Still not sure?
STILL, YET and ALREADY Last time, I shared my misgivings about the slippery present perfect tense in English. As if it wasn’t bad enough alone, this tense also provides a favourable habitat for three of our most exotic and user-hostile adverbs: still, yet and already....
Present Perfect II: The Past as a Hangover
Problems, problems… In my last blog, I explained why the English Present Perfect tense can be tricky to get right for non-native speakers. Many languages use a similar form to talk about the recent past, reserving the “regular” past tense for more “historic” events....
Present Perfect: Tense of the Living Past
On Time Perhaps unsurprisingly, English grammar is quite punctual. Tenses are used fairly consistently to separate past from present and although we never got round to inventing future tenses, we manage with will. Unlike some other languages, the rules are pretty...