Let's talk about verb tenses, baby.

(clicks mouth)

(upbeat rock music)

Oscar asks, "Hi Julian, what a great voice!

"Your accent is very clear,"

blah blah blah,

blah blah blah blah blah,

"My question: on a daily basis,

"when doing ordinary activities,

"like running errands, doing chores, et cetera,

"how many tenses do you think native speakers of English use

"to communicate?

"Thanks."

Good question.

The frequency distribution of different kinds of words

and chunks is something that I talk about

quite a lot in my book, Master English FAST:

An Uncommon Guide To Speaking Extraordinary English.

What I don't talk about in that book, however,

and which Oscar will know because Oscar has the book,

is the frequency distribution of tenses.

First, a quick clarification.

There are only actually three tenses in English,

the past, the present, and the future,

and technically, only two grammatical tenses

by which of course I mean the past and present.

Because the future tense is formed

by using the present form of the verb,

plus an auxiliary verb, such as will.

But then there are also four aspects,

the simple, the progressive, the perfect,

and the perfect progressive,

which then, combined with the three tenses

to form 12 tense categories.

As Oscar's question alludes to,

it probably won't surprise you to learn

that native speakers don't use

these 12 tense categories equally.

A lot of research has been done

on the frequency of the tenses,

and the findings are pretty much unanimous.

Whether in spoken or written English,

the simple present usually accounts for about 60 to 70%

of the verbs found.

Then the simple past, about 20%,

meaning the simple past and the simple present alone account

for about 80 to 90% of all the verbs

in any stretch of spoken or written English.

Clearly, that is a lot,

but what about the other 10 tense categories?

To make this easy to understand,

I made this pretty simple and extremely rough graph.

Straight away, you will see

that the present simple accounts for a massive 50%

of the verbs in this data.

Then, the past simple, a further 30%,

meaning the present simple

and the past simple combined account

for 80% of the verbs in this data.

Then we have the present perfect at 5%,

and the future simple, and present progressive at 2% each.

And from there, the rest of the tenses account

for less than 1% of the data each,

right down to the future perfect progressive,

which accounts for only 0.01%

of the verbs in this dataset.

Again, this graph is pretty rough.

It's something that I just threw together quickly

based on the different research that I looked at.

But it should give you a pretty good idea

as to how the tenses are distributed throughout English.

Before I move on, let me just make one point

because I don't want you to misunderstand.

Just because a tense is, relatively speaking, quite rare,

it doesn't mean that it's not used at all.

All tenses are useful somewhere

and they all have a place within the English language.

For example, the future perfect progressive.

A very rare tense to be sure.

But, next week, I will have been doing

the Doing English Plus Programme,

now Julian Northbrook's League

of Extraordinary English Speakers, for three years,

which was an example of the future perfect progressive.

Again, a rare tense compared

to some of the others to be sure.

But in this situation, a very useful one.

The point is the frequency of the 12 tenses

is clearly extremely imbalanced.

And when you are learning English,

if you are giving equal time and attention, or worse,

you are doing what generally happens

in traditional English learning classrooms

and giving all of your time and attention

to the rarer-perceived difficult tenses,

you are probably not being very efficient

in the way that you learn.

Indeed, the way that most people approach learning English

is actually backwards.

They learn the rules and the tenses

and they try to produce English from that.

This is a pretty poor way to go about trying

to improve your English.

You get taught the tenses,

again, usually with more emphasis on the rarer,

more difficult ones, and then you're expected

to produce language from that.

This is a very quick and easy way

to end up overusing the rare tenses

that native speakers almost never use.

Want a better way to practise the tenses

and improve your English?

A way that's not backwards?

Then check out my book,

Master English FAST: An Uncommon Guide

To Speaking Extraordinary English.

In chapter six, I talk in detail

about something that I call example-based learning,

Which, you ask me, is the best way

to improve your use of the English tenses,

and, well really, any other kind of grammar

that you want to get good at as well.

And there we go. (upbeat rock music)

That is the end of this video.

Did this clear up a few things

about the equation tenses for you?

If it did, go ahead, click the thumbs up button

and leave a comment.

If you thought this video was a load of all shit,

doesn't matter, go ahead, click the thumbs down button.

And either way, if you're new to this channel,

subscribe, and I will see you

in the next extraordinary video, good bye.

However, I didn't really talk

about the frequency of grammatical patterns.

(upbeat rock music)

Uh, they've gone out.

Uh, Delphine's I think, sorry.

Yeah, see ya later.

Yeah, see ya later.

You can probably see this on the Youtube later.

(laughing)

Bye.

He stood on the other side of the window.

Don't stand on the other side of the window,

I can see you!

(lightly laughing)

(lightly laughing)