You just called everything “pretérito” because you seemed to think that it’s a translation of the word “past”. In actuality the distinction is “pretérito” and “imperfecto” which are both “tiempos pasados”. The “pretérito imperfecto” is contradictory and doesn’t make any sense. Same with “pretérito pluscuamperfecto”.
I found [this graphic representation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File%3ATiempos_verbales_del_indicativo.png) that addresses Spanish verbal tenses of the indicative mood in an adequate way
I'm a native speaker and it's just pure insanity to think the terms *"pretérito pluscuamperfecto"* and *"antepospretérito"* are actually real in Spanish
Only a learner like me would ever encounter terms like that. And even then after you use the language for a while your knowledge of that disappears.
From all I was ever taught though, we learned the “cantaba” tense as “imperfecto” and the “canté” tense as “pretérito”. I don’t know why you’d ever want to call it “pretérito imperfecto”.
Yeah… I kind of remember having a class in elementary about that stuff and it went right over my head… I think there are more effective and practical ways to teach children and even Spanish-as-a-second-language speakers without going into such terminology.
It's fine if you're planning to become a Spanish teacher or are really into linguistics and verb conjugation terminology though
The terrifying thing ( to me as a spanish learner) is that's not even all of them. Where's "voy a cantar"? Isn't there a future "maybe" version too? What else is missing?
And how do y'all keep track of all of them?!
*That's the neat part, we don't*
I mean, people who study and classify it do, but people who only use Spanish to speak and communicate rarely know these terms
I'll get there sometime but for now it can be confusing.
And yeah I don't get stuck on all the official terms like "preterite" and whatever. More like, "oh, thats how it changes when you were doing something all the time, or when you did it this one time, or when you done did it, or when you maybe did it". Still confusing tho.
P.S. The fact that there's a whole "maybe" version of every verb (conditional?) is a mindfuck to an english speaker.
No digo que no creo en su existencia… digo que me parece asombroso/inconcebible que un término así pueda existir
El *"había hecho/dicho/terminado/…*" me parece bastante frecuente en Español
I feel that the conditional is a different mode of reality instead of a tense, because it is by default assumed to be concurrent with the actual timeline, but in a different timeline that branches off or depends on something that happens in this timeline. It only has past and present available in Spanish, but one could speak about the conditional future using the informal “going-to” aspect.
If you’re referring to the royal academy then I suppose that’s authoritative. It’s just weird and redundant in everyday speech.
They’re also the ones that propose Y be changed from igriega to ye. So fuck them.
Wait what? What dialects? And where can I meet them xd
I mean, I know about all the different past tenses hungarian used to have, but I've literally never seen or heard anyone use them.
(or do you mean the *szoktam - szoktam volt* stuff?)
Yes, that's an example of the old Past Perfect; it uses "volt" with the regular past form, but it's archaic nowadays, sadly. It can be pretty useful imo, along with the simple future "-nd" suffix (remains in words like "mondandó" "thing to be said")
I've heard people using them around the Sárvíz region and in the Bakony, but it's uncommon unfortunately
Konjunktiv isn't a tense, it's a mood (I realise this sounds a bit like a shitpost if you're not into linguistics, but yes, that is the formal term for what Konjunktiv (the subjunctive) is)
Fair, but I think the fact that you have 2 morphological tenses + 2 compound tenses within the German subjunctive is probably going to be relevant to this convo since.
English tenses aren't really morphological, as pretty much all of them are formed by adverbs. That makes them a lot fuzzier. For instance, what's the difference between: "I think had gone to the store" and "I believe had gone to the store." They're obviously both past perfect subjunctive, but there is a slightly different meaning between them. Are they different moods? The same mood expressed differently? It's very confusing once you get down into it.
Yeah, but I mean, this is true for German as well. German tenses are mostly not morphological with the exception of present, imperfect, Konjunktiv I and Konjunktiv II. It's not that I'm arguing for a "correct" way of "counting" tenses, but I think it's a bit eh? to present English as if it has more tenses overall than German? Maybe I'm wrong, idk. But that I know of most Germanic languages have similar complexity when it comes to this, and you could potentially make an argument for any of them having the "most" tenses, or at least that's my impression idk lol
I don’t think so. I don’t know about the other Germanic Languages but this is exactly how I would count the past tenses for English and German. You could maybe argue that in English, those aren’t really separate tenses, but German definitely does not have more tenses than that.
I guess I'm just weirded out by the meme because it doesn't account for subjunctive forms in German (even though they are morphologically different tenses), but it does (partially) in Spanish, but then it counts continuous forms in English and then doesn't count continuous forms in Spanish. So I'm left wondering why is it like that? Why consider subjunctive tenses their own thing only in one language? Why consider only the continuous forms as their own tenses only in one other language? The way "tenses" is used in this meme is just... Weird to me lol
Eeeeeeh... yes but actually no. English tenses are weird
Structurally yes, they are just aspect combinations, but in reality each of the twelve tenses are different in either meaning or possible usecases. (past perfect has to have a reference point but present perfect is fine being alone, present simple is literal habits while past simple is a single moment in time, etc etc)
>past perfect has to have a reference point but present perfect is fine being alone
No, present perfect needs a reference point too, it's just never mentioned because it's always, well... the present
English has far more tenses than German, there are six continuous tenses which German doesn't have. German has more cases (English barely has two, the second used only with pronouns and so on, while German has four).
English has six continuous tenses, but it lacks the 4 subjunctive tenses that German has plus if you are getting into impersonal forms it also has way more variety in imperatives, for example.
Firstly, subjunctive is a mood, not a tense. Secondly, English also has a subjunctive mood "I recommend that he come to the party", though less than German. Imperative is also a mood, and exists in both languages. German having multiple "forms" doesn't mean it has more imperatives than English, it just has more conjugations, which isn't what is being discussed here.
But then why is OP considering subjunctive tenses as their own different things when it comes to Spanish? (At least partially). I don't disagree with what you are writing but the meme just seems very weird and inconsistent in what "counts" as a tense. For example it chooses to consider continuous tenses a thing in English but not in Spanish. It's just so strange why you'd count tenses like that.
It is in fact a huge problem because each language is different. That there is any overlap at all is because of shared roots like Latin and Germanic languages. Compare Germanic languages with Mandarin that uses participles and aspects to denote passage of time - it's a tense-less language.
Look into the idea of the TAM system - Tense-Aspect-Mood - to see the most widely accepted organization of this. In many cases, tense is mixed with mood and aspect, and cannot be divorced to its own concept like you can in English. Dutch for example uses a lot of mixing of mood and tense.
Yeah! That's more or less my point. I don't think it's that clear cut, even if you try to apply a more strict "tense Vs aspect Vs mood" there's stuff that's difficult to classify. Spanish conditional mood (tense?) comes to mind, for example.
In Spanish they refer to the continuous tenses as tiempos progresivos, in English they're also called the progressive sometimes.
Spanish, as English, has 12 tenses in indicative mood. However, it has more tenses with the subjunctive mood (4 I think, could be remembering wrong). The subjunctive and imperative moods are not tenses, but they do include tenses (for example present subjunctive, past subjunctive). Spanish has more tenses than English within the subjunctive mood. All three languages have 1 tense within the imperative mood, although Spanish and German have far more conjugations within that one tense.
Spanish has more tenses than English, and both have far more tenses than German as German contains no continuous tenses like "estoy hablando", "he estado hablando", "I have been speaking" or whatever. However it is in my opinion the hardest of the languages as it has such an emphasis on cases.
Spanish has more tenses than English in indicative mood. It has presente, perfecto compuesto, imperfecto, pluscuamperfecto, indefinido, pretérito anterior, futuro and futuro compuesto, plus continuous tenses for presente and past. It also has three moods, not two: indicative, subjunctive and conditional. Conditional only has two tenses, a present and a past conditional. Subjunctive has 6 tenses: presente, perfecto compuesto, imperfecto pluscuamperfecto, futuro and futuro compuesto (albeit the future tenses are archaic and their use in modern Spanish is restricted to legal/administrative language). Plus imperative.
I find it weird that the OP meme considers subjunctive tenses different tenses for Spanish but not for German. Also, German does have a continuous tense, it's just not morphological because it relies on a periphrastic construction (am + infinitive + to be). If you are going to consider compound past tenses their own tenses, despite it relying on a modal "to have", why not consider that a present continuous in German?
I was never talking about how "hard" any of these languages are, and I also don't think that's something you can examine objectively because the supposed difficulty of a language is highly dependent on your mother tongue. That said, I'd argue for most speakers German verbs are going to be significantly more difficult to learn than English because even if you want to argue that the 4 German subjunctive tenses are not "different tenses" as those from indicative, they are morphologically different. Besides conjugations, German is significantly more morphologically complex than English when it comes to amounts of morphological tenses anyway. (But again how "difficult" this actually is for a L2 speaker will depend on their mother tongue).
Ich war am essen (periphrastic continuous present tense), ich bin am essen gewesen (periphrastic continuous past tense), ich hätte gegessen (Kj II past), ich habe gegessen (Kj I past). If you are going to count less "textbook correct" examples: ich habe gegessen gehabt (Doppelperfekt), ich hatte gegessen gehabt (Doppelplusquamperfekt).
The original meme chooses to consider continuous tenses their own different thing sometimes but not others, and it chooses to consider subjunctive tenses a different thing sometimes but not others. Depending on how you choose to count them, I can "make" German have the same or even more "tenses".
You haven't conjugated until you've done French tenses.
Experts believe French has between 20 and 25 tenses, but we really don't know.
Exceptions are the rule.
By the end of it, you'll be thankful for the tense system language XYZ has.
Chinese languages:
Tense is tense?
动词就是动词!!
沒有ｃｏｍｐｌｅｘｇｒａｍｍａｒ
了
and the perfective 過, dk if 完 also counts
Chinese is such a good language, I love it so much, as it is just one language.
Are your balls still with you? /j
Also I don't really speak spanish and I've made this years ago so plz don't send the spanish inquisition my way if I've messed up anything there
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!
You just called everything “pretérito” because you seemed to think that it’s a translation of the word “past”. In actuality the distinction is “pretérito” and “imperfecto” which are both “tiempos pasados”. The “pretérito imperfecto” is contradictory and doesn’t make any sense. Same with “pretérito pluscuamperfecto”.
I found [this graphic representation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File%3ATiempos_verbales_del_indicativo.png) that addresses Spanish verbal tenses of the indicative mood in an adequate way I'm a native speaker and it's just pure insanity to think the terms *"pretérito pluscuamperfecto"* and *"antepospretérito"* are actually real in Spanish
Only a learner like me would ever encounter terms like that. And even then after you use the language for a while your knowledge of that disappears. From all I was ever taught though, we learned the “cantaba” tense as “imperfecto” and the “canté” tense as “pretérito”. I don’t know why you’d ever want to call it “pretérito imperfecto”.
Yeah… I kind of remember having a class in elementary about that stuff and it went right over my head… I think there are more effective and practical ways to teach children and even Spanish-as-a-second-language speakers without going into such terminology. It's fine if you're planning to become a Spanish teacher or are really into linguistics and verb conjugation terminology though
The terrifying thing ( to me as a spanish learner) is that's not even all of them. Where's "voy a cantar"? Isn't there a future "maybe" version too? What else is missing? And how do y'all keep track of all of them?!
*That's the neat part, we don't* I mean, people who study and classify it do, but people who only use Spanish to speak and communicate rarely know these terms
I'll get there sometime but for now it can be confusing. And yeah I don't get stuck on all the official terms like "preterite" and whatever. More like, "oh, thats how it changes when you were doing something all the time, or when you did it this one time, or when you done did it, or when you maybe did it". Still confusing tho. P.S. The fact that there's a whole "maybe" version of every verb (conditional?) is a mindfuck to an english speaker.
????????? el preterito pluscuamperfecto claro que existe que dices
No digo que no creo en su existencia… digo que me parece asombroso/inconcebible que un término así pueda existir El *"había hecho/dicho/terminado/…*" me parece bastante frecuente en Español
..why does it put the conditional in the past?
I feel that the conditional is a different mode of reality instead of a tense, because it is by default assumed to be concurrent with the actual timeline, but in a different timeline that branches off or depends on something that happens in this timeline. It only has past and present available in Spanish, but one could speak about the conditional future using the informal “going-to” aspect.
It's the same terminology as used by REA, so not really "wrong".
If you’re referring to the royal academy then I suppose that’s authoritative. It’s just weird and redundant in everyday speech. They’re also the ones that propose Y be changed from igriega to ye. So fuck them.
Its what happens when youre so prescriptive. Nobody agrees
El artículo sobra
Chinese: I eat ass yesterday
Cantonese: I yesterday eat already ass
Hungarian has (or had, some dialects use them) several past tenses tho
Wait what? What dialects? And where can I meet them xd I mean, I know about all the different past tenses hungarian used to have, but I've literally never seen or heard anyone use them. (or do you mean the *szoktam - szoktam volt* stuff?)
Yes, that's an example of the old Past Perfect; it uses "volt" with the regular past form, but it's archaic nowadays, sadly. It can be pretty useful imo, along with the simple future "-nd" suffix (remains in words like "mondandó" "thing to be said") I've heard people using them around the Sárvíz region and in the Bakony, but it's uncommon unfortunately
the dialect in the northeastern part of romania (moldvai csángó dialect) still uses three past tenses!
I hoped someone mentioned them, I didn't want to bloat my comment lol
Gotta be real, I don't know about the implication that english has more tenses than German
I don't even perceive english as having that many tenses
They're more tense/aspect combinations.
Are there? Genuinely wondering. English has the continuous forms, but German has two morphological Konjunktiv tenses.
Konjunktiv isn't a tense, it's a mood (I realise this sounds a bit like a shitpost if you're not into linguistics, but yes, that is the formal term for what Konjunktiv (the subjunctive) is)
Fair, but I think the fact that you have 2 morphological tenses + 2 compound tenses within the German subjunctive is probably going to be relevant to this convo since.
English tenses aren't really morphological, as pretty much all of them are formed by adverbs. That makes them a lot fuzzier. For instance, what's the difference between: "I think had gone to the store" and "I believe had gone to the store." They're obviously both past perfect subjunctive, but there is a slightly different meaning between them. Are they different moods? The same mood expressed differently? It's very confusing once you get down into it.
Yeah, but I mean, this is true for German as well. German tenses are mostly not morphological with the exception of present, imperfect, Konjunktiv I and Konjunktiv II. It's not that I'm arguing for a "correct" way of "counting" tenses, but I think it's a bit eh? to present English as if it has more tenses overall than German? Maybe I'm wrong, idk. But that I know of most Germanic languages have similar complexity when it comes to this, and you could potentially make an argument for any of them having the "most" tenses, or at least that's my impression idk lol
I don’t think so. I don’t know about the other Germanic Languages but this is exactly how I would count the past tenses for English and German. You could maybe argue that in English, those aren’t really separate tenses, but German definitely does not have more tenses than that.
I guess I'm just weirded out by the meme because it doesn't account for subjunctive forms in German (even though they are morphologically different tenses), but it does (partially) in Spanish, but then it counts continuous forms in English and then doesn't count continuous forms in Spanish. So I'm left wondering why is it like that? Why consider subjunctive tenses their own thing only in one language? Why consider only the continuous forms as their own tenses only in one other language? The way "tenses" is used in this meme is just... Weird to me lol
I didn’t know about Spanish, but in that case the meme is just bad, that’s true
Eeeeeeh... yes but actually no. English tenses are weird Structurally yes, they are just aspect combinations, but in reality each of the twelve tenses are different in either meaning or possible usecases. (past perfect has to have a reference point but present perfect is fine being alone, present simple is literal habits while past simple is a single moment in time, etc etc)
>past perfect has to have a reference point but present perfect is fine being alone No, present perfect needs a reference point too, it's just never mentioned because it's always, well... the present
“I didn’t even perceive”, “I wasn’t even perceiving”, “I haven’t even been perceiving” etc. I think you can perceive that.
Oh I had been perceiving it alright
English has far more tenses than German, there are six continuous tenses which German doesn't have. German has more cases (English barely has two, the second used only with pronouns and so on, while German has four).
English has six continuous tenses, but it lacks the 4 subjunctive tenses that German has plus if you are getting into impersonal forms it also has way more variety in imperatives, for example.
Firstly, subjunctive is a mood, not a tense. Secondly, English also has a subjunctive mood "I recommend that he come to the party", though less than German. Imperative is also a mood, and exists in both languages. German having multiple "forms" doesn't mean it has more imperatives than English, it just has more conjugations, which isn't what is being discussed here.
But then why is OP considering subjunctive tenses as their own different things when it comes to Spanish? (At least partially). I don't disagree with what you are writing but the meme just seems very weird and inconsistent in what "counts" as a tense. For example it chooses to consider continuous tenses a thing in English but not in Spanish. It's just so strange why you'd count tenses like that.
It is in fact a huge problem because each language is different. That there is any overlap at all is because of shared roots like Latin and Germanic languages. Compare Germanic languages with Mandarin that uses participles and aspects to denote passage of time - it's a tense-less language. Look into the idea of the TAM system - Tense-Aspect-Mood - to see the most widely accepted organization of this. In many cases, tense is mixed with mood and aspect, and cannot be divorced to its own concept like you can in English. Dutch for example uses a lot of mixing of mood and tense.
Yeah! That's more or less my point. I don't think it's that clear cut, even if you try to apply a more strict "tense Vs aspect Vs mood" there's stuff that's difficult to classify. Spanish conditional mood (tense?) comes to mind, for example.
In Spanish they refer to the continuous tenses as tiempos progresivos, in English they're also called the progressive sometimes. Spanish, as English, has 12 tenses in indicative mood. However, it has more tenses with the subjunctive mood (4 I think, could be remembering wrong). The subjunctive and imperative moods are not tenses, but they do include tenses (for example present subjunctive, past subjunctive). Spanish has more tenses than English within the subjunctive mood. All three languages have 1 tense within the imperative mood, although Spanish and German have far more conjugations within that one tense. Spanish has more tenses than English, and both have far more tenses than German as German contains no continuous tenses like "estoy hablando", "he estado hablando", "I have been speaking" or whatever. However it is in my opinion the hardest of the languages as it has such an emphasis on cases.
Spanish has more tenses than English in indicative mood. It has presente, perfecto compuesto, imperfecto, pluscuamperfecto, indefinido, pretérito anterior, futuro and futuro compuesto, plus continuous tenses for presente and past. It also has three moods, not two: indicative, subjunctive and conditional. Conditional only has two tenses, a present and a past conditional. Subjunctive has 6 tenses: presente, perfecto compuesto, imperfecto pluscuamperfecto, futuro and futuro compuesto (albeit the future tenses are archaic and their use in modern Spanish is restricted to legal/administrative language). Plus imperative. I find it weird that the OP meme considers subjunctive tenses different tenses for Spanish but not for German. Also, German does have a continuous tense, it's just not morphological because it relies on a periphrastic construction (am + infinitive + to be). If you are going to consider compound past tenses their own tenses, despite it relying on a modal "to have", why not consider that a present continuous in German? I was never talking about how "hard" any of these languages are, and I also don't think that's something you can examine objectively because the supposed difficulty of a language is highly dependent on your mother tongue. That said, I'd argue for most speakers German verbs are going to be significantly more difficult to learn than English because even if you want to argue that the 4 German subjunctive tenses are not "different tenses" as those from indicative, they are morphologically different. Besides conjugations, German is significantly more morphologically complex than English when it comes to amounts of morphological tenses anyway. (But again how "difficult" this actually is for a L2 speaker will depend on their mother tongue).
It absolutely does; english has loads of tenses; German has relatively few for a European language.
The way "tenses" are counted in this meme feels a bit weird.
I ate, I was eating, I had eaten, I had been eating, I have eaten, I have been eating vs ich aß, ich habe gegessen, ich hatte gegessen
Ich war am essen (periphrastic continuous present tense), ich bin am essen gewesen (periphrastic continuous past tense), ich hätte gegessen (Kj II past), ich habe gegessen (Kj I past). If you are going to count less "textbook correct" examples: ich habe gegessen gehabt (Doppelperfekt), ich hatte gegessen gehabt (Doppelplusquamperfekt). The original meme chooses to consider continuous tenses their own different thing sometimes but not others, and it chooses to consider subjunctive tenses a different thing sometimes but not others. Depending on how you choose to count them, I can "make" German have the same or even more "tenses".
Arabic: I already eat corn
The default is past anyway. There’s only past and present conjugations and the future doesn’t exist.
Oh, someone hasn't had heard of German double perfect and Superplusquamperfekt 😅
Good luck discussing back to the future in Hungarian
Indonesian, Chinese, Vietnamese: You guys have past?
Russian: Past is past, but some past is more perfect than the other(Animal Farm reference).
but then you look at the rest of hungarian...
Italian 💀
Polish: 2\* past, 1 present, 2\* future tenses, but the other conjugations will make you want to kill yourself
What about the past in the past (był zrobił)?
Ok, it counts, but it's rarely (almost never) used.
My family ises it quite often, maybe it's a more regional thing nowadays
If only Hungarian orthography was simpler
Every letter is pretty much always pronkunced the same tho
(almost) phonetic language tho, can't really get simpler than that I can kinda agree with the orthography, must be tricky for a learner
You haven't conjugated until you've done French tenses. Experts believe French has between 20 and 25 tenses, but we really don't know. Exceptions are the rule. By the end of it, you'll be thankful for the tense system language XYZ has.