after all my studies! 😅😅
Thank you very much! This video was very useful for me. I'm learning English (my native language is Russian). When I read about the theory of tenses that you talk about in this video, I began to understand the future tense better.
This is awesome. I had a weak grasp on this subject after years of studying languages and dabbling in linguistics, but this video really pulled it all together. Also, it gave me a better understanding of aspect in Mandarin, which I never really got when I was studying the language a few years ago.
I love that your book recommendations are by Bernard Comrie. The book that got me interested in linguistics was "The world's major languages" that he edited and wrote a section in.
It was in teaching Spanish that I finally understood aspect and tense (studying it, it was all just confusing), but it was in watching this video that I had a word to attach to the idea of aspect. So, thank you for that!
*This* is quite interesting, and I've never heard it put this way. I am learning Spanish, and learning about the way that language is put together makes me more curious about English and the nuts and bolts of it all. I will check out those books, thank you.
Being native English and all those years of English class, i didn't realize how little i understand English until trying to help Spanish and a French speaker with it
Taylor, another great video! For me the poster child of aspect is modern Greek and the poster child of mood is ancient Greek.
I love that Arrival reference. Chapeau a toi.
My first foreign language was Latin, with its 6 tenses (as we were taught). That system informs how Spanish, French, and Italian approach their verbs--and also English and German in that English and German grammars were subjected to the rules of Latin. Then came Russian with its tenses and aspects. Easy-peasy, as you say, just three tenses, but two verbs expressing a single English idea. Now there is Hungarian, also very simple verb systems ... except for definite and indefinite conjugations (basically, is there a specific direct object?) ... and verbal prefixes, which sometimes express aspect and sometimes completely change the meaning of the root verb. (And I discover that infinitives can take personal endings, and so, yeah, not so simple after all.) In other words, thinking of verb systems in terms of tense AND aspect is a very useful perspective. Thank you.
This video I earned my subscription.
Very well done!
Danke!
I’ve been struggling with all the ‘tenses’ in my German class for 3 years now and just hearing what tense and aspect are clears so much up because it was never explained.
Many years ago now, I had a discussion about how to express the future in English. I said that there are only "will" and "shall" , which are defective verbs, and references to time explicity. And that except to sound old-fashioned we have lost "shall".
I found this video using UA-cam's new "feeling lucky" feature. It was a great watch!
Thank you!
ASL handles tense similarly to Mandarin. Eg "yesterday I went to the store" would be YESTERDAY I GO STORE. The sign for go is the same regardless of what time period you're talking about. However, many verb signs encode aspect in whether you do a single or repeated motion, and directionality by changing the direction of movement. You can even do a thing called indexing where you assign a location relative to you to a particular noun/noun phrase, and then you can use pointing to that location like a pronoun, and you can move verbs to or from that location to indicate subject vs object.
I love your videos! This one was super interesting. Spanish was my second language, and I actually love the subjunctive. I think it's a useful idea to convey. I'd be interested to see how I can apply this to the language I'm currently working on: Korean. It has so many interesting endings for verbs, but most of them I think must be 'moods.'
Nice topic, and love your videos and delivery style. I was wondering if there were Wikipedia page you'd recommend as a start for this topic?
Brilliant, concise and in-depth, not to mention satisfying - bravo! 🙌
The English Verb by Michael Lewis (the other one, who didn’t write Moneyball) is also a short, excellent exploration of this stuff in English. It’s aimed primarily at teachers of English, but the ground it covers is valuable for all.
I’ve always thinking about something like the aspect you talked about. Now it made me releifed hearing about that
People say English doesn't have a future tense just because of a space. It's stupid.
It's not just the space in writing, it's also that it's not obligatorily on the verb, and in fact "will" acts like another verb in many ways. For instance, an adverb can intervene: "He will {hungrily} devour the hamburger." But not "he devour {*hungrily} ed the hamburger."
@@languagejones It expresses the future, and therefore it's a tense. You can split infinitives in English.
This was as good an explanation as I ever heard. This really made sense to me for the first time when I learned Russian in college. Thanks
Interestingly, Hungarian uses a similar technique to English for the future - sometimes. You conjugate the verb "fog" then add the infinitive of the verb you mean eg sétálni fogok - to-walk I-shall. However, more often you just use the present and context - Holnap sétálok - tomorrow I-am-walking ie I will walk tomorrow.
Love all your videos.
Grazie.
Sapir-Whorf was mentioned in passing, and it reminded me of a very interesting study on the influence of the way languages do, or do not, mark future, and the economic behavior of the speakers of the language. “The Effect of Language on Economic Behavior: Evidence from Savings Rates, Health Behaviors, and Retirement Assets” by Keith Chen. TLDR, Chen presents data that strongly imply that people who speak languages with mandatory future marking save less money than people who speak languages that do no have to mark future.
I find the way we decide what is attached to the verb or not interesting. Spanish has a future tense, but it evolved from a phrase. So while “I will eat” is expressed in one word, “comeré”, that word comes from a combination of the infinitive “comer” and a conjugated form of “haber” (to have).
So, “comeré” is just “to eat, I have”, but contracted. There’s a reason the future conjugations in Spanish are the same as the present tense conjugations of “haber”, just with the silent h dropped. This change happened in Vulgar Latin before Spanish was really Spanish, so it’s not something everyone recognizes. It’s similar in other Romance languages.
So what makes that different from English “will eat”? The space? The fact that “will” comes before “eat”?
My Ancient Greek teacher at university gave us this rundown of tense versus aspect as soon as we started using past tense, which helped me understand the Latin tense-aspect system that I'd already learned and which I then used to help a friend who was studying French. I feel like anyone learning a language should be taught about this, but sadly it often doesn't happen because the native-speaking teachers rarely consider it themselves.
Ah, I finally understand the 'imperfect' in imparfait! I get the use, but was always bewildered by rudeness of the name. Looking forward to your explanation of mood. Thanks for another insightful video.
I love how this overview covers these concepts in many languages. Having the canvas painted in many colour schemes is a great teaching approach.
I tell my students that "past" and "present" are misnomers for tense, as those language forms refer not necessarily to time, but at base to real vs. unreal (as in some other languages.). Past "time reference" can be derived from that. If it's not here and now... "If it rained tomorrow, we could..."
Thank you for this series--lots of useful ideas here.
Good video!
Often my Central American friends and I like to compare English and Spanish. A verb like “walk” has these forms: walk, walks, walked, plus have walked and will walk. Spanish has too many forms of “caminar” to count, which reflect tense, aspect, mood, and speaker. I’ve found most Spanish-speakers prefer “caminara” over “caminase”, which are interchangeable.
Verbs conjugate in most European languages. Spanish is not unique. It's rather English that almost completely got rid of verb conjugation (except for the third person singular).
Aspect ...never heard of it before. Thanks. I will be researching this. Oh, and Your videos are wonderful. Just found yours today.
I studied ancient Greek and did well! I still read from time to time. Aspect was always more confusing and underexplained than it should have been. Thanks.
Great video as always. Watch out with Cantonese ("a Chinese language") as it does mark the verb in the past, gerundif (of which it has at least two ways of saying it). Unsure if other "Chinese languages" have these verb markers.
I remember trying to learn Russian n't couldn't get my head around some tense not existing in my language. In those days you only needed a degree in your subject to become a teacher but none of pedagogical training. It was also a time when coding was done purely on paper and the school only had one Apple machine with a tiny black screen displaying white text - a student wanting to test their code would have to book a slot in advance and get a key to the glass booth... My high school was the one of two schools in the whole country to have a computer and offer coding as a subject! 😂 So, resources outside of school were zero, including the stark lack of material in libraries... I gave up language learning pretty quickly.
You've been a great help Languagejones. Because of you I'm starting to find linguistics very interesting. I hope one day you will tackle the Celtic languages, especially Welsh which is an Alice in Wonderland for linguists. Especially the Verb 'bod' which is the cornerstone of the language,but in itself doesn't seem to be translatable except in relation to other words and acts as a separate tense or mood marker. I have oversimplified this verb because it also acts as an auxiliary in forming most of the periphrastic tenses. All in all Celtic languages are unique in a lot of ways and I find them the most interesting except Manchurian which is really cool.
Interesting. My grammar professor, Dianne Larson Freeman, used The Grammar Book for our text. It does go into detail about the tense aspect system, but less theoretically than for practical teaching approaches. As I recall, in general, the book leans on Chompsky’s grammatical theories.
It would have been so helpful if my language classes in high school (Spanish) and college (German and Japanese) would have touched on this at all. Primarily, in the classroom setting, learning the associated culture feels like little more than tourism. Looking at linguistic aspects of a language like this is an invaluable cultural angle, as we better understand how people communicate and express themselves in the language, how to think in it.
loving the style of content
This is fascinating! What tense/aspect are command words/the imperative? It looks like the present tense in English ("Sit", "eat", "give me that", etc.), but the action would conceivably occur in the future (after you say the command) and represents an unfinished task.
I just noticed the O'Reilly computer books in your bookshelf! At least two are part of the "In a Nutshell" series, and one of those is about Unix.
My first language was English (arguably Spanglish), followed by Spanish, Latin, and French. Recently, however, I started playing around with 中文, and I was SO pleasantly surprised by the way time markers work. I may be the odd one out, but it genuinely made the language make more sense to me, more quickly, than finding similar structures and cognates in the interrelated languages I'd studied before. It almost felt like balancing an equation.
In English, the present time and past time are conjugated for, whereas the future and conditional are formed periphrastically. This is also the case in other germanic languages. But broadly speaking I think it helps to think of Time and Aspect as components of a grammatical algorithm which we call tense. This makes naming them intuitive in English. We have 4 aspects simple, continuous, perfect and perfect continuous, and we also have 4 "times" where we can situate the action, the present, the past, the future (relative to the present) and the future (relative to the past). This second "future" is often called the conditional. Combining these 4 times and 4 aspects, naming the 16 tenses becomes intuitive, at least in English.
I have been a biblical languages student for a few years now, and not a single one of my teachers have ever actually explained what aspect is, only that it was different than tense. This was especially frustrating with Hebrew. One teacher explained a little that it was related to something being completed, but vaguely. I need to go back and read the verb sections of my textbooks because THIS MAKES SO MUCH SENSE AND IT'S NOT THAT HARD TO EXPLAIN AND WHY DIDN'T ANY OF MY LANGUAGE PROFESSORS ACTUALLY JUST SAY THIS!? It makes me wonder if they fully understood what aspect was...
Thanks a lot!
the funny thing is that the bible teaches here in Israel do not explain anything about biblical grammar, which is somewhat different from modern Hebrew grammar - so we just read it, with no understanding that the ו (vav, "and") actually flip the tenses, so past becomes future and vice versa (ויאמר "modern hebrew: "and he will say"; biblical hebrew: "he said" etc...). Only after I've read about this online did I understand that I can actually read the bible quite easily
My favorite thing is that verbs that end with "ing" act more like adjectives than anything else with some form of "to be" as the verb in the sentence.
Participle forms are adjectives created from verbs. Sometimes, though probably rarely, they can even function as nouns, e.g. “do you mind me opening the window” vs “do you mind my opening the window”. When learning English, progressive verb forms baffled me because in standard German, this kind of aspect distinction doesn’t exist, and the present participle is hardly ever used at all. Only later did I realise that I use similar constructions all the time when speaking my native dialect.
I teach English to mostly Russian software engineers. When they have a low level to start with, I just say, "This is future tense. Don't worry about it." When they are at a more advanced level, I tell them there is no future tense, blow their minds with a verb chart analysis, and try to undo a lot of what they learned in school. When we get to mixed type conditionals, the real headache begins. "Yes, this is a past form. No, it is not past tense."
I really think that deserves its own video. Learning about shall/should, can/could, will/would -- and the fact that the same kind of thing happens in other languages, was mind expanding for me!
I'm interested: why is "walked" a past tense of "walk" but "will walk" isn't a future tense? Is it simply some sort of technical definition like if you modify the verb without introducing a space into the written form, it counts, but not if the modification includes a space in the orthography? ('Cos that'd seem a bit arbitrary, functionally-speaking, if it's something like that! And possibly another one of those hangovers from historic linguistic theories that assumed everything should work like Latin?)
Often English marks tense/aspect/mood on the pronouns, like "I'll" is a future tense of "I" and "he's" is a presente perfective of "he".
@@zak3744 the reason is will is a verb and ed is not. sure, it's hard to say what the verb MEANS, but the conjugation is just like "can". i will, you will, he will, she will, we will, they will, i would, you would, he would, she would, etc
@@zak3744 "to go to" is also a way of showing the future, as in "i'm going to answer your question". (it doesn't make much sense to say "i went to answer your question" though)
I've spent a fair amount of time studying Greek and a lot of time studying Russian. I've love to see more on this. Choosing the correct verb form is so challenging!
Modern Greek and Russian have a similar aspect system--though Russian struck me as more random. If you learn one, the other language becomes easier. The verbs, at least. Now, Navajo, with no tense but seven modes and twelve aspects, puts everything into perspective.
I vaguely remember the modal verb to want in German can sometimes be used to convey future. I like foreign languages but to be honest I fall in the camp that only gets these concepts like the subjunctive vaguely and can't properly apply them in real life when speaking a foreign language. I have to just guess and hope for the best.