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Lesson 4: Past, Present, and Future Tense

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In this lesson we're going to talk about tenses. Up to now, we've only been using one tense, and that is the one represented by the plain dictionary form of verbs:

歩く [あるく] "to walk"
食べる [たべる] "to eat"
and so forth.

To use natural-sounding Japanese, we need three tenses. You might think they would be past, present and future, but in fact they're not. The one we've been using up to now is not a present tense.

It's called the non-past tense, and a lot of people think this is confusing. Why can't Japanese have a simple present tense like English instead of something vague and mysterious like a non-past tense? Well, actually it isn't confusing at all, and what makes it confusing is, for a change, not the fact that Japanese is taught in a strange way, but the fact that English is taught in a strange way. The truth is that the Japanese non-past tense is very similar to the English non-past tense.

What is the English non-past tense? Well, it is the plain dictionary form of English words: eat, walk, etc. Why do I call it a non-past tense? Let's take an example.

Suppose you get a message on your cell phone saying, "I walked to the cafe and now I eat cafe and drink coffee". What would you know about the person who sent that message? Well, you'd know that it was not a native English speaker, wouldn't you? Because no native English speaker says "I eat cake and I drink coffee" when they mean "I am eating cake and drinking coffee right now".

When so we say "I eat cake"? Well, we might say it when we mean that we eat cake sometimes: "I eat cake. I'm not one of these people who doesn't eat cake. I do eat cake. Whenever there's any cake around, I eat it. But that doesn't mean I'm eating cake right at this moment."

When else do we use the English non-past plain form of verbs? Sometimes we use them for future events: "Next week I fly to Tokyo." "Next month I have an exam."

And sometimes we use them for something that's going on right now, but not mostly. For example, in a literary description: "The sun sinks over the sea and a small happy robot runs across the beach." But that isn't the way we use it most of the time in everyday speech, is it?

So, the Japanese non-past tense is very similar in the way it functions to the English non-past tense. If you understand one you can pretty much understand the other. Most of the time, the Japanese non-past tense refers to future events.

犬 が
食べる
いぬ が
たべる
dog
to eat

"The dog will-eat"

桜 が
歩く
さくら が
あるく
Sakura
to walk

"Sakura will-walk."

The way we've been using it up to now - "Sakura walks" - is possible, but it isn't the most natural way. We've been using it that way because it was the only tense we knew. If we want to say something more natural, like "Sakura is walking", what do we do? Well, what do we do in English?

In English we say, don't we, "Sakura IS walking". We use the word "to be". You can "BE walking". "Sakura IS walking"; "We ARE walking."

Fortunately, in Japanese we don't have all these different forms of the word "to be". We use the same word every time, and the word is いる. いる means "be" in relation to animals and people, and to make this continuous present tense, we always use いる.

So, "Sakura is walking":

桜 が
歩いて
いる
さくら が
あるいて
Sakura
walking
to be

"Dog is eating":

犬 が
食べて
いる
いぬ が
たべて
dog
eating
to be

Now, let's notice that in a sentence like this. We have something we haven't yet seen, and that's a white engine. A white engine is an element that could be an engine but in this case it's not the engine of this sentence. It's modifying, or telling us more about, one of the core elements of the sentence.

So, the core of this sentence is 犬 が いる - "the dog is". But the dog isn't just existing - the dog is doing something. And that white engine tells us what it is doing. It is "eating".

And we're going to see this white engine structure over and over again as we go deeper into Japanese. And just as in English we don't say "the dog is eat", we use a special form of the verb that goes along with the verb of being. So in English we say "is walking" and "is eating". In Japanese we say 歩いて いる and 食べて いる.

Now, how do we form this て-form, which is the form we use for making the continuous present? With a word like 食べる, it's very easy indeed. All we have to do is take off the る and put て in its place.

The bad news is that with other verbs, we do have slightly different ways of attaching the て. Apart from the way shown above, there are four other ways. The textbooks will say five, but in fact two of them are so similar that we can treat them as four. The next lesson will show how to do this for every type of verb.

The good news: it's perfectly regular. Once you know the ending of a verb you also know how to put the て onto it. The only one that's a bit tricky is る-ending verbs, but the next lesson will explain how to do that.

So, how do we put things into the past tense? Fortunately, that's very easy indeed. All we do is add た - that's the whole thing.

犬 が
食べる
いぬ が
たべる
dog
to eat

"dog will-eat" becomes...

犬 が
食べた
いぬ が
たべた
dog
ate

"dog ate"

Now, there are different ways of attaching た to different kinds of verb, verbs with different endings, but the good news here is that they are exactly the same as the ways that you attach て. So once you've learned the ways that て attaches, you've also learned the ways that た attaches. After the next lesson, you'll be able to do both the continuous present and the past tense for all verbs.

Now, there's one more thing about time expressions that I think is useful to learn now.

When we say:

私 は
ケーキ を
食べる
わたし は
たべる
I
cake
to eat

...if we want to make it clear that we're talking about a future event, we can say 明日 [あした], which means "tomorrow":

明日
ケーキ を
食べる
あした
たべる
tomorrow
cake
to eat

This means "Tomorrow I'm going to eat cake". That's all we have to do. We just say "tomorrow" before we say the rest of the sentence, just as we do in English.

Now, "tomorrow" is what we call a "relative time expression" because it's relative to today. Today is yesterday's tomorrow. And with all relative time expressions like that: yesterday, last week, next year, and so forth, times that are relative to the present time, we just do what we did then. We put the time expression at the beginning of the sentence and that puts that whole sentence into that time.

However, when we have an "absolute time expression", an expression that is not relative to the present, such as Tuesday or six o'clock, then we have to use に.

Tuesday is 火曜日 [かようび] and we may may say:

火曜日 に
ケーキ を
食べる
かようび に
たべる
Tuesday
cake
to eat

"On Tuesday I will eat cake."

The important thing here is that it can seem a bit complicated to have to work out, "Is the time absolute or relative?" And the good thing to know here is that it's not complicated at all, because it works exactly the same as English.

In English, we say, "Tomorrow I eat cake", "Next week, I have an exam", and so forth, but when we use an absolute time expression we say, "On Monday I will eat cake", "At six o'clock I have an exam"; if we're talking about a month we say, "In July I'm going to Tokyo".

Now, Japanese works in exactly the same way except that we don't have to remember when we're using "on", when we're using "at" and when we're using "in".

In Japanese we use に every time. But in English when we need one of those little words, on, in or at, then we need に in Japanese. And when we don't, then we don't need に in Japanese. English and Japanese are identical in that respect.

So rather than sitting down to work out "Is this relative, or is this absolute?", just think whether you need an on, in or at in English, and if you do, you need に in Japanese. And if you don't, you don't need に in Japanese. It's really as simple as that.

Now, in these four lessons so far, we've covered an awful lot of Japanese and now we're able to do quite a few things. So I think we need some way of consolidating this work. Therefore, I've made some worksheets:

• Worksheet #1 (PDF)
• Worksheet #1 Answer Key (PDF)