How many tenses are there in English?
As a native English speaker, I had no idea how many tenses there are in my language because I am just so familiar with it. So I was surprised this week when a colleague of mine, who is trained as a teacher of English as a foreign language, told me that there are 13 tenses. Surprised? You can see what they are here.
13 tenses seems like a lot to me. But, so far as I can work out, French and Spanish have 17 tenses. In contrast, German seems to manage with only four (there are two past tenses). And then there is Mandarin Chinese which has no tenses (if only it was not tonal and used the Roman alphabet).
How many tenses are there in your language or the language you are learning?