English past simple

English
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Past Simple tense usage

We use past simple in following situations:

• to tell about something that happened at a given moment in the past We saw a good film last week. I shaved this morning. (morning is a finished, closed period of time) She finished her work at seven o'clock. As we can see, in these sentences we often see information when the action took place. For instance: last week, when I was a child, yesterday, six weeks ago, at 5 o'clock, in 1997

• to tell about historical facts and past events Christopher Columbus sailed to America in 1492. People lived in caves a long time ago. Mozart was an Austrian composer. He started composing at the age of five and wrote 600 pieces of music.

• to describe events that have lasted for some time and ended in the past I lived in Poland for two years. (but I don't live there any more) John studied Japanese for four years. (but he doesn't study it any more) They sat at the beach all day.

• along with the Past Continuous tense to tell you that something happened during another activity We were watching TV when the telephone rang.

How to make the simple past sentences

We can create sentences in the past simple relatively easily. All you have to do is to add ed ending to the basic form of the verb. Below a few sentences in the past simple tense.

The schema of creating declarative sentences is as follows:

Subject	+ verb in the basic form with the ending ed
I, My father, Tom, American students, You, We, They, Guardians of the Galaxy	talked, started, enjoyed watched, worked, danced, cleaned, wanted, rained

A few more examples of sentences in the past simple tense

This morning I cleaned my teeth.

Yesterday it rained all morning.

We enjoyed the party last night.

Lucy passed her exams because she studied hard.

Exceptions when creating verbs with the ending ed

• Verbs ending with y. This vowel disappears and we add ied: try → tried study → studied copy → copied
• One-syllable verbs ending with a consonant. You double this consonant before adding ed. stop → stopped plan → planned

Irregular verbs

Unfortunately, next to regular verbs in English there is a large group of irregular verbs that do not form the past form by adding the ending ed. For instance, the past simple form of the verb write is wrote not writed. For that reason, the sentence in past simple tense with this verb looks like that: Yesterday I wrote a letter to my uncle.

You can find all of irregular verbs in our table English irregular verbs with audio but below you will find the most common ones.

Basic form	Past simple form	Pronunciation
be	was, were (depending on the subject)
begin	began
break	broke
bring	brought
buy	bought
choose	chose
come	came
do	did
drink	drank
eat	ate
fall	fell
find	found
forget	forgot
get	got
give	gave
go	went
have	had
hear	heard
know	knew
make	made
meet	met
pay	paid
put	put
read	read (same spelling but different pronunciation)
say	said
see	saw
sleep	slept
speak	spoke
take	took
tell	told
think	thought
understand	understood
write	wrote

Questions

We create questions in Past Simple by using the word Did at the beginning of the question, the verb returns to its basic form and, as always, we finish the sentence with a question mark:

A few more sample questions:

Did I clean my teeth this morning?

Did it rain yesterday all morning?

Did we enjoy the party last night?

Did Lucy pass her exams because she studied hard?

Negative sentences

Negatives in past simple are created by placing did not (or didn't) after the subject. The verb appears in its basic form:

A few more examples of negative sentences:

This morning I didn't clean my teeth.

Yesterday it didn't rain all morning.

We didn't enjoy the party last night.

Lucy didn't pass her exams because she didn't study hard.

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