The past tense is used to describe actions or states that occurred in the past. It's essential for storytelling and recounting previous events clearly. In this timeline, you can see several past actions like walked, ate, studied, and played.
Regular past tense verbs are formed by adding '-ed' to the base form. For example, walk becomes walked, play becomes played, and listen becomes listened. This is the most common pattern for forming past tense verbs in English.
Irregular verbs don't follow the '-ed' rule. They change their form in different ways. For example, go becomes went, eat becomes ate, and see becomes saw. These verbs must be memorized as they don't follow a predictable pattern.
Signal words help identify past tense sentences. Common signal words include yesterday, last week, ago, in 2020, and when I was. These words clearly indicate that the action or state happened in the past.
Let's see past tense in complete sentences. I walked to school yesterday. She ate breakfast this morning. They played soccer last weekend. We studied for the exam all night. Notice how the verbs in red show the past tense forms, and the signal words help identify when the actions occurred.