English as an Additional Language/Simple past tense

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The past tense signifies actions that were done in the past. Conjugating verbs to show the past tense is very easy in English, almost as easy as conjugating the present tense.

[edit] Past Tense

To show how to conjugate the past tense, let's take the verb to work. It is conjugated in this manner:

• 1st person singular: I worked.
• 2nd person singular: You worked.
• 3rd person singular: He/She/It worked.
• 1st person plural: We worked.
• 2nd person plural: You worked.
• 3rd person plural: They worked.

As you can see, to conjugate the past tense ed is simply added to the end of the verb in all its forms. As with the present tense, there are a large number of irregular verbs; for example the verb have uses the word had for all forms, the verb try uses the word tried for all forms and the word send uses sent in all forms.