Grammar where it actually lives.
Most grammar pages explain a tense with a sentence about John and Mary. These show it in 108 lines from classic stories, each one linked to the tale it came from, free to read with the audio.
Past Simple
26 sentencesThe tense a story is told in. It carries almost every sentence in these tales, and it is the first one worth being able to spot on sight.
Past Perfect
23 sentencesThe tense for the thing that happened first. English marks it with had, and once you can see that, the order of events in any story stops being a guess.
Past Continuous
18 sentencesSomething already going on when the story arrives. It sets the scene, and it is almost always the sentence the action interrupts.
Present Perfect
8 sentencesThe past that still matters now. The tense learners of English get wrong most often, and the one that is easiest to feel in a line of speech.
Future with will
9 sentencesA decision made while speaking, a promise, a threat. In stories it is where a character commits to something.
Past Simple Passive
24 sentencesWhen the thing done matters more than who did it. Old tales lean on it constantly, because in a folk tale nobody signs their name.
Why there are not more
There are thousands of these sentences in the stories. What you see here are the ones that can be pointed to without any doubt at all. Most tenses announce themselves with a helper word: had before a participle, wasbefore an -ing. Past Simple announces nothing, so only the verbs whose past form cannot be anything else in English — went, saw, ran, wrote — are shown. The rest are being checked by hand, and they will appear when they are right rather than when they are ready.
Read the stories these came from →