In the “I have a question” series, we discuss your language-related questions and problems.
Would you please explain about how we should deal with the problem of the correct usage of tenses in relation together, or a grammer text that we can refer to when we get caught in making sentences in which we need to use several verbs with time relations?
Short answer: No, Farid, I can’t “explain” it in a short text, or even a rather long one. Sorry, no magic bullets! :-( More detailed answer: The use of multiple tenses in a sentence is a broad and rather complex topic that is not easy to cover in a single text. I can’t really think of any “text” to refer you to except standard grammar books. A good choice would be the “English Grammar in Use” series by Cambridge. But then, that would only cover the understanding part, not the being-able-to-use part. Now if you tell me that understanding something… Read more »
Thank you Pejman jân for paying attention to our questions.
Actually I face this problem using multiple tenses in a short paragraph when I want to narrate something, and naturally I put them in the way that we do in my mother tongue Farsi, and often in Farsi we don’t think about them and just use them as they come to our mind and often it is without problems as far as I guess. Of course, may be if a Farsi professor corrected it, in way you correct our English texts, he/she find many problems in it ????.
Dear Farid,
I think it is not a bad idea to write a paragraph and then analyse its mistakes with Pezhman’s help in order to find the root of the problem. It might be much easier to learn them too.
1) Of course if a Farsi professor correct it, in a way you correct our texts, he/she will find too many mistakes in them.????
Sorry if a Farsi professor correct them. And I don’t know how use “may” with that?
See this post about the difference between “maybe” and “may be”.
You have two choices here.
Either:
If a Farsi professor corrects it, he/she will find too many mistakes in it.
Or:
If a Farsi professor corrected it, he/she would find too many mistakes in it.
As I think it is rather unlikely that it happens, I prefer the second sentence.