The System of tenses

There are four groups of tenses in English:

• The Indefinite (Simple) group;
• The Continuous group;
• The Perfect group;
• The Perfect Continuous group.

Each group numbers three tenses - present, past and future, except the Perfect Continuous group that only has two tenses (present and past) because the Future Perfect Continuous is not practically used. Besides, all future tenses can be transformed into correspondent future tenses in the past.

So all in all there are fourteen tenses in English.

The following sections describes all the groups: