Master All 12 English Tenses Through One Real Business Project

1. Course introduction: Hello, and welcome to this Skillshare course on mastering English tenses with a practical project. So let me just explain what I mean by this. If you ever tried to learn English tenses, you've probably seen something like this. There's a course with all the tenses, explains that there's past present future. Simple, continuous, perfect, perfect, continuous. And each of these combine to make 1210 aspect combinations. And then you go through the course, say, here's Present Simple, use for this, Present Continuous, use for this. I go through all 12. Now, I know this is like that because I have one exactly like this on Skillshare. So I know they exist. And what I'm not saying, ignore this course, it's rubbish. What I'm saying is that there's a different way of approaching this whole topic because, in effect, especially in a business context, you don't think in terms of grammar tables. You think in situations. You think about questions like, what are we doing right now? What have we completed? What went wrong? What will happen next? And once you start thinking like this, the tenses sort of become a lot easier. You stop sort of thinking, Here's a tense. How can I use it? And you approach it from another direction? Here's my situation. What tenses do I need? And both are valid. If you want to have more details on a particular tense and hop over to the other course and look at the content there. You'll find it useful. What this course does is it goes through a hypothetical project from beginning to end. So we look at the planning, the execution, the reporting, the setbacks, and the completion. And at each stage, we ask just one simple question, namely, which tense helps us to communicate most clearly in this situation. And the end of the course, my sincere hope is that you will stop seeing tenses as sort of grammar and see them more as communication tools. Now, as with all Skillshare courses, there is a project with this. And the idea of the project is that you sort of have your own imaginary or even a real if it's based on work sort of project that you can think of. And then for each of the phases, write down some sentences that are sensible for that using the tenses that we'll find in the course. As usual, any questions, anything isn't clear, please ask your questions. You know you'll get an answer. Have a look, with the project, by the way, forget normally on a lot of course is you do the course, and then you do the project, which is a fairly normal way of doing it. Now, if it's easier for this particular project, you can do the planning sentences after the planning lesson. You can do the execution questions of the project after the execution lesson. So if it's easier for you to sort of work through the project as you're working through the course, that's a perfectly valid way of doing it or as always do it at the end if you prefer. Anyway, hope we have fun, hope we learn something, and let's make a start. 2. Planning - Introduction: So at the very beginning, the planning stage. So at this stage, nothing has happened yet. There's no product, no rollout, no migration. We only have plans, predictions, deadlines, and, of course, expectations. And this is a perfect phase for lots of future tendencies. However, not all future tenses mean the same thing. Sometimes we're talking about decisions. So times we're talking about scheduled activity. Sometimes we're focusing on a future milestone. And all of the future tenses give us distinct, possibly subtle different ways of referring to all of those things. And we'll see examples of all of these now in the presentation. 3. Planning - Presentation: The first part of the project is the planning phase. And here we use lots of future tenses. We start off with the project decision. Here are some examples. We're going to launch the CRM project in June. That's Future Simple with going to. We will launch the CRM project in June, that's Future Simple W W. And we are launching this CAM project in June, that's present continuous. Now, they all describe the same event, but the meaning is not exactly the same. So going to the first one, sounds more like a definite plan that could be happening soon. And W is more like maybe a future decision further in the future, more of a prediction or a promise. And we are launching the present continuous. This more like a fixed arrangement. So it has been long decided, and this is what we're doing. No, same project, different levels of, say, certainty and planning. We have resources and staffing. We will hire external consultants for the project. We are going to bring in external consultants. We are on boarding external consultants next month. We will expand the IT team. We are going to increase technical support capacity. We are adding three engineers to the project. So again, the idea is not which one is correct because they're all correct. The question is sort of what type of future are we talking about? Is it a decision, a plan, or something that's already been arranged? Now we have sort of the outcomes, what do we expect from this project? We will improve system efficiency by 20%. We are going to reduce processing time significantly. We are aiming to improve system performance across departments. We will increase customer satisfaction. We are going to enhance Hugh's experience. We are targeting higher adoption rates after launch. And again, all of these are correct. And in this case, it's probably more actually a matter of personal choice. Now, as an aside, these outcomes, the forecasting outcomes are actually deliberately not very good. So we will take them in turn. We will improve system efficiency by 20%. Okay, the 20% is good. That can be measured. But what system efficiency are we talking about? Time it takes to produce reports or hard disk usage, memory usage. What are we talking about exactly? It's not really clear. The second one is also equally vague. We are going to reduce processing time significantly. Okay, processing time is good, but significantly, that's a very subjective amount. And the third one, we are aiming to improve system performance across departments. Again, what are we talking about? Okay? These are not very good forecasts and similarly increase customer satisfaction. Give me a number. Similarly enhanced user experience, doesn't mean anything. And targeting higher adoption rates. Yeah, how much higher? So I suppose your first homework, if you want, would be to take these poorly defined outcomes and turn them into something more objective and concrete if you want to. The next thing we do is we predict the activities. So these all use so called future Continuous. And we use these to sort of answer questions such as what will be happening at a certain time or say what will the team be working on at a certain time. Here's some examples, at the end of this month, we will be migrating customer data, and this we will be migrating is feature Continuous. Or this time next week, the IT team will be configuring the servers. During ir quar three, we will be testing the new CRM platform. We also predict milestones. And these all use future perfect. And this has actually comes up quite a lot in project management. So by September, we will have completed system testing. By fourth quarter, we will have migrated all customer records. And this is we will have completed, we will have migrator. That's the future Perfect. And by December, we will have finished user training. And the thing to point out here is that there's no indication of if we've started it yet or not. So we're doing a little bit of sort of mental time travel, if you like. So we're saying, Okay, we're projecting ourselves into the future and then say at that time, what have we done? And whether we started it yet or not doesn't actually form any part of this. There's just saying, What's happened in a future milestone. And the last thing is predicting future durations, and these all Future Perfect Continuous. Now, before we give the examples, I would like to point out that future Perfect Continuous is not used very much in everyday language. But for projects, if you need to emphasize, say, a duration leading up to a point, it's extremely precise and useful. Look at the examples. By December, we will have been working on this project for one year. And the future perfect continuous here is we'll have been working. By the end of third quarter, the team will have been testing the platform for three months. By launch day, we will have been preparing the migration for six months. And in a similar way to the previous slide, there's no indication here sort of directly of if you've started these activities yet or not. And again, it doesn't really matter. But if you look at the first one by December, we will have been working on this project for one year. We probably have started it because we haven't given a year. We just said by December, so maybe we were in April, May, whenever. So we probably have started on it. But the other ones, maybe not. But again, it's not important. We're doing a little bit of again mental time travel where we're projecting ourselves to a future point in time and then looking back and saying, how long we've been doing something? Whether it started yet or not, again, not really relevant. So the thing we notice here that future is not just one thing or one idea. There are sort of layers. We can talk about decisions, schedules, activities, completed milestones and durations. So when we say future tent is often a little bit too simplistic. It's sort of missing something important. But back to our planning project or back to our project. So the planning is complete, say, the projects approved. And that actually changes the language we use when we talk about the project. So what follows the project approval is the kickoff, and that's what we look at next. 4. Kickoff - Introduction: We're now in the kick off phase, and often you'll hear about a kick off meeting. And the kickoff is really quite a decisive point in the project. It's when plans become actions. Is often learners misses kind of this important shift. So we stop talking about sort of what we intend to do. We move away from future tenses and we move towards present tenses, what is actually happening. And it's quite a subtle change, but it does matter a lot in professional communication. So the kickoff where the rubber hits the road. 5. Kickoff - Presentation: And we've now transitioned to the project kickoff and starting work. We are going to start data migration today, Future Simple, or we are starting data migration today, which is present continuous, or data migration begins today, present simple. So the first one Future Simple still a little bit like planning, but the other two, like real execution. So this is the moment that actually becomes the project is now real. And we're going to begin system configuration. We are starting system configuration this week, configuration starts today. Again, similar feel from sort of planning to action. And we also assign responsibilities. So I'm going to lead vendor selection. I am leading vendor selection, and I take responsibility for vendor evaluation. I'm going to manage the integration phase. I am managing system integration. I oversee the integration work stream. One of the things with present continuous, it has two main functions. You're either describing something happening now or something that's maybe temporary, and the context will tell you which it is. Do we take the first block, I am leading vendor selection. It could mean I'm doing this now. This is the thing I'm doing at this moment, or it could mean I don't normally do this, but for this project, it's something I'm going to do. As opposed to I take responsibility for vendor evaluation. The present simple here is more of this is the standard thing. This is a normal state of affairs. But what you should notice is that the language becomes more direct. Okay, it feels more real, it feels more actionable, and it feels less like planning and more like doing. And in project work, you see this all the time. There's a sort of a shift from intention to action, which is something you will notice when you do project work. 6. Execution - Introduction: Okay, now the project is fully underway. This is daily operational work. Metings are happening, tasks are being completed, teams are coordinating, and this is where the present tenses become especially important. So in buses English, we often need to distinguish between sort of permanent responsibilities, temporary activities, and recurring routines, and all of those now. 7. Execution - Presentation: We now look at the project execution phase, and here we find lots of use of various present tenses. So we have to look at sort of the role versus temporary work versus routine. And here are some examples to show this. I lead the implementation team. Present Simple defined the role. I am leading the implementation team this quarter's Present Continuous. And it's sort of this quarter, normally, I don't. That's the temporary bit. And then the routine, I lead weekly project meetings. So every week we have a project meeting, I lead, that's sort of the routine aspect. Again, present simple. So more examples, I manage system integration. I am managing CRM integration this month. I manage stakeholder communication. So the same verbs in all both blocks of three, but different meanings. So we talk about we differentiate here between permanent role, temporary focus or repeated routine. Then we look at sort of daily operations. So we process client requests every day. We are processing high priority requests today. We handle system issues as they come in. And the last block, we support internal users. We are supporting migration activities this week. We provide ongoing technical support. Again, this distinction is really quite useful in workplace communication so that the same verb can be used to describe your permanent role or your current focus or a routine responsibility. And the tenses and also the context, of course, will help your listener to understand which you mean. But stakeholders want something different. They don't want to know what you're doing. They want to know what you've done. This brings us on to the next part. 8. Progress - Introduction: We now move to progress reporting, and this is where many English learners struggle. And why? Because reporting is really about just the past. So in business meetings, the stakeholders, the customers, the managers, the finances, whoever's involved. They usually care less about the history and more about its current relevance. They don't just ask what happened. They say, Well, you know, what does that mean now? Or what have we achieved so far? What has been completed? What are the results right now? And for these type of communications, we'll see perfect tenses coming up, and the perfect tenses link two points in time. That's really what they're for. We'll see more in the presentation. 9. Progress - Presentation: We now look at progress reporting, which uses these so called perfect aspects. When we think about completion, we have three ways that we can say it. We completed phase one. That's actually past simple. We have completed phase one, that's present perfect. And we have been completing Phase one tasks is present perfect continuous. So one focuses on history, like we completed Past Simple, it's all in the past. The present perfect connects this past action to a present result, and the present perfect continuous sort of more focuses on effort over time. Look at some other examples. We finished system testing. We have completed system testing successfully. We have been testing the system for three weeks. So again, the perfect aspect, it says, something happened in the past, and that has an effect for me now. And actually, the effect it has now is more important than the actual action in the past. It's the consequence that matters. So if we have completed Phase one, well, great. We can go on to phase two now. That's the important bit. And we'll look at some more examples deliverables. We delivered the prototype. We have delivered the first version of the system. We have been developing the prototype continuously. Again, past simple, present perfect, present perfect, continuous. We implemented the CRM module. We have implemented the CRM module successfully. We have been working on CRM integration for months. And this is why we often use the present perfect, because if you're in meeting, say, talking about projects, the focus is not really what happened, but the focus is what is relevant now going forward. This is one of the biggest mindset shifts in English, if you like. So a completed action is not always just a past event. So sometimes its importance comes from the fact that the result still matters now. And this is really exactly what present Perfect helps us to express. So the consequence that this past event has on us for now. I hope these examples show that if not, please ask. 10. Problems - Introduction: Of course, no project runs smoothly. That would be too much to ask. Sooner or later, something goes wrong, system crashes, data gets lost, or deployment fails, or 100 other different things. And often when we're describing sort of problems, we don't just need to explain what happened. We need to describe what was happening at the time. And for these types of communications, the continuous form is extremely useful. 11. Problems - Presentation: Of course, no project would be complete without problems and delays. And for these situations, Past Continuous is very often used. We'll have a look now. So, for instance, system failure. The system crashed. That's past simple. The system was crashing during testing. Past Continuous, was crashing. And we were testing the system when it crashed is a mixture of past continuous we were testing, and it crashed, past Simple. So it actually describes sort of what was happening at the same time. So we were testing this continuous, past continuous sense of duration. And in the middle of that duration, it crashed. Some more examples, the platform failed during deployment. The platform was failing under load, and we were deploying the system when the failure occurred. So, again, we have this sort of similar situation. It failed, Past Simple. I was failing, Past Continuous, and then we have combined together. We were deploying Past Continuous. When the failure occurred, pass Simple. So in this sort of period of time that we were talking about, something happened in that time. And we also have data issues. We lost data during migration. We were migrating data when the issue occurred, and they were transferring the data when the system failed. Is, again, similar to the previous slide. We have Past Simple, pass continuous, and both together. And this is where English can actually be quite precise, so we can describe the main event, the background event, and the interruptions in the same sentence. And it makes the explanations clearer, especially when we're reporting incidents. Again, if it's not clear, please ask. The moving forward with the project, the project is finished, we now look back and do a project review. 12. Completion - Introduction: The project is now complete. The CRM system is live, the users are trained, the rollout is finished. Now is a time when we look back. And when we tell the story of a completed project, we often need more than one past tense. We need to show sequence, which event happened first, which event happened later, and what's already been completed before another milestone. 13. Completion - Presentation: The project is completed, and this is where we tend to use sort of past tenses when talking about it. Let's look at some examples. So main events. We launched the CRM in March, so past Simple. We had completed training before launch Past Perfect. And we had been preparing the system for months before launch as past Perfect Continuous had been preparing. On some more examples, we deployed the system successfully. We had finished configuration before deployment. We had been working on integration for six months. And so the past, as we see, it's not just one time. There's layers. You know, we have main events, earlier events, long preparations. Now, in a way, when we spoke about present perfect, we said it links the present to a point in the past. Past Perfect is similar. It links a point in the past to a point further in the past. And we had completed training before launch. So at sometime in the past, we launched and before that, we completed training. Or we had finalized configuration before deployment. So at some point in the past, we managed the deployment, and before that, we finished configuration or finalized configuration. Again, past perfect and past perfect continuous aren't used that much, and it's a more elegant way of saying the same thing. Now, you can use different tenses in this case and in a lot of other cases. You could see, instead of saying we had completed training before launch, you could say, we launched and before that, we completed. So you can use Past Simple in both cases. But this Past Perfect is a bit more elegant. 14. Final Thoughts: So let's return to the idea we started with. English tenses are often taught as grammar rules, but grammar is just the surface. So underneath, the grammar is the meaning. And this usually comes from some sort of time perspective. Are you planning, executing, reporting, explaining a problem, reviewing a completed task? Once you connect the tenses to, like, real business situations, they become much easier to understand and much easier to use. So next time you're unsure of which tense to use, don't ask yourself, what grammar rule applies here. Instead, ask, What exactly am I trying to communicate about the time I'm talking about? And that question will usually lead you to use the right tense.