How to form the Past Tense in English
For every verb in English, there is only one form of it in the past tense.
- I walked home.
- He fixed the car.
( The exception is the "Past tense of To Be", which has two forms: "was" and "were" )
For example: The past tense of the verb play is played.
Played is used as the past tense for all subjects/pronouns.
So you just have to learn one word to be able to use it in the past tense. In this case we just needed to learn the one word played which can be used for all subjects (or people).
Past Tense Regular Verbs
To change a regular verb into its past tense form, we normally add –ed to the end of the verb.
- play – played
- cook – cooked
- rain – rained
- wait – waited
Examples of sentences using regular verbs in the past tense:
- Last night I played my guitar.
- She kissed me.
- It rained yesterday.
- Angela watched TV all night.
- John wanted to go to the museum.