Dicas de Inglês - 2

Hello, guys!!! xD

I’m here to talk about some things which may help you understand the difference between Present Perfect and Simple Past.

Some students tell me, “Teacher I always make mistakes here and there because of Present Perfect. I think it’s because I translate it wrong.”

Guys, don’t worry about translation, you have to know when to use it, better than its Portuguese translation. So here we go!

Simple Past
Used to talk about actions in the past, but actions that can’t be changed anymore (unless you have a Time Machine and can go back to the past and change it all!!). For instance:
I went to the movies with my family yesterday.

You did this yesterday! Now think about it... Can you change YESTERDAY? No. ^^ So here we have a Simple Past sentence. Another one for you to understand better.
My friends and I bought the tickets for our trip to France last month.

So there can you understand it better? The underlined words are the ones that we might use in a Simple Past sentence, they’re our key words. xD

Present Perfect (I’ll call it P.P. to shorten some things up)
There are many ways to differ P.P. from Simple Past, but I’ll go through only some explanations.

1st – Used to talk about actions that we can still change.
She has gone to the shopping mall five times this week.

So here we have it. Has gone to say it is a P.P. sentence and Five times this week to say that we can still change this period of time! THIS WEEK hasn’t finished yet, so we can change it! xD

2nd – This here is a hint to differ Simple Past from P.P., some key words that look the same but they’re not.

Simple Past
Present Perfect
last year
this year
last week
this week
last month
this month


These are some hints for you to follow if you have doubts, but if you want to expertize yourself, check this website out! It has all you need to know about Simple Past and P.P., and more!!

Enjoy it!!! xD
Ah, how could I forget it?! You can also do some written exercises in these adresses below!


Thanks for your attention!! ^^
Teacher Aram
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Anônimo
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quarta-feira, junho 08, 2011 12:36:00 PM delete

I have never seen better than this site.

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Anônimo
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quarta-feira, junho 15, 2011 2:30:00 PM delete

I never thought I would agree with this option.

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