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How to conjugate any verb form in English

When learning a language like Latin or French, learning conjugations is a major hurdle.

With six conjugation forms for every tense, school children in France have entire classes just for conjugaison ... quelle horreur!

So compared with other languages, verb conjugation is not something you would think would make English hard.

Yet many English learners still struggle, getting mixed up with we has and she have, runned and swimmed, or even have talking and been eated.

The way conjugation in English is taught might be part of the problem. Many English language teachers still confuse tense with aspect and mood.

Mixing these concepts up into 12 or more verb forms like you'll find on a typical conjugation chart only serves to make English harder to master and causes a lot of stress for learners.

But it doesn't need to be this hard.

And it isn't when you learn this simple recipe for mastering any verb form in English ...


First, a bit of theory to make sense of everything ...

In any language, there are only two ways to changing meaning about time and belief - changing the order of words by adding or removing words, or changing the words themselves.

English loves word order. The dog bites the man means something very different to the man bites the dog. Word-order focused languages are what linguists call analytic.

English is mostly analytic except when it comes to verbs. Then English spices things up by changing the words themselves ... sing, sang, sung, singing.

Changing parts of a word to change its meaning is called inflection, and when we inflect verbs it is called conjugation*.

In English, we inflect or conjugate verbs based on who is doing the action (the subject), the tense (past or non-past), and the aspect (continuous or perfect).

The secret to mastering English verbs is knowing which verbs to inflect for what. And we can do that with a simple recipe.


A simple recipe for verb conjugation

Step 1 - Word Order

The word order for verbs is very simple. First comes the subject or actor of the sentence, then the auxiliary verbs if we like, and then the main action.

subject + ( auxiliary-verbs ) + action

Auxiliary verbs are the helper verbs that change the meaning of the main action. They include aspect-verbs like have and be, as well as modal verbs like can, shall, may, and will.

The word order of the auxiliary verbs is also very simple. We can have up to three of them (or one or none), one modal-verb and two aspect-verbs, like this ...

subject + ( modal-verb + have-aspect + be-aspect ) + action

And that's it for word order! Take any action, any subject, and sprinkle in some mood and aspect to your taste ...

subject-me + mode-shall + aspect-be + action-ski 

Step 2 - Inflect for subject and tense

While word order is very simple, conjugation is just simple as it requires two steps. First, we inflect the first verb, and only the first verb, for subject and tense agreement.

Remember, there could be up to four verbs here ... modal-verb + have-aspect + be-aspect + action ... but it is only the first one that we inflect to show tense.

I should ... aspect-be + action-ski  

The mode shall became should, its past tense, and should agrees with I. For the simplest sentences without aspect verbs like she skis or he will ski, our recipe finishes here.

Step 3 - Inflect for aspect

When we have more than one verb, the final step is to inflect the remaining verbs for aspect agreement. Depending on whether we are using just the perfect aspect, the continuous aspect, or both, we will have one of these results ...

I should have skied
I should be skiing
I should have been skiing

And that's it. Follow these three steps and you can conjugate the most complex verb-form in English like a boss.

All you need to do now is practice.

Notes

  1. Inflection of a noun or adjective is called declension. Latin and German love declension which allows them to be flexible with word order. Der Hund beißt den Mann means the same as den Mann beißt der Hund. Languages that use a lot of inflection are called synthetic.

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Dave Kinkead

Once upon a time, Dave taught critical thinking and effective writing at university. Now he writes about English language and communication. He has degrees in science, business, and philosophy ... probably because he never got a gold star in finger painting.