4.2.2.2.1. Dealing with the past

Now in connection with your pictures and other activities that required you to hear, process and respond, you will have learned to recognize a good stock of nouns (farmer) , verbs (ploughing) and adjectives ( wet). It may be that in the language you are learning, pictures are described in a form that you can think of as “present tense”, as in “This farmer is ploughing in a wet field”. You also want to start recognizing forms that describe things that happened in the past. The system for indicating such time-related properties of expressions will vary greatly from language to language. It may also be complex, if you worry about all the details. So it may not be a good idea to worry about all the details, or all the possible forms. Rather, at this point, you will concern yourself with the main uses of the main forms.

Techniques: With your pictures, you may be able to get these past time sentence patterns by providing a frame, such as “When this picture was taken--”. That is, with each picture, the LRP says things like “When this picture was taken this farmer was ploughing a field.” If you have a hundred pictures, you will quickly hear a hundred sentences with familiar verbs in this type of past description form. You may get another type of past description form by using the frame “On the day when this picture was taken--” or “During the week when this picture was taken--”. In English, for example, this might yield “During the week when this picture was taken, this man ploughed a field”. Can you see the difference in the verb form in these English examples? You may or may not find such a difference in another language.

You can also experience past description forms of sentences in the context of physical activities. For example, your co-learner might perform actions, and your LRP will then tell you what your co-learner just did. Or it might be what you just did, or what the LRP just did, and so forth. In this way you may be able to combine past description forms with different pronouns, which may be interesting in its own right, and is essential to learn in any case.