In this lesson, you will learn the four main uses of the present simple tense and how to use it correctly. Also see - MOST COMMON MISTAKES IN ENGLISH & HOW TO AVOID THEM:    • 50 MOST COMMON MISTAKES in English Gr...  

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Transcript:

Do you know where to use the present simple tense
and how to use it correctly? In this lesson, I’m going
to teach you the four main uses of this tense, and how
to avoid common mistakes that many people make with it.
So let’s start.
Welcome to my series of lessons on the tenses.
Before we start, as always, if you have any questions
at all, just ask me in the comments section below,
and I will talk to you there.
OK, in this lesson, I will teach you the four main uses
of the present simple tense – that is, to talk about
habits and routines, permanent situations, facts
about the world, and finally, the very important –
talking about states with state verbs. And there’s
a quiz at the end to check your understanding.
Alright well first – what is the present simple tense?
Well, quite simply, it’s the most basic tense in English
and it’s the first tense that you will learn in any
English course that you take. It’s very easy:
you just take a subject and you add a verb. A subject
is a word like I – You – We – They – He – She – It –
or a name like Mike or Emma. Let’s take ‘I’ for now.
And let’s add a verb – say ‘drink.’ Let’s complete this
sentence so it sounds meaningful – “I drink tea every
morning.” And there you have the present simple tense.
Now, what does that sentence mean? Well, when I say
“I drink tea every morning” you know that I do the
action regularly. Now you see a timeline on the screen.
Let’s say this side is the past, over on that side is
the future, and in the middle is right now. So you know
that I drink tea on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday,
Thursday, Friday, Saturday and so on. You can see that
it repeats. So this is a habit.
And this sentence shows us the first use of the present
simple tense – that is to talk about habits and routines,
things that we do regularly or repeatedly.
Now it would be wrong to say “I’m drinking tea every
morning” – because this is a habit, and for habits you
must use the present simple tense.
Alright, here are some more examples: “Mike visits his
parents on weekends.” Again, this is something that
Mike does regularly – every weekend. In our next example,
“Emma usually has dinner at eight thirty.” Meaning that
it’s part of her routine to eat dinner at eight thirty
every day. In both of these sentences, you should
NOT use the continuous form – remember that.
OK, I want you to notice one other thing in these examples.
You can see how frequently or how often the action happens
– every day, on weekends etc. When we talk about habits
or routines, we normally use these kinds of expressions.
The word ‘every’, for example, is very common – in phrases
like every morning, afternoon, every day, week, month etc.
I said “I drink tea every morning.” Another example is
“They go to Mexico on vacation every year.” You can also
use prepositions like ‘on’ or ‘in’. As in
“Mike visits his parents on weekends.” or
“Dennis goes fishing on Fridays.” And then there are
expressions like once a week, three times a year etc.
For example, “We visit the dentist twice a year for
a checkup.”
Apart from these expressions, we also use what are called
‘frequency adverbs’. If you remember, one of our examples
was “Emma usually has dinner at eight thirty.”
The word ‘usually’ is a frequency adverb.
There are many others like this –
if you do something all the time, that is one hundred
percent of the time, then you can use ‘always’.
For example, “Meena always walks to work.”
That means she never takes the bus or she never drives
to work. But hey, there’s another frequency adverb there
– ‘never’. And that means that something happens zero
percent of the time. It does not happen at all.