Simple Past Tense

The simple past tense is used to talk about a completed action or state that was in the past. For regular verbs, we make this tense by adding -ed to the end of the verb. For example, the past tense of "to walk" is walked. Use the simple past whenever you say that something happened in the past. For example, "I talked to her yesterday."

There are also many irregular verbs in the simple past tense. For example, the past tense of "to have" is had. The past tense of "to do" is did. "To be" is extra difficult because we say I/he/she/it was and you/we/they were.

To make the negative in the simple past tense, we put did not before the base form of the main verb, as in, "I did not see a movie last night." We usually speak the contraction didn't instead of did not. With the verb "to be," we use was not or wasn’t, as in, "I wasn’t happy with the film."