Your textbooks LIED about "tenses." Learn this if you want to learn languages
HTML-код
- Опубликовано: 28 сен 2024
- Most of how we talk about "tenses" is wrong, especially in language learning textbooks. It's time to talk about tense, aspect, and mood. If you want to learn a language, or even become a polyglot, you can't afford to not know this.
Books recommended (Amazon affiliate links):
Tense: amzn.to/3ZqVqxi
Aspect: amzn.to/3JhmOID
Introducing Semantics: amzn.to/3ZJzVYa
Language Jones Attire: languagejones....
Patreon: www.patreon.com/languagejones
The past, present, and future walked into a bar.
It was tense.
Nah, it was, is and will tense.
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 RUclips language community only has like ten people lmao
Super gigachad polyglot?
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".
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.
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 learned so much about English when I started to understand the subjunctive in Spanish. “ If I were to…”
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
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.
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.
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 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 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!
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
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).
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.
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.
I’m thoroughly enjoying your videos. I’ll have questions once finish a few more of them.
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.
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.
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.
I found this video using RUclips's new "feeling lucky" feature. It was a great watch!
Thank you!
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.
Man, your channel really rocks! Keep it up.
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 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! 😅😅
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?
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".
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.
Super interesting topic! Can’t wait for the mood and modality video! Keep up the work
*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.
Taylor, another great video! For me the poster child of aspect is modern Greek and the poster child of mood is ancient Greek.
I've been saying this for years to my English students. You are much clearer than I've ever been. Thanks for this.
every once in a while the reccomendations get it right. subscribed.
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.
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!!
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…
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!
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! 😊
Thank you for dealing with these issues in such a clear yet rigorous way! Can't wait for the video in mood!
I'm more worried about the lack of pluperfect. Had English got one, that previous clause would be 25% more efficient.
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 like Douglas Adams' comment on the effect of time travel on the tenses - for example future perfect fell away because it was found not to be.
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 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".
English has only two tenses: present and præterite - but a whole zoo of auxiliaries, to express aspect and mood. And don't get a linguist started on the verb, 'do'.
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.'
Omg, this video was great, when I was in primary school, I learned aspect and tense as 1 concept in English. I left a comment on your polyglot tricks video about verb tenses in Mandarin Chinese. This video did clear up a few of those questions. However, if one Chinese character is viewed as a word, it makes sense that there are no tenses linguistically speaking. However, as a very natural speaker of Mandarin Chinese (still quite far from native I might add) I've come to think of a 字 as a syllable, rather than a word. Is it not then a little bit harder to say there is no tenses in Mandarin?... Hmm, I think I need to join the Patreon lol.
Now I know why I always felt my language lessons are short coming.
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.
Ah, not so happy memories of being bombarded with lists of verb conjugations for various tenses when learning French in High School. The "here's a list of verbs and their conjugations, memorise them" approach to language teaching. UGH! It was so much nicer learning Māori where we learned useful stuff to say for the first half of the course and by the time we got to looking at tenses "academically", we were already so used to using them, it was a piece of cake.
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'm learning French and you're scaring me. I've heard of passé composé but I haven't started the relevant textbook yet.
Definitely interested. I had this feeling about ebonics but I never knew how to articulate it.
I've often thought about this & I think English future tense just needs an imaginative use of the letters O & N for future tense. We have "looked" & "look" for past & present tense, but "lookon" can easily convey future tense i.e. "They looked at it in the past", "They look at it now"& "They lookon in the future".
This is what I have been looking for since forever! This video specifically and other videos in general. I'm a native swedish speaker, also fluent dutch+english and every now and then I get the idea I should pick up french but all "frans voor zelfstudie" books/courses leave me with a feel of "I guess I can buy a baguette, but I do not understand what is going on in this language". Now I kinda understand why things don't make sense, thanks. So now I plan to buy these books + some from another video you have. I'd love to use your affiliate links but they lead me to US amazon, I shop off of NL amazon; is there some solution to this?
Also I must say that the idea from another video of telling dutch people dat nederlands een grappig taal is.. this is a complete game changer for me.
I would like it if you would translate each word of the other-language phrases you use, in order. This helps to appreciate differences in word order and how separate word meanings combine in a phrase to make a new meaning.
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.
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.
That's awesome! I have just discovered this channel and I am so excited to watch other videos. Thank you🙏
Well done! Why do many language teachers not know about aspect?
*Arthur Prior enters the chat.*
Anyway, please try to help people differentiate "perfective" and "perfect". That's where any time I've discussed this with people, they get confused because they conflate the two.
English is cool because it sometimes takes adverbial phrases to disambiguate the perfective and imperfect aspects, like, "I ran two miles ((last Saturday)/(every weekend))."
IIRC, Hindi does have perfective and imperfect aspect conjugations for all of its tenses.
I mentioned this in another comment, but I too get them confused. I once had a very angry peer reviewer really take me to task over it. Since there's so many requests for it, I'll add it to the video idea stack!
When we started getting into the endless different verb forms in French that I waved the surrender flag. I also love that in Japanese, you sometimes make an ADJECTIVE past tense rather than the verb (effectively "Yesterday it is hotted" rather than "Yesterday it WAS hot."
They should make an aspect for when you are trying to focus on something but some annoying thing or person or pet keeps bothering you
Once I finally got aspect, especially as pertains to perfective versus imperfective, it allowed me to understand "perfect" and anterior tenses better. No, I didn't even learn this concept in linguistics classes, though I suspect had I got a master's instead of a plain bachelor's I would have had a course on aspect.
And all of these have helped with concepts like telicity too. Expressions of temporal relations, like Star Trek, fascinate me but sometimes get on my nerves.
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.
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
High school French taught me so much about English. It was where I first heard of the past perfect and imperfect.
I had the same experience, but with German. I concluded that studying a foreign language compels you to understand grammar in more depth than you previously had. You understand the grammar of you native language more than you did in “grammar school”.
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.
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).
loving the style of content
I love that Arrival reference. Chapeau a toi.
My first time hearing about aspect - fascinating 😊
Something at least for English is that English has this small, simple tense/mode formal system, but yet English uses lots of helper auxiliary verbs to form a complex system that isn't always taught very well, either in English or when then studying other languages. It's readily possible to learn and to teach the Latinate (Spanish, French, etc.) verb system to English speakers, but they have to absorb the differences, plus they need to know how English grammar does it, in order to anchor those concepts in the new language. Teaching for a non-european language, a different ver system, (and different noun system and other word classes) has got to be challenging for both the teacher and the students. -- People don't seem to realize at first how, no matter what human language, there are always ways we mark various bits of meaning, even if it is inferred and not so obvious. Or cases where the language doesn't mark something, just doesn't really consider it a thing, yet it gets handled in other ways by speakers, it's still understood in its own different way within the language.
"Tense" is an overloaded term and has an everyday sense and a technical linguistic sense. But unlike lots of other overloaded terms the everyday term gets a lot of use in fields like language learning, which to an outsider would seem to be closer to the field of linguistics so they think they already know the technical linguistic meaning and that makes it really confusing when they bump into the actual technical linguistic sense, or claims based on it.
Another word where a similar thing happens is "grammar". It's often treated as meaning "usage", or as meaning only inflections and not including syntax.
As for tense vs aspect, it seems to sometimes be unclear. People don't seem to agree on whether Japanese has tense, aspect, or both.
(But I'm not a real linguist, just an enthusiast.)
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 always find the Japanese approach to time interesting. Embedded time (like "He told me you *weren't* there") works differently from English in that you only have to mark the time of the final main verb. You can also often completely ignore time while telling a story of an event and speak in the present after initially defining the story as occurring in the past; you can kinda do this in English, too, but it's way more common in Japanese where people seem to avoid staying in "past mode" if they're going to be using a lot of verbs.
And then you can also choose to end your sentence on a verb-based "noun," often a verb of Chinese origin (in kanji) or a foreign language verb (in katakana), without supplementing it with Japanese verb endings (especially in written text), although you can ALSO choose to inflect these with prefix/suffixes (mostly Chinese).
"在庫を確認" (check inventory)
"在庫を確認中" (currently checking inventory)
"在庫を確認済" (completed checking inventory) *although this suffix is pronounced in Japanese
etc.
I think that the aspect of tenses having potentially shifting reference points explains something I see in fan fiction quite a lot, possibly particularly where it’s written by non-native speakers of English whose English is otherwise very very good. Fanfic writers often don’t seem to know how to effectively signal within the prose text where there is a shift in time between scenes - whether that’s the next day, or months or years later. Rather than marking the time within the prose, it’s common to use somewhat paratextual headings/subheadings marked *Timeskip*, sometimes with further detail as to where time is skipping to, other times that is just something you are expected to figure out. If I can quickly tell where your next scene is temporally with respect to the previous scene, you don’t need to tell me it’s a time skip. If I can’t tell quickly, I lose immersion in the story while trying to figure it out, and the word ‘timeskip’ has not told me enough. But most noticeably, these headings are not something that I would expect in the course of natural language; they are a sudden and harsh imposition from the authorial voice over that of the narrator.
In more fluid writing, I would expect to be viewing a scene at a specific time, moving through the scene as I read at a specific speed which may or often may not quite align with the actual speed of events. If the writer wants to leave the characters at the end of a scene and write a scene that exists, or may exist, at a different time or place, I would expect some kind of temporal marker that situates the new scene with respect to the previous one whose time the reader had been inhabiting. This could be a word or phrase like ‘the next day’, or ‘three hours later’ or a different tense/aspect that implies movement through time like ‘they had been walking’ or ‘they were running’, compared with a previous scene which had been using ‘they ran’. Generally, I would expect a combination of both of these. A specific temporal marker tells me exactly where the time of the action is moving to, and the tense/aspect change allows me to move stepwise through the change of action time whilst retaining my reference time before that action time then becomes my new reference time. When I break it down like that, it sounds really complicated and I can see why facility with the temporality of scene changes might be something that comes late in the journey of language fluency.
This is probably explained badly, but is my personal working out of an odd aspect of everyday linguistics that has been bugging me for a while.
Great info. I appreciate the great examples and details of how tense and aspect differ and interact. And now, we must get into mood!
This really needs to be addressed in English classes. So many native English speakers are losing forms because grammar teachers really don't understand it. So many forms have been eradicated, and so many people don't understand them. It's sad. I've understood them because I'm well read, but it always upsets me when I hear teachers especially correct things that are written correctly. There was even an English professor who wrote a book titled "On Writing Well" where he talks about various forms that are wrong, that are actually correct--just he doesn't like how flowery they are.
And it's ironic, because his titled comes from the "You can't write good", which is also false. Because it's an English form not often seen with an implied. For example, "I run good" has an implied "I run good runs". This form emphasizes the implied noun. Meanwhile, the form this professor (and teachers in general) suggest is the only correct way (wrong) is "I run well". This emphasizes the verb; i.e., having good form, etc. "I run good" implies your run times will be astounding while "I run well" implies you are capable of running and generally capable of the things running requires. Both forms are correct with drastically different meanings.
And it's stuff like that which makes me upset. We are losing forms in English because many are uninformed of the linguistic and grammatical nuance. We need people to be better taught so that English doesn't deteriorate.
nah ion think so that dont sound right to me, u probably bin thikin about a different language imo
"Did anyone ever clearly explain them?"
Dude this video is the first time I properly grokked what Perfect/Imperfect meant. And I already KNEW there was a difference between momentary vs ongoing. I didn't know that's what those were.
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.
I hope I got the point across when I tutored English to fellow engineering students. I had Russian in school, but I certainly did not grasp the idea of aspect then.
My high school French classes did at least try to explain the distinction between time and completion, albeit maybe not so clearly since the teacher had to try to judge comprehension from a group of teenagers.
Myself, I always rather enjoyed the plus-que-parfait.
My mind is blown, hearing you speak Chinese. I have been studying it on Duolingo (and found your channel because of your video on Duolingo) for a few years now. I have gathered that le means past, but now I'm seeing it's all much more complex. I have a BA in Spanish, and have taught ESL, but I'm not much of an expert on languages. I was flabbergasted when I was learning French, also on Duolingo, that French doesn't have a progressive tense. I thought it was just like Spanish. Anyway, I'm sure I'm going to learn a lot from your videos. Thanks!
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
Polish has aspect as in dokanny and niedokanny. A nightmare for English natives trying to learn it.
Ummmmm.......yeah. Cases are another challenge to monolingual English speakers. And the there's the fun of "seriously, nobody's confused even though there're no articles". Trust me. I understand your pain.
My French teacher explained this concept pretty well in high school and it’s something I’ve always been conscious of learning new languages. Thanks for the clear and detailed explanation 😊
I don’t know English grammar even though it’s my native tongue. I really want to learn and I think these concepts: aspect, mood, tense, etc. you speak about will finally break my confusion. Is there a beginner book for regular folks that teaches these? I have an immigrant wife who really wants to learn English well and it’s embarrassing that I don’t know how to explain my own language to her.
There’s got to be a book that doesn’t copy the old Latin way of teaching grammar.
5:00 your local Sinologist here, when you say 我穿着衣服, it’s sounds like you’re wearing your clothes to do something, so when you had the 着 at the end of the first verb, usually another verb would follow to show why or how you’re wearing your clothes. 我穿着黑丝黑色的衣服去婚姻。“I’m wearing black clothes to the wedding” if you want to express “wearing” you can literally just say 我穿衣服, no need to add 着，if you want to mark a contrast between having worn and not having worn then you can add 了，我穿衣服了, 5:00
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.
I don’t think I ever learned about aspects in French (my language). A lot of my colleagues are teaching this language and we never had this discussion. Even when they whined about people who considered periphrastic constructions as tenses, they never explained that these were mostly about aspects. I started to build a conjugation software a while ago and I never came across this idea. Now, it’s in nowadays curriculum in Quebec, so maybe the kids are learning it more explicitly. I thought French conjugation was complex, but now that know about aspects.... Oh, what a beautiful mess it is! Thank you for opening my eyes.
My favourite tense (or is that mood ?) is the imperfect subjunctive in Italian. Juste because it's pretty. Si figuravano che credessimo che fossero intelligenti. I've studied very little Turkish, but I like the fact that there is a past for what you actually experienced and one for what you know from another source.
How about "He had never had much ice cream, but what ice cream he would have had would have had to have been substandard."?
I loved this video, and will continue loving it. 😂
I came close to fluency in Slovak, but only ever achieved fluency in my native English (I communicate in Spanish and came close to communicating in German). I struggled with the tense, specifically, I appreciated in English the distinction between events in the past: I was walking down the street when I tripped. I started wondering if such a refinement meant a different understanding of time, then I started wondering if other languages had more refinement than English. (The boilerplate feel of English is disappointing, especially the use of "do", but Slovak had flourish: To Peter I wrote a letter. I to Peter wrote a letter. I wrote to Peter a letter. I wrote a letter to Peter. The latter dominates.
The Irish language (Gaeilge) also has a habitual present, but only for one verb, bí (to be). Weirdy, though, it has a regular system for indicating the habitual past for any verb.
I worked with some sales people who used "habitual" tense markers to "fluff" their life experiences. Ex: "The last time I hiked the Grand Canyon, I ....." when the speaker had only hiked once. Using "the last time" made it seem like they were avid outdoorspeople.