Learn English – Do native speakers know the tenses

tenses

Present simple, past continuous, future perfect, present perfect continuous etc.
These terms are used when English is taught to foreigners. All of them are from quite a neat chart 3×4 of tenses, which are studied thoroughly and separately, and then in speech.
I was wondering if native speakers students who study English use the same terms and approach. I got this idea after I'd read the book of English grammar, by British for the British. It is quite old, and maybe the approach is outdated too. It said there were two tenses, present and past. All the rest were just syntactical constructions for detailed meanings.

Best Answer

Native speakers of English, or really any language, know how to use their verbs better than anybody else (and if they make 'mistakes', they make the right mistakes).

But you are really asking about conscious knowledge of their own language and the educated vocabulary used to describe it.

I can't say for other cultures, but in the US schooling system, there is some explanation of grammar with those terms you used in late elementary/early secondary school. But it is not emphasized or repeated later. As mentioned in a comment, most Americans learn more about grammar (and English grammar) when learning grammar of a foreign language.

As to you particular mention about two tenses, that's actually a bit of a terminological controversy, where most people informally think of English as having three, but they just would understand the formal vocabulary for tense as meaning English only has two inflected tenses (future and aspect are all periphrastic/modal/etc).

I distinctly remember in middle school (early secondary) some older student mentioning that they just learned about the future perfect in English, eg "I will have left for the store by the time you return", and thinking, wow, that must be some university level stuff. But it was never eventually mentioned to me in any English class (almost entirely devoted to literature and writing). And also eventually, I just learned how to do it naturally despite its rarity.

There are so many things in your native language that as a native you are just not aware of, but for non-native learners, an explicit rule makes things so much easier. Which preposition goes with a verb, the order of adjective roles, which article goes with a noun, the native speaker has no idea how to describe these, they just do it correctly without a thought.

To your title question, sure, most native speakers know the tenses past and present, they've heard things like 'present perfect continuous' but probably don't know exactly what it means, searching hard and failing from their memory of early grade school English.

Of course, ELU denizens, a very particular bunch, might track you down and forcibly explain every nuance of tense and aspect to you.