Main Verbs (Simple Past Tense)

Objective: Write sentences in the simple past tense. When we began our lessons on main verbs I mentioned the difficulty resulting from subject and verb agreement. We have now put that behind us. Our new problem is in the nature of verbs in the past tense. Fortunately, as I have mentioned, the question of subject and verb agreement does not arise. But we have two kinds of verbs: regular and irregular verbs. The regular verbs add –ed to form their past tense and past participles. Once again we shall benefit from the list we had created. Regular verbs form their past tense and past participle by adding –ed to the main verb. From our list such verbs are 1) Play 2) Skip 3) Jump 4) Sip 5) Wash 6) Air 7) Watch 8) Kick 9) Cook 10) Fetch 11) Chew 12) Suck 13) Boil 14) Work 15) Milk 16) Brush 17) Paint 18) Laugh 19) Mill 20) Dance 21) Colour 22) Polish 23) Weld 24) Cry 25) Slash 26) Winnow 27) Slap 28) Smile 29) Call 30) Phone 31) Weed 32) Plant 33) Knock 34) Hammer 35) Cheer 36) Praise 37) Shell 38) Beg 39) Herd 40) Push 41) Close 42) Visit 43) Fish We can use any subject, singular or plural to form our sentences. a) John smiled. b) John and Joan smiled. c) He smiled. d) She smiled. e) They smiled. f) We smiled. g) It smiled. On the other hand, irregular verbs do not form their past tense and past participle in this way. In fact it is difficult to predict what these forms will be. The best advice is to learn them by heart. Examples from our list include: 1) Stand, stood, stood. 2) Sleep, slept, slept. 3) Sit, sat, sat. 4) Read, read, read. 5) Bath, bath, bath. 6) Run, ran, run. 7) Drink, drank, drunk. 8) Take, took, taken. 9) Think, thought, thought. 10) Hang, hung, hung. (hanged means to kill by hanging) 11) See, saw, seen. 12) Write, wrote, written. 13) Ride, rode, ridden. 14) Swing, swung, swung. 15) Draw, drew, drawn. You can see that our list has three items. For this lesson we need only the second item. The third item will be used in a future lesson but you need to know it. Again we do not have a subject and verb agreement problem. The problem here is to pick the right verb. In some cases the second and third item are similar. No problem. When they are not, be sure to use the second item. Thus: a) John ran. b) John and Joan wrote. c) He read. d) She saw. e) They rode. f) It drew. g) We thought. These verbs as I have mentioned present a special problem. You have to know them by heart. My list is very small. Any good dictionary has a huge list of these verbs. Make a habit of using this section of your dictionary every day to master the English sentence pattern of the day.