Ignoring Tenses Otherwise Perfect

[PeaceBlondie]

Brits tend to ask, "Have you eaten yet?" and are sometimes annoyed to hear Americans ask, "Did you eat already?" Some Brits wonder if the present perfect is even taught or used in America.

Yes, I have been speaking perfect tenses almost all my life. I had been speaking it in English until 1998, and since then I have been able to speak perfect tenses in Spanish. However, if I lived in Thailand another 50 years, I doubt I will have spoken the future perfect tense much in Thai.

Please repeat this mantra until you have memorized it: "Mai bpen rai, it will not have mattered."

Let the Thai teachers of English do all their grammar trees, including the subjunctives and perfect tenses and passive moods, such as "You will have been more bored than if I were to have taught you even more."

I've written a two-volume novel, and then I got to the point where I had used the past perfect tense innumerable times. I went back and changed them to past simple. Now I'm going back and changing many of the present perfects to past simple. It simply works better. It communicates better. I have realized that, if I were to have been a perfect teacher, and if I had taught all my nakrian until they had been taught perfectly, they would have become LESS fluent in English, because I would have wasted valuable teaching time teaching them to have learnt the wrong schtuff. Just as you have now wasted precious time reading all the excess verbiage that I have just written.

The most clever way to teach EFL is to use as little grammar as possible while still teaching communication. Besides, "Have you eaten YET" ends in the common Thai word for '<deleted>-k.'

[robitusson]

"Where have you been for the last hour?" Does this translate as "Where were you for the last hour already?"?

[PeaceBlondie]

Your sample sentence, Cough Syrup, doesn't end in 'yet,' so the translation can be "Where were you for the last hour?" From what little I understand of Thai, which uses adverbs or phrases of time in place of complex time tenses, that would translate just fine.

Why do you think you need to say, "Where have you been?" when you could say, "Where were you?" The perfect tenses require the verb portion of the sentence to combine one imperfect verb (have/have/had) with another (be/was/been). KISS. Keep it simple.

[robitusson]

Hey peace Peaceblondie, just wondering how it works. If someone said to me "Where were you?" I would say "when?".

[PeaceBlondie]

I'm not real serious about this whole thing; after all, I'm unemployed and don't have much of a life.

I thought if you said, "Where were you yesterday?" Thais would understand it fine.

If you engage me in conversation, you'd find that I speak a lot of long extemporaneous, complex sentences. When I do that in teaching anything less than (true) advanced learners, I lose them every time. If I had not lived among foreigners for years in Texas, I wouldn't have known how to teach EFL. See the tenses in that last sentence? Isn't it intense?

I don't speak broken Thailish in class, but I try to think of the shortest clear answer. I avoid irregular verbs like the plague, and that's difficult. I avoid words like 'yet' and 'key.' I never use the subjunctive mood because I can only think of "If I were king of my country..." and "If I were you...," both of which are absurd.

But you can always say, "It's cold in Alaska NOW."

[robitusson]

You're point is well taken. I've very rarely had students that have to worry about it. Most of the time subject + verb + object is challenging enough in this country.

[PeaceBlondie]

Agreed. So:

subject + irregular V1 + irregular V2 + object + preposition + object + adverb + adverb

is way too complex, even when it's just:

"I have given homework to you every day."

But I say stuff like that without thinking twice. I should have thought thrice before thrashing so much rice and trash.

[kenkannif]

Noticed watching American Idol last night that you seem to say spit instead of spat???

[chownah]

Noticed watching American Idol last night that you seem to say spit instead of spat???

We also typically say "skinned" instead of "skun".

[robitusson]

After my ship sinked I swimmed to shore.

[PeaceBlondie]

Having skinned a possum, no American hillbilly would say, "This possum is skint." Neither would he begin a sentence, "Having skinned the possum, I ate it....."

"Spat" sounds unAmerican. We would say, "Cor, mate - that uncouth cad of a bloke just spit on the bloody floor!"

[chownah]

Teaching the perfect tenses can be fun. On monday you give everyone in the class a cookie or a piece of candy if you are on a budget and have them eat it...you can do this near the end of the class so they don't try to talk with their mouth full. Do the same on Tuesday and ditto on Wednesday. On thursday, before you feed them you teach them to say:

"on Monday I ate one cookie"

"on Tuesday I ate one cookie"

"by Tuesday I had eaten two cookies"

"by Wednesday I had eaten three cookies"

"now I have heaten three cookies"

"after class today I will have eaten four cookies"

"by midnight tomorrow I will have eaten five cookies"

etc.

Welllllll.....the cookies are fun!!

[kenkannif]

Noticed watching American Idol last night that you seem to say spit instead of spat???

We also typically say "skinned" instead of "skun".

Mate I don't know anyone that says skun

[robitusson]

Sink, sank.

Wink.........winked.

[chownah]

Noticed watching American Idol last night that you seem to say spit instead of spat???

We also typically say "skinned" instead of "skun".

Mate I don't know anyone that says skun

Great! I'm glad you agree!

[Guest endure]

Having skinned a possum, no American hillbilly would say, "This possum is skint." Neither would he begin a sentence, "Having skinned the possum, I ate it....."

In English English 'skint' means you have no money like 'broke' in US English.

[otherstuff1957]

Having skinned a possum... most American Hillbillys would say "Where's the Possum fixin's?