Learning Past Simple from a Story

In the previous post we learned about local wisdom which is uttered in English. This time, we are going to learn the language feature found in the story. A legend belongs to a narrative, and narrative uses past tense in conveying its story. Well, now let’s start learning about past tense.

Past tense / past simple is a grammatical structure that is used to describe actions which have finished now. The actions started and finished in the past. Past tense is indicated by some adverb of time, like yesterday, this morning, last week, two days ago, long time ago, etc.

To get better understanding the use of past simple we will divide the sentence into two kinds. They are nominal sentence and verbal sentence.

A.   Nominal sentence

Nominal sentence is a sentence which does not have verb. The sentence uses ‘be’ instead of a verb.

The ‘be’ in past simple is was and were

Was is used for single subject, such as: I, he, she, it, John, cat, etc.

Were is used for plural subject, such as: you, we, they, John and Betsy, cats, etc.

Example of nominal sentence:

I was happy yesterday.

John was in Surabaya last Monday.

Some students were sick at school this morning.

My cats were not in their room last night.

Was he your teacher in elementary school?

We can see that after subject there is no verb used. The adjective, noun or adverb comes after ‘be’. In negative sentence, we add ‘not’ right after the ‘be’, and in interrogative sentence the ‘be’ is put in the beginning of a sentence before the subject.

B.   Verbal sentence

Like its name, verbal sentence has a verb as the predicate of the sentence. Since the action happens in the past, we use the past form of verb in positive sentence. Meanwhile, auxiliary ‘did’ is used in negative and interrogative sentence. In negative and interrogative sentence the base verb is used instead of the past form. Look at the example below.

My mother made soup this morning.

Farida and Moya went to the zoo yesterday.

I did not meet you last night.

We did not sleep well last night.

Did Dian call you two days ago?

Here are some past simple sentences found in the legend of Ngerit cave:

• She was a daughter of a king from Kediri.
• This princess was the youngest among three brothers.
• She meditated in the jungle of Trenggalek to gain the power and wisdom.
• He wanted to build a mosque.
• He did not believe what he heard.

This video may help you in understanding about simple past tense.

 video's source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQO1UcvZraM

Form of verb

Some of verbs are regular and the others are irregular. The past form of regular verb is almost the same as its infinitive. We only need to put ed/d in the end of the word. For example: want+ed=study; play+ed=played; study+ed=studied; kick+ed=kicked

The past form of irregular verbs changes into a new word. Here are some exammples:

Infinitive	Past form
be begin break bring buy build choose come cost cut do draw drive eat feel find get give go have hear hold keep know	was/were began broke brought bought built chose came cost cut did drew drove ate felt found got gave went had heard held kept knew