tense combinations?

[h2k47]

First of all, hello everyone. It is amazing that the grammaticality of each post is checked .

I am 25 years old from Syria and my native tongue is Arabic. The most difficult aspect of English for me is tenses and more specifically tense combinations. What I mean by the latter is sentences such as the following :

' The game is now working after I had installed the missing files' (present progressive + past perfect)

OR

'The game is now working after I installed the missing files' (present progressive + simple past)

which one is correct?

Most of my inquiries about English revolve around this point ' How to combine tenses'. I would be grateful if someone knows about a website that contains all of these correct tense combinations and their use.


I also have another problem that is my tendency to quickly forget whatever tense use I have learned and automatically find myself switching to my 'mostly' ungrammatical English so that I can speak more freely and loosely. It would take a great amount of time if I want to check each of my sentences against a grammar rule in English. Is there any way to make it easier for me to accelerate the process of grammar-checking ?

Thank you

[Duckduck]

First of all, hello everyone. It is amazing that the grammaticality of each post is checked .

I am 25 years old from Syria and my native tongue is Arabic. The most difficult aspect of English for me is tenses and more specifically tense combinations. What I mean by the latter is sentences such as the following :

' The game is now working after I had installed the missing files' (present progressive + past perfect)
Not correct, because you only combine past perfect with past tense. It's used when talking about activities of the past, which you want to arrange chronologically. "I had just got up when suddenly the house collapsed." = get up = first activity (Past Perfect), collapse = second activity (Past Tense).

OR

'The game is working now after I installed the missing files' (present progressive + simple past)
This one seems OK, though I wouldn't say it like this, I suppose. Check these:
"The game is working now because I have installed the missing files."
"The game started working after I had installed the missing files."
"I installed the missing files and...look, the game is working."

Most of my inquiries about English revolve around this point ' How to combine tenses'. I would be grateful if someone told me about a website that contains all of these correct tense combinations and their use.

I also have another problem that is my tendency to quickly forget whatever tense use I have learned and automatically find myself switching to my 'mostly' ungrammatical English so that I can speak more freely and loosely. It would take a great amount of time if I wanted to check each of my sentences against a grammar rule in English. Is there any way to make it easier for me to accelerate the process of grammar-checking ?

Thank you

Hi and welcome!

Well, first of all, your English is extremely good! Do you speak German at all? Not knowing the first thing about Arabic I can't really advise you on the best way to understand the use of the tenses. Do you have a similar range of tenses? Or is it only the difference between past - present - future that counts? What I mean is: do you have anything similar to the distinctive use of the different tenses of the past (Past, Present Perfect, Past Perfect)?
Obviously, you know the tenses in English. And the fastest - and the only, really - option you have to use them correctly is learning the rules! And understanding them! And practising them! And then - one day - you will say....Ok, that's it, I've got it!

Why not check the grammar explanations here at Englisch-hilfen http://www.englisch-hilfen.de/en/inhalt_grammar.htm for a start?

Good luck says
Duckduck

[h2k47]

Sadly I don't speak any German although I have heard that both Arabic and German share parsing which is quite interesting. Anyway, in Arabic, there is not a distinctive use of the different tenses of the past. In fact, if you tried to translate the corrected form of my previous sentence from English to Arabic : "The game started working after I had installed the missing files." , you will be able to use the same past form in both parts of the sentence.This means that it will look like this in Arabic: '' The game started working after I installed the missing files''. I think this is one of the major problems that Arabic learners like me face because in Arabic we only have Past and Present distinction. No past perfect, present perfect..etc distinctions.

I am grateful for your advice and it was quite helpful the way you illustrated the difference between the two sentences as this what I was looking for. I will surely post again if I have any other question.

cheers