For this week’s reading material, let’s talk about Past Simple and Past Continuous. As we have heard from the previous podcast, there were sentences like,
“When I arrived at the venue, the band was already performing.”
We will learn about the tenses that are used in the sentence above, Past Simple and Past Continuous. We use Past Simple and Past Continuous tenses to talk about actions or events that happened in the past, but they emphasize different aspects of those actions.
We use Past Simple tense to describe completed actions or events in the past. It is often used to express a single event that happened at a specific point in the past.
The time signals that are often used in this tense are:
The pattern we use to make sentences in Past Simple tense is:
S – V2
“I arrived yesterday.”
“They played a few tracks.”
“There was a special guest appearance by another famous artist.”
The past continuous tense is used to describe actions or events that were ongoing or in progress at a specific time in the past. It emphasizes the duration or interrupted nature of an action.
The time signals that are often used in this tense are:
Pattern
“When I arrived, the band was already performing.”
“At 10 p.m, I was sleeping.”
“I was dancing and singing along with the crowd.”
We often use the Past Continuous tense with the Past Simple tense. We use the Past Continuous to express a long action and we use the Past Simple to express a short action that interrupts the long action. We can join the two ideas with when or while. For example,
In summary, the past simple tense is used for single completed actions in the past, while the past continuous tense is used for actions that were ongoing or interrupted in the past. These tenses help us provide a clearer picture of when and how events occurred in the past.