Just curious: do other languages, besides English, have as many tenses? Like do all languages have Present Perfect Continuous tense?
1 Answer
I do not know any other languages with as many tenses as English, but I don't know too many languages.
Explanation:
I do not know many languages, but I can write something about Polish.
In Polish (my mother-tongue) we have only 3 tenses: Past, Present and Future, but there are some other verb forms which can be compared to some of the english tenses. For example if you compare different equivalents of english verb 'to do' in Polish you will find 2 different verbs: 'zrobić' is a verb which does not have present tense (it only has past and future forms) and they can be compared to english Past and Future Simple tenses, while if you consider the verb 'robić', it can be compared to Continuous tenses in English.
For example if you translated polish sentence 'Wczoraj zrobiłem zakupy' to English you would probably use Past Simple tense 'I did shopping yesterday'. But on the other hand if yoou translated a sentence using the verb 'robić' like 'Wczoraj cały dzień robiłem pranie' you would use Continuous tense to indicate that the action took a long time. This sentence would probably be translated to 'I was doing the washing up all day yesterday.'
