Learn English Tenses: PAST SIMPLE NEGATIVES

How do you make negative sentences in the Simple Past Tense in English? Many learners make mistakes when changing regular and irregular verbs to negatives in past tense sentences. Watch this lesson to learn an easy strategy to avoid all those mistakes and speak correctly, once and for all! To learn and understand all the tenses in English fully, watch my free, complete course, Learn English Tenses: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxSz4mPLHWDZ95iyxBNdjxLNI1k8HnVcd

Get a full overview of the past simple tense: https://youtu.be/dmJrYbDjxQY
Take the quiz here: https://www.engvid.com/learn-english-tenses-past-simple-negatives

In this lesson:
0:00 Past Simple Negatives
1:53 Regular & Irregular Verbs
4:42 Positive & Negative Past Tense Sentences
9:45 Practice: Past Tense Regular Verbs
11:05 Practice: Past Tense Irregular Verbs

Transcript:
If you're watching this, I know that you're serious about becoming fluent in English. One of the main ways to do that is by mastering the English tenses. That's why some time ago, I recorded an entire series of lessons on all 12 verb tenses, and you can watch those. I'll give you a link to those. It's a very strong program, millions have watched it, and basically, it takes you through all of the tenses, tells you what they are, when to use them, how to use them, what mistakes to be careful of, pronunciation, and everything, okay? So, if you haven't had a chance to watch it, please do go through them. I think you'll find them very, very helpful.

Now, today, what we're going to be focusing on is the past simple tense. Why this one again? Because we use this tense more than almost any other tense, so we really, really need to use it correctly. So, I'm going to show you one aspect of that. I'm going to show you exactly how to say the positive sentences, and then, most important, how to make the negative sentences, because to be fluent, you want to be able to move smoothly from the positive to the negative, the positive, the negative, also the questions, but today, here, we're going to focus on how to go back and forth, and what's the secret to that, alright? So, let me explain so that you can continue with your journey to being more skilled in English and also more confident in English, which is, I know what you want to do. So, let's begin.

So, here, you see a lot of writing on the board, and everything is for a reason, okay? Don't get worried. I'm going to explain everything to you. So, the first thing you need to know in English is that we have verbs, right? Verbs are the words that indicate some kind of action, usually. So, there are many ways to classify these verbs. One way to separate them is to understand that some verbs are regular verbs, and other verbs are irregular verbs, and that's important for this reason. I'm going to show you now. The regular verbs, like work, live, and study, in the past tense, they usually just have an -ed or a -d or an -ied, okay? That's how we know, actually, that these are regular verbs. We can recognize them. If I hear the word "work" or "worked", I know the word, right? But you're going to see that on the other side, things are a little different. So, let's look at these regular verbs first. So, "work" becomes what in the past tense? "Worked", right? "Live" becomes "lived". Here, we just added a "d" because we already had an "e". Here we added "ed", right? And this word, "study", it happens to end with a "y", so we need some spelling changes there. So, we have to add "ied" after we drop the "y". And we have many verbs that fall into these groups, okay? Some with "ed", some with "d", some with "ied", but those are the regular verbs, and we're going to see what happens with them in a few minutes when we go from positive to negative.

Let's look now to the other side at the irregular verbs. So, examples of irregular verbs are "go", "do", "sleep". Why are they irregular? Because look what happens when we put them into the past simple tense. "Go" becomes "went", "do" becomes "did", and "sleep" becomes "slept". Now, they didn't follow any kind of a regular pattern. Each one is kind of a little bit different, right? So, that's what makes them irregular, that the past forms are basically sometimes completely different, like "go" and "went", or "do" and "did", which is kind of similar, or "sleep" and "slept". But they don't follow any basic pattern, they just fall into different groups. But you must know them, because if you don't know that "went" is the past of "go", you won't be able to talk about something somewhere that you went yesterday, okay? And let's see now how all of that comes together when we are making positive sentences. And negative sentences, so it's like this.

Now that you know regular and irregular, let's look at what happens first in a positive sentence. So we could say, for example, "I cleaned the house", but if I want to make it negative, all I do is I go back to the base form of the verb. […]