In learning English, learning about tenses is very important. If you understand tenses, you already know about 70% of English. The rest 30% is vocabulary.

I don't want to talk much, so let's start.
學習英文時，　動詞時態是很重要的一部份。　如果了解時態，你就差不多了解了英文的百分之七十。


Verb Tense and Grammatical Tense
First, there are two kinds of tense in English: Verb Tense and Grammatical Tense. Both kinds of tense correlate to each other as you will see later.

首先，有兩種時態：動詞本身以及文法變化。　兩種互相都有關係。

Verb tense is the change of the verb itself. There are three forms in every verbs in English: Infinitive, Past, and Perfect.
Example: eat (infinitive form) --> ate (past form) --> eaten (perfect form).
每個動詞都會有動詞原型、過去式、即過去分詞。

Grammatical tense is the change of sentence structure according to time.　文法上的變化是因句子中因時間而做的改變。
Example:
I am eating.
I have eaten.


Verb Tense
As mentioned, verb tense is the change of the verb itself. There are three forms in every verbs in English: Infinitive, Past, and Perfect.
動詞時態是動詞本身的改變。每個動詞都有三種變化：原型、過去式、過去分詞。
Example: eat (infinitive form) --> ate (past form) --> eaten (perfect form).

Verb tense is devided into two types: Verbs with Strong Conjugation and Verbs with Weak Conjugation.
其中有兩種形式：　有強烈變化或比較弱的變化。

Verbs with strong conjugation is the kind of verbs that have internal word change, meaning the wording of the verb itself change. This kind of verbs also known as Irregular Verbs. Almost all of this type of verbs are from older words.
所謂強烈變化就是動詞本身有內部改變，通常稱為不規則動詞變化。這些動詞通常都是屬於古字。
Example: eat --> ate, write --> wrote, tear --> tore.

Verbs with weak conjugation is the kind of verbs that do not have internal word change, we just add "-d" or "-ed" to the verb to make its Past and Perfect form. This kind of verbs also known as Regular Verbs. Almost all of this type of verbs are from newer words.
動詞若有比較弱的變化就是它本身內部沒有改變。只要加上　"-d" 或 "-ed" 再動詞字尾就是過去式或過去分詞。　通常這種動詞稱為規則動詞。這些動詞通常都是新的字。
Example: walk --> walked, talk --> talked, fill --> filled.


Special Verbs
In English, there are verbs that have special usage as auxiliary verbs: Be and Have.
有些特殊的動詞有特殊用法因為他們可以當成助動詞。　像　　be have

Be: be/am/is/are (infinitive form), was/were (past form), been (perfect form)
Have: have/has (infinitive form), had (past form), had (perfect form)

Remember these special verbs very well because they are important in learning grammatical tense.

這些特殊動詞也很重要，我將在下次在多談些verb tense 和 grammatical tense。

In my next post I will talk more about verb tense and grammatical tense.


Sincerely,
Agustinus