What is the Present Tense?
The present tense is perhaps the most frequently used tense in everyday spoken English. Certainly, the present tense is the one that most people first encounter when they study English as a second language. The present tense is normally used to indicate actions and events which take place at the same time as the speaker is talking about them or events which happen regularly. It can appear in either the simple present tense or the present continuous forms. The difference between the simple present and the present continuous can be shown with the simple present example I watch and the present continuous example I am watching. In this case, the simple present suggests that the action happens regularly, while the present continuous is happening right at the moment of speaking, or possibly in the near future. Native speakers of English may intuitively understand the difference between the two forms even if they are unaware of any grammatical explanations.
When we speak of the present tense, we are generally referring to the present indicative. The indicative mood is used for statement of facts, or statements which the speaker considers to be unassailably true. The other moods used in English are the imperative, which is used to issue commands and the subjunctive mood which can be used to talk about hypothetical situations.
People who grow up speaking a language which has tenses generally find the concept fairly straightforward, even if they still find the task of learning the verb endings of a new language to be an arduous one. However, not every language uses tenses to indicate whether an action is taking place right now, whether it happened already or will take place at some point in the future. For example Mandarin does not use the past, future or present tenses in the way speakers of European languages think of them. Instead, speakers indicate when an action is, will be or has been taking place with the use of particles which convey the same information. This means that students of a lanuage such as Mandarin do not face the difficulty of learning various tenses of any given verb, although they may face challenges in other areas of the language. However, for speakers of languages which use a different method of identifying when an action takes place, the past, future and present tenses may seem confusing and even excessively complicated at first.