The English verb tense system can be really intimidating for learners. The different verb tenses and aspects really are tricky, but it can be difficult even to get an answer to a simple question: How many verb tenses are there in English?
Below we will discuss the various answers to this questions that you might find to this question and a brief explanation of each.
2 Verb Tenses in English
Occasionally you might hear someone say “technically, there are only two verb tenses in English.” This is not a very helpful answer if you are learning English, but let’s talk about what they mean when they say this.
When someone says that there are only 2 tenses in English, they are referring to morphological tense, that is, tense that can be expressed in a single word, by adding a suffix. In this case, the verb tenses are the present tense and the past tense. Because we talk about the future in English using will or going to—that is, we use helping verbs, rather than changes to the form of the main verb—the way we express the future in English does not meet the definition of morphological tense.
For some linguists, this is a valuable distinction. For English learners, it is not helpful.
3 Verb Tenses
Many English teachers will answer that there are 3 verb tenses. In this case, we are thinking of the three time frames in which an action can take place. By this definition, the three verb tenses are:
Past Tense
Present Tense
Future Tense
If you are talking about tenses in particular (not aspects) then the most useful answer for English learners is that there are three verb tenses.
12 Verb Forms
The answer that we think is most helpful for English learners is that there are 12 verb forms. More precisely, these are not 12 verb tenses but 12 combinations that can be produced by combining the 3 verb tenses and the 4 verb aspects.
16 Verb Tenses
One other answer that you will see sometimes is that there are 16 tenses. This response includes the 12 tense/aspect combinations mentioned above, as well as the 4 future-in-the-past constructions:
Future in the Past
Future Continuous in the Past
Future Perfect in the Past
Future Perfect Continuous in the Past
These are not generally treated as verb tenses in English, although they are tenses in other languages.
24 Verb Tenses
If you find a website that claims there are 24 verb tenses in English, this is wrong. They are probably confusing verb tenses with grammatical voice. You can transform each of the 12 verb forms into both passive and active voice, but grammatical voice is importantly difference from tense.