Grammatical tense is how languages talk about time without explicitly naming time periods, by instead, modifying verbs to specify when action occurs.
So how many different tenses are there in a language like English?
At first, the answer seems obvious: there's past, present, and future.
But thanks to something called grammatical aspect, each of those time periods actually divides further.
There are four kinds of aspect.
In the continuous or progressive aspect, the actions are still happening at the time of reference.
The perfect aspect describes actions that are finished.
The perfect progressive aspect is a combination, describing a completed part of a continuous action.
And finally, there's the simple aspect, the basic form of the past, present, and future tense, where an action is not specified as continuous or discrete.
That's all a little hard to follow, so let's see how it works in action.
