Making Tenses Easy in Afrikaans: Part 1 – Tenses in English vs Afrikaans

📘 Who this is for: CAPS, IEB, Cambridge students (FAL and SAL Grades 7–12) and adult Afrikaans learners.

In this lesson you will learn about the basics of tenses in Afrikaans before we go into more detail about how tenses work in further lessons. You will learn how tenses in Afrikaans are different from tenses in English.

What are tenses

A tense tells us when the action in a sentence takes place.

Tenses in English vs Afrikaans.

Tenses in English

English has 12 different tenses. In English, the different types of tenses look like this.

	Simple	Continuous	Perfect	Perfect Continuous
Past	He walked.	He was walking.	He had walked.	He has been walking.
Present	He walks.	He is walking.	He has walked.	He has been walking.
Future	He will walk.	He will be walking.	He will have walked.	He will have been walking.

 

Tenses in Afrikaans

Afrikaans doesn’t have that many tenses. It only has three. The different types of tenses in Afrikaans look like this.

Tense	Example
Past	Hy het gestap.
Present	Hy stap.
Future	Hy sal stap.

 

The lower number of tenses does, however, not mean that tenses in Afrikaans are simple to understand. They can be very tricky for English speakers because of how different they are from English tenses.

 

Click here to go to the next lesson:
Making Tenses Easy in Afrikaans: Part 2 – Past tense

 

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