Shadowing Practice: How do some languages not have tense? - Learn English Speaking with Video
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If I asked you to explain the difference between I ate dinner and I was eating dinner,
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you'd probably tell me they both happened in the past, and you'd be right.
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In linguistics, we call the when of a sentence tense.
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But there's a second, much more subtle layer of meaning hidden in those sentences
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that English speakers use every day without ever realizing it.
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Bernard Comrie still has the classic definition of it from his 1976 sequel to his high-stakes nail-biting thriller,
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Tense, where he explains it simply as the internal temporal constituency of a situation.
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And some languages use it without ever using tense at all.
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In plain English, it's called aspect.
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If you're new to the channel, welcome.
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I'm Dr. Taylor Jones.
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I've got a PhD in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania.
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And on the channel, I discuss everything relating to language, linguistics, language learning, and culture.
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If you're into those topics, be sure to subscribe and ring the bell for notifications.
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Today, we're talking about what's weirdly one of the hardest concepts for people to get.
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This is Language Jones.
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I bought Airfare to Italy last month, and my old move would have been to just not look at my accounts for a while.
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Instead, I opened Monarch.
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One clean dashboard.
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Accounts, spending, net worth, debt payoff progress, recurring bills, all in one view.
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No hopping between four banking apps to piece it all together.
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Setup was fast.
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Monarch syncs with over 13,000 institutions, so my banks, credit cards, and brokerage all connected securely in one sitting.
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What I actually needed to know was whether that purchase set me back.
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Monarch's AI pulled from my real financial data and explained what changed.
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Two minutes, no spreadsheet.
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The budgeting's flexible, not rigid.
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Fixed versus flexible spending, my own rules and categories.
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And if you're managing money with a partner, you both see the same picture.
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No ads, no selling my data.
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I'm the customer, not the product.
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And it's the same experience on web and mobile.
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Monarch.com in the description, use my promo code or scan the QR code on screen.
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Now back to the video.
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Okay, so what the fuck is Aspect?
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As with most linguistics jargon, the name sounds kind of made up.
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While tense tells you when something happened, past, present, or future, aspect tells you how that event occupies mental time.
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Is it a single completed point?
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Is it an ongoing process?
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Is it a habit that happens over and over?
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Today, we're going to look at the two core kinds of aspects that languages, from English to Russian to Mandarin, have to deal with.
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The perfective and the imperfective.
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To visualize this, imagine you're looking at a parade.
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If you're standing on a skyscraper, looking down at the entire parade route from start to finish, you see the parade as a single complete event.
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If you're looking down from the space station, the whole thing is an undisentanglable dot.
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This is the perfective aspect.
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You aren't interested in the individual dancers, the specific timing of the drums.
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You're not interested in who's going by right now.
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That question doesn't even make sense.
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Instead, you're looking at the event as an unanalyzable black box or a single dot on a timeline.
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In English, we usually show this with a simple past.
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I wrote the book.
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I read the book.
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I ate the book.
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It's done.
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The concept's a whole.
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But now imagine you're standing on the sidewalk right in the middle of the noise of that parade.
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You see the floats passing by, you see the movement, and you're right in the thick of the action.
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You don't see the beginning or the end necessarily.
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You see the internal constituency, the internal texture of the event.
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This is the imperfective aspect.
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In English, we often use the ing form for this.
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I was writing the book.
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I was eating the book.
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This distinction is the foundation of almost everything we do with verbs.
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But where it gets really interesting is how different languages choose to mark these categories.
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In English, we're actually a bit of a strange outlier.
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We love the progressive aspect, that am doing or was doing construction.
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We use it constantly to show that an action is currently unfolding.
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By the way, see how am doing is the present tense and was doing is the past tense?
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This stuff is distinct from tense and can overlap with, interact with, or totally ignore tense.
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Some languages like
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Mandarin don't even have tenses at all.
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If you want to say when something happened, you legit just say when it happened or will happen, but the aspect marker doesn't change.
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All you students of Mandarin out there, le is not a past tense marker.
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But also there's a conceptual reason we might think of one as related to the other.
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Perfective aspect for things that are done
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and dusted is just statistically more likely to co-occur with things
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that happened in the past than things that will happen to completion in the future.
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That's how Hebrew switched from a spectral system in Biblical Hebrew to a tense system in Modern Hebrew,
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starting sometime maybe in the Mishinaic period and running to completion sometime around the 1500s, but definitely before what we think of as Modern Hebrew.
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There's a lot of weird conspiracy theories online that are totally unhinged, so if you want a rundown of the history of Hebrew,
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check out my video on that, link in the description.
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Anyway, if you look at a language like Russian, aspect is the absolute king of the grammar system.
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Forget case marking.
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Slavic aspect is the final boss.
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Almost every verb in Russian comes in a pair, except verbs of motion which come in even more groupings.
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Some say too many.
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But for those pairs, there's a perfective version and an imperfective version.
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You can't even say the word to eat without first deciding
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if you're talking about the process of eating or the result of having finished the meal.
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And then there's the habitual aspect.
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This is a subtype of the imperfective.
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If I say I used to walk to work, I'm not talking about one specific walk.
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I'm talking about a pattern of behavior that's stretched across time.
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In those days, I walked to work.
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Does the same thing with the simple past, but it adds a phrase that gives you the right reading.
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Used to is just a grammatical structure that encodes the habituality.
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Some languages have a specific piece of morphology, a little prefix or suffix that they stick onto the verb solely to signal,
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hey, this isn't a one-time thing.
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It's a habit.
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In African American English, it's been argued for almost 60 years that one function of so-called invariant B, as in he be working every week,
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is as a habituality marker in the present tense by analogy with like used to.
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Although I just read a fantastic 2019 dissertation that makes a very interesting argument for a different interpretation.
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I've got a video on that.
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Link is in the description.
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And I'll link at the end too.
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Be sure to check it out.
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Now, why does this matter?
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Why did Comrie and other linguists spend hundreds of pages and decades of their careers obsessing over this?
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One answer is because aspect allows us to zoom in and zoom out on life.
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Think about how we tell stories.
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We use the imperfective to set the scene, the background of the movie.
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The sun was shining, the birds were singing, and I was drinking my coffee.
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These are ongoing states.
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Then we use the perfective to trigger the action or the foreground.
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Suddenly, the phone rang.
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By switching aspects, you're telling the listener's brain which information is just the background and which information is the plot moving forward.
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Without aspect, our stories would be just a flat list of facts with no rhythm or depth.
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What always messed me up at first was the fact that basically anything can be either, depending on your framing.
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So when I said, suddenly the phone rang, I can continue, the phone was ringing when I dropped my coffee.
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It's the same event in the world, the same instance of the phone ringing,
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but I choose how to represent it in terms of duration and relationship to other events.
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One of the trickiest things about learning a new language is realizing
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that they don't all draw the lines in the same place.
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Some languages, like
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Mandarin Chinese, don't use tense at all.
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They don't change the verb for past or future.
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Instead, they rely entirely on aspect particles like le or zhe to tell you if an action is completed or ongoing.
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They care way more about the shape of the event than the date on the calendar.
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And by care, I mean encode in the grammar.
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You can absolutely just tell somebody the date on the calendar or use a deictic term like yesterday or tomorrow.
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That's what people actually do.
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So the next time you're writing a text or telling a story, pay attention to your verbs.
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Are you looking at the parade from the sidewalk or from the skyscraper?
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Did I just help you ace high school Spanish?
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Probably.
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Once you start seeing aspect, you realize that language is constantly shifting focus to show us how life actually feels as it unfolds.
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That's what we're using language to do.
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And the reason people like Comrie study it is
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that there's a lot to be learned from how languages choose to encode some information and not other information.
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How they force us to attend to certain aspects of our actions and our lives, pun very much intended.
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Which language's aspect system has been the hardest for you to wrap your head around, and why is it Russian?
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For me, it's always the Slavic perfective pairs,
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especially once you get into verbs of motion where it matters whether everybody is going in the same direction
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or whether it's one-way trip or a two-way trip.
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Let me know in the comments below.
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Hit the like button if you learned something new about your own speech today.
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And don't forget to subscribe.
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If you like what I'm doing with the channel,
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you can always support it right here on YouTube with super thanks or over on Patreon at patreon.com slash languagejones.
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Please leave me a comment.
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They are great for the algorithm.
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And until next time, happy learning.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This speaking lesson is built on the video “How do some languages not have tense?”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: aspect, language, tense, verb, event. This video has 154 sentences and 1769 words to shadow. The speech runs for 8:56. The speaker talks fast, about 198 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. Only 81% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is demanding.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| aspect noun | /ˈæspɛkt/ | Any specific feature, part, or element of something. |
| tense noun | /tɛns/ | The property of indicating the point in time at which an action or state of being occurs or exists. |
| verb noun | /vɝb/ | A word that indicates an action, event, or state of being. |
| parade noun | /pəˈrɑd/ | Synonym of military parade: A show of troops, an assembly of troops as a show of force, to receive orders, or especially for inspection at set times. |
| ongoing adjective | /ɒnˈɡəʊ.ɪŋ/ | Continuing, permanent, lasting. |
| marker noun | /ˈmɑː(ɹ)kə(ɹ)/ | A felt-tipped pen, a marker pen. |
| calendar noun | /ˈkæl.ən.də/ | Any system by which time is divided into days, weeks, months, and years. |
| habit noun | /ˈhæb.ɪt/ | An action performed on a regular basis. |
| completion noun | /kəmˈpliː.ʃən/ | The act or state of being or making something complete; conclusion, accomplishment. |
| grammar noun | /ˈɡɹæm.ə(ɹ)/ | A system of rules and principles for the structure of a language, or of languages in general. |
| sometime adverb | /ˈsʌmˌtaɪm/ | At an indefinite but stated time in the past or future. |
| flexible adjective | /ˈflɛk.sɪ.bəl/ | Capable of being flexed or bent without breaking; able to be turned or twisted without breaking. |
| subscribe verb | /səbˈskɹaɪb/ | To write (one’s name) at the bottom of a document; to sign (one's name). |
| zoom verb | /zuːm/ | To move fast with a humming noise. |
| constituency noun | /kənˈstɪt͡ʃu.ənsi/ | A district represented by one or more elected officials. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| check out verb | To record the departure or withdrawal of someone or something (such as guests, employees, books, etc.). | |
| make up verb | /ˌmeɪk ˈʌp/ | To constitute, to compose. |
| move forward verb | To cause to make progress. |
Sentences worth repeating
Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:
- If you're new to the channel, welcome.
- I'm the customer, not the product.
- To visualize this, imagine you're looking at a parade.
- You're not interested in who's going by right now.
- You don't see the beginning or the end necessarily.
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| “Used to” used to + verb — a past habit or state that is no longer true | used to walk · Used to is |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | been argued · is completed · be learned |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | it's been argued · has been |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 38 contractions and reduced forms, such as you're, don't, I'm. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: thick /θɪk/, rhythm /ˈɹɪð.əm/, algorithm /ˈælɡəɹɪðm̩/, thriller /ˈθɹɪ.lə/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: completion /kəmˈpliː.ʃən/, institution /ˌɪn.stɪˈtʃuː.ʃən/, interpretation /ɪnˌtɜːpɹəˈteɪʃən/, shine /ʃaɪn/, duration /dʒʊˈɹeɪ.ʃən/
- Long words — get the stress right: constituency /kənˈstɪt͡ʃu.ənsi/, necessarily /ˌnɛs.əˈsɛɹ.ə.li/, institution /ˌɪn.stɪˈtʃuː.ʃən/, conspiracy /kənˈspɪɹəsi/, interpretation /ɪnˌtɜːpɹəˈteɪʃən/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like aspect, tense, verb.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.