hello everyone thank you for joining me again and welcome to any new viewers this is to the point English with Ben I'm Ben and in this video I'm going to explain how to tell a story in English and in particular how to use the narrative tenses now I know what you might be thinking um you have no plans on writing a book right you're not planning a career in literature so why do you need to know how to tell a story well first of all if you're planning on taking an English exam you'll need to know how to tell a story effectively for example if you need to write a review of a book or a film you need to basically tell the story in in summary form of that book of or film or maybe you have to write an article about a personal experience like your favorite holiday and you need to tell the story so to speak of that holiday but apart from that we do actually tell stories every day maybe they're just mundane little anecdotes about things that have happened to us so for example here's a little mundane anecdote for you I just saw my old school friend Dave at the shopping center he was buying a present for his wife and had been walking around for hours it was good to bump into him I had last seen him in 2009 okay so as you can see that's not a particularly interesting or elaborate story it's very mundane very day-to-day but in that little short story I used all of the narrative tenses in in English now I do want to emphasize that narrative tenses are not some special secret tenses that we only use for storytelling they are simply Four Past tenses which are very useful when we want to tell a story and really explain what we want to say effectively and the four tenses are the past simple the past continuous the past perfect and the past perfect continuous so with those four verb tenses you can tell any story you want to tell basically from a Shakespearean tragedy or just a mundane anecdote like I just told so to form the past perfect you just need to use the auxiliary had so the past of have as an auxiliary verb and then the past participle of the main verb so had gone had been had worked Etc and for the past perfect continuous you also need to use the auxiliary had plus the past participle form of the verb be so in this case bin is the past participle of B and then the ing form of the main verb so had been working had been doing had been trying for example so let's look again at that little anecdote I just saw my old school friend Dave at the shopping center so I just saw so I saw is the past simple so we use the past simple to refer to an action which started and finished in the past it has no connection to any other action in the past or present or future and then I said he was buying a present for his wife so that's the past continuous of course so we use the past continuous to refer to actions which are taking place before during and possibly after the time when the story is taking place the action of seeing Dave started and finished in a very short period but he was buying a present for his wife continued for longer but then I said he had been walking around for hours so in that case it's the past perfect continuous and we use the past perfect continuous to describe an action which started before another action in the past and continued up to that other past action and I'm really emphasizing that he had been walking around for a long time and then I said I had last seen him in 2009 so that's the past perfect simple so that's referring to a past action which happens before another past action which is also referenced in the story or the anecdote or the sentence now it may be in relation to another past action or just a past time reference in this case you know the whole story is happening in the past right I saw Dave in the shopping center that sets the time it was in the past and all these other actions happen in relation to that past action so as you can see there's quite a lot of grammar in a very simple and basic mundane boring anecdote really now I'm going to give you a much longer anecdote a longer story and this is a true story from when I was quite young and while I'm telling this anecdote I want you to spot as many of the narrative tenses as possible that I use and then we're going to see it written on the screen so you can check if you spotted them all when I was 18 I took a gap year with the intention of spending the whole year in Australia with a couple of friends I had never been outside of Europe before so I was extremely eager to go I was living with my parents at the time but I needed to earn money to pay for the flights and accommodation so I got a job in a factory I had been working for just two weeks when it dawned on me that we needed to apply for a Visa in order to stay in Australia but we had left it too late so we changed our plans and decided to go to Spain for six months Instead This was pre-brexit by the way we flew to Malaga and took a bus along the coast stopping in towns along the way we had been traveling for three days when we started to feel homesick and we stopped in Gibraltar for a few nights in order to connect with the Home Country after so long away after that we went back up the coast to Toro Molinos where we stayed in a cheap apartment for five weeks and drank on the beach every day until we ran out of money and went home so what was supposed to be a year in Australia ended up being about six weeks in the south of Spain but it was a great experience and curiously one of my friends now lives in Australia and I now live in Spain so that travel bug obviously stayed with us all these years so did you identify all the different narrative tenses so remember we're looking for the the past simple the past continuous the past perfect and the past perfect continuous well let's have a look at that anecdote in text now and as you can see I've highlighted the different verb tenses in different colors so we have the past simple in red the past continuous in blue the past perfect in that kind of orange yellow color and the past perfect continuous in green so if you want to pause the video now just to to reread that text and see how I've used those narrative tenses to tell this little story so as I said this is not that Shakespeare it's not particularly creative or inventive it's just an anecdote but I did use all of the narrative tenses and they really helped me to express what I wanted to say effectively and it helps the flow of the story and the reader or The Listener can really get a feel for when these different actions were happening in relation to the rest of the story so of course the whole story was in the past so we use the past simple for the main events but everything that happens around the story so usually before or during you have to use the different verb tenses so either the past continuous the past perfect or the past perfect continuous so as I said these verb tenses The Narrative tenses are extremely useful for every everyday English but also particularly useful if you're taking an English exam especially the Cambridge English exams okay share your own examples in the comments check out these videos to watch next they contain a lot of useful tips and I'll see you very soon for another video