You are waiting for the bus after school when it suddenly starts to rain, and then the bus pulls into the stop. When you tell a classmate about these three things in English, you know they all happened yesterday—but do you hesitate over whether the three verbs should take the same tense?
Start by asking what picture you want the listener to see. You are already waiting; the rain falls at that moment; the bus comes afterwards. All the events are in the past, but the storyteller still has to show their order and how they relate. ENG004 begins with exactly this kind of relationship, teaching verb forms together with the job they do in the sentence.
Use the simple past for the step that moves the story forward
It started to rain. A bus pulled up a minute later. Two simple past verbs report the rain starting and the bus arriving, one after the other. Lesson 2 places this pattern in the main narrative line and asks learners to decide which action pushes things to the next step. When you meet a paragraph with muddled tenses, first circle only the few events the reader must know in order. Lesson 2 | Past tense and narrative
Use the past continuous to hold on to the scene at the moment something happened
I was waiting at the bus stop when it started to rain. At the moment the rain fell, the waiting was already going on. Was waiting supplies the background, and started brings in something new. Lesson 2 practises this combination alongside the case of two actions in progress at the same time. Try replacing the background with I was walking home and see how the picture changes when a new event cuts in.
Find the two points in time that a perfect form connects
If the point of your telling becomes "by the time the bus arrived, I was already sheltering somewhere else," you can say By the time the bus arrived, I had already moved under the shop awning. First mark the bus arrived on the timeline, then place had moved before it. The past perfect exercises in Lesson 5 guide learners to find this past reference point and then report the action completed before it. Lesson 5 | Perfect tenses and multiple layers of time
The reference point can also be the present moment of speaking. A friend is looking for the platform right now, and you tell them The bus has already left. This sentence links the bus's departure to missing it at this moment. If you are recalling last night, you would say The bus left at six yesterday. Lesson 4 uses scenes like these to compare the present perfect with the simple past. Lesson 4 | Present perfect
Rewrite your own three-sentence story
Pick a small thing that happened today. First write down the order of events, then add a sentence saying what you were doing at the time. Read it aloud to a classmate and ask them to say which event happened first and which one was ongoing. If the two of you understand the order differently, go back to the timeline and find the one sentence most worth changing.
This course suits middle school students who have already learned basic sentence patterns and want to use tenses in speaking or writing, as well as self-learners brushing up on English. The course currently uses the English version of its materials, and the key grammar pages checked here include Chinese–English bilingual notes. You can start with the narrative exercises in Lesson 2, then return to Lessons 4 and 5 to see which point in time the speaker chooses as a reference. Enter ENG004 "Visual English Grammar (Tenses)"