This video is about verbs. 'To be or not to be, that is the question'. These are perhaps the most important class of words. Verbs are often defined as 'doing words', and they are indeed typically the words in clauses and sentences that tell us about the nature of what is being done. The definition of a verb as a 'doing word' works quite well in many cases, so in each of the following sentences there is a verb: 'She swims three lengths every day', 'They eat their dinner at six', 'We ran down the hill'. In these sentences 'swims', 'ran' and 'eat' are verbs. However, defining verbs as 'doing words' can be problematic for various reasons. One reason is that nouns too can express actions or events. For example, 'preparation', 'movement', 'performance'. What's more, there are words in English that we would want to call verbs, but they are not 'doing words' at all. So, for example, if I say 'Sophia is French', then Sophie isn't actually doing anything at all. Or if I say 'Tom seems happy' or 'Nina feels cold', then again Tom and Nina aren't actually engaged in any kind of activity, except perhaps for shivering. And yet, we want to say that 'is', 'seems' and 'feels' are also verbs. So what is a more reliable way to define verbs? Consider the two sentences shown here: 'She loves cupcakes', 'She loved cupcakes when she was five'. In these examples the verbs have an ending, which we called an 'inflection'. In the first sentence the ending is an '-s', added to 'love'. In the second sentence the ending is '-ed'. These endings indicate what we call 'tenses'. More specifically, a 'present tense' and a 'past tense'. A tense is a way for a grammar of a language to talk about time. Many languages in the world have a very rich set of verb endings in various tenses, but English has very few. In the present tense we have only one ending for regular verbs, namely when we have a third-person singular subject. Remember that the subject in a sentence or clause is usually the 'do-er'. This means that in the table on screen, for standard English all the verb forms are present tenses, even though it is only visible if there is a third-person subject. The present tense is often used to talk about the 'here and now', as when we say 'Kylie plays with her friend Emma every afternoon'. However, we can also use the present tense to talk about the future. For example, when I say 'Jenny plays football tomorrow at 6 p.m.', even though the sentence talks about the future, it doesn't have a future tense in it, because there's no special future tense inflection. The present tense can even be used to talk about the past. This happens, for example, when we tell a story and use present tenses to make what we are saying sound more immediate. So I might begin a story by saying 'The other day I'm in the park, when suddenly I hear this loud music. It turns out that a rock concert had just started'. The past tense of verbs is typically used to talk about a situation in the past. The past tense can be formed using the ending '-ed' on what we call 'regular verbs' for all persons. As you can see, for the verb 'love' all the past tense forms are the same. However, there are also quite a few verbs in English whose past tense forms are not regular, and for this reason we call them 'irregular verbs'. For example 'break' - 'broke', 'eat' - 'ate', 'drink' - 'drank', 'run' - 'ran', 'see' - 'saw'. What about the future? Although this may seem surprising, most linguists agree that English has no future tense, only a present and past tense. Of course, this doesn't mean that we can't talk about the future; it's just that English has no special verb forms that we can call a future tense. So how can we talk about the future? Well, one way is to use a present tense: 'Tomorrow the sun rises at 5 a.m. and sets at 10 p.m.' Another way is to use a modal verb such as 'shall' or 'will'. We will discuss modal verbs in the next video. Find out more about grammar at englicious.org.