Did I buy a new car or have I bought it?
Or, Past Simple vs. Present Perfect
This is a question that many English learners ask — and it doesn’t matter if they are Engramo users, high school students, or veteran office employees working on their English to shrug off the competition they face from their younger colleagues — because even advanced learners are often unsure of this issue. That is, whether to use the Past Simple tense or the Present Perfect.
It should not come as a surprise as these two tenses share many functional similarities. They can both be used to describe completed actions and thus speak about an aspect of the past (despite the name Present Perfect). Both can also be used to describe states that relate to the past. But despite these similarities, there are also subtle differences that may sometimes not mean much and just shift the emphasis to another piece of information, while at other times the choice between these two tenses carries extra implicit meaning.
An example of the former case is saying “I’ve bought a new car”. By using the Present Perfect, you signal that the purchase of the car is the thing that’s important here and that it doesn’t matter when the purchase was made. If you instead tell your friend “I bought a new car yesterday”, the Past Simple is employed because the time is specified and the whole action is now anchored in the past. The Past Simple used in this way shifts the emphasis as well as the attention of the listener from the action itself and to the time the action was completed.
To illustrate the latter case, let’s take a look at the following two examples: “I didn’t shave this morning” vs. “I haven’t shaved this morning”. The first sentence would probably be uttered at some point later in the day, such as over lunch or in the afternoon; it is anchored in the past as a fact and there is nothing that can be done about it. Compare that to the second sentence, which implies that the shaving can still happen this morning, which in turn means that it would only make sense to say that sentence while it is still morning — because you cannot travel back in time from the afternoon to the morning just so you could still manage to “shave this morning”.
As you can see, context (even such details as the current time of day) can play a huge role in what grammar is acceptable to use and what grammar would sound strange or downright ungrammatical.
The Engramo English app teaches you all about tenses and much, much more. In fact, it contains and covers pretty much all English grammar, including all the advanced topics and rules. Its proprietary Grammar Book strikes a perfect balance between brevity and complexity and there is enough context in the practice exercises the app employs to measure your progress. Different parts of grammar are contrasted in meaningful ways to teach you the similarities and differences between them.
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