Introduction to verbs

What is a verb? Verbs have a few different functions, but the main one is to express action. For example, in the sentence "the bear roars", "roars" is the verb. "Roars" is the action that the bear is doing. All sentences must contain at least one verb to b

 David explains "agreement" in English sentences. It means making sentence parts match. For example, "The dog barks" is correct, but "The dog bark" isn't. If you sound like Gollum from Lord of the Rings, your sentence might not have agreement.

Introduction to verb agreement

Verb tenses

Verb tenses allow verbs to express when an action occurred (past, present, or future). For example, in the verb "talk" in can be expressed as something happening in the past ("talked"), in the present ("talk"), or in the future ("will talk").

Introduction to verb tense

The present tense is a verb tense used to talk about events happening in the present moment. It explains that the present tense can be formed in two ways: with the verb unadorned (e.g. "I eat a donut") or with the word “is” and “ing” (e.g. “Bertie is singi

The present tense

The past tense in English describes events that have already happened. How to form the past tense in English: take the present tense of the word and add the suffix "-ed"" . For example, to turn the verb "walk" into the past tense, add "-ed" and you get "wa

The past tense

The future tense in English describes events that are going to happen IN THE FUTURE! There are several ways to form it, but the most common one is to start with the verb "will". "They will go to Kentucky on Thursday." "Esmerelda will not be attending the m

The future tense

Linking and helping verbs

Linking verbs are verbs that can connect ideas to one another, like "It is sunny out" or "she looks unhappy". Verbs like "to be", "seems", "appears", or other verbs that reference the five senses are linking verbs. "That smells good." "The cactus feels spi

Linking verbs

Helper or auxiliary verbs are forms of "to have" and "to be" that help other verbs in a sentence. They can help clarify when an action is taking place, as in "They had already eaten dinner by the time the package arrived." In that sentence, "had ... eaten"

Helping verbs

Irregular verbs

Words like "walk" and "look" are regular verbs – they behave in a predictable way. But there's a whole class of words in English, called irregular verbs, that are harder to predict. David, KA's Grammar Fellow, explains.

Introduction to irregular verbs

These are the most regular of the irregular verbs; while they don't behave exactly like regular verbs, like present tense "walk" become past tense "walked", they do maintain the "-ed" sound. It's just spelled differently.

The funky -ed irregular verb

This group of irregular verbs have vowel sounds that change in a predictable way, when they go from the present to the past tense.

The vowel-shift irregular verb

Some irregular verbs have these strange -en endings that only show up in their past perfect/past participle forms. Let's take a look!

The irregular verb gets taken for a ride

Some irregular verbs just won't be categorized. They don't fit into neat little boxes. These are those verbs.

The truly irregular verbs

Verb aspect: simple, progressive, and perfect

If verb tense allows you to control the past, the present, and the future, then aspect gives you even finer control over time.  David, Khan Academy's resident grammarian, explains. Created by David Rheinstrom.

Introduction to verb aspect

Verb aspect allows a speaker to give even more information about when an event took place or is going to take place. The simple aspect of a verb is the same as its past, present, and future tenses, such as "I walked," "I walk," and "I will walk." .

Simple aspect

We use the progressive aspect to express that a verb action is ongoing, as in "I am eating.".

Progressive aspect

You use the perfect verb aspect to express when an action is completed, like "I have done the dishes.".

Perfect aspect

Verb aspect and modal verbs

We use the perfect progressive aspect to talk about an action that was once ongoing, but has since completed, like "I had been waiting for twenty minutes.".

Perfect progressive aspect

There's a class of helper verbs known as modals that we use to express a bunch of conditions: we can use them to give advice, make guesses at how necessary or likely something is, make requests of people, and so on. They're super useful.

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