Please note that there are probably a few mistakes in the transcripts. There is a lot of text to look through and its very time consuming. You can use it as a guide to practise your English but I can’t promise that everything is perfect. If you have any questions you’re welcome to ask me. 0:05 Welcome to the Level Up English podcast - the best place to come to practice the English language, learn about the British accent and culture with me, your host, Michael Lavers. 0:21 Hello, good evening. Good morning. Good day English learners. Welcome back to the podcast. How are you doing today? I hope you're all well. Thank you very much for listening. And joining me today on our English learning journey. Maybe it could be a journey, why not? Today, I'm going to be talking about the present perfect tense, really difficult part of English. And I think very, very important. So we're going to be looking at that, and trying to make it fun, not boring and tedious. Like how you might remember it in school. 1:01 Before we get to that, as always, I want to remind people to use the transcript. And I really say this for the new listeners, if it's anyone new. And you don't know, I do make a transcript for every episode. So this is where you can read what I'm saying, while I'm talking to help improve your vocabulary. And kind of keep up if you can't catch every word I'm saying, you can find the transcript in the podcast show notes. Or if you can't see on your phone, you can go to the website, levelupenglish.school. And there will be the transcript for every podcast episode over there. 1:42 Secondly, Italki is one of the things that helps me keep going. And it really helps the podcast continue. So if you are looking for an English lesson, online English lesson, you can find any teacher you want. Or you can even find me if some people have been doing that recently, they've been signing up to italki and they found me on the website. And they had some lessons with me. If you want to try that as well, you can go to levelupenglish.school/free, that's FREE. If you go there, there'll be some instructions on that page, you click on the link, sign up. When you sign up, you can get a free $10. And you can use this $10 for an italki lesson with me, with any teacher you find - whatever you like. So it's a great way to practice your English with a professional teacher. And also have a little bit of free money to do that. So once again, levelupenglish.school/free. 2:53 The final thing I want to mention, which I do mention occasionally, is my weekly emails. So if you are interested in some free English lessons, you can sign up to my email list, which probably the easiest way is to go to my website, my main website, which is ewmichael.com. And you can sign up on the homepage. And every Thursday, I send out a free email lesson where we look at vocabulary or grammar. Last week, we looked at accent. And I give audio as well. So you can listen while you while you learn. And it's also a good place to, to come if you want to hear news about when I do lives when I have some new classes available. And you could have news like that. So it's a good place. We're building little community now. And it's it's a lot of fun. So once again, go to my website ewmichael.com. And you'll be able to sign up halfway down the page. 4:00 Okay, let's get into the topic of today which is present perfect tense. This is a really, really hard one, but so useful, because we use it all the time. You cannot get to a high level of English without knowing this tense, unfortunately. Just to review the structure, it's fairly simple. So rather than saying, "I go" or "I went", we would say "I have" and then the third form of the verb which is the past participle. So rather than say, I go, we would say, I have gone. Rather than say, I see or I saw. We would say, I have seen. If we say he, she, it or that's it. He, she or it or a person, we say has, like he has seen, Michael has seen. But for I, you we and they, we say have, they have we have I have you have. 5:16 So that's the structure. The hardest part is the past participle verbs, they do take a lot of time to learn. Some of them are easy, like invite, invited, invited. So that's the same as past simple - invited. Some of them are a bit harder, especially like, this is a fairly common one, of course, but go went gone. Am, or Be, was and been, 5:48 So some of them can get a little bit different, a little bit tricky. But they're really, really useful. And present perfect has lots of uses. So what I'm going to do today, I'm going to go over the grammar, I'm going to go over the rules with you. Because I think there are some rules that maybe you haven't learned in school you haven't learned before. So we're going to go over them today. And then the second half, I'm going to basically just have a talk about my life and tell you things that I have done. Then, as usual, I'm going to give you a chance to practice. So I hand it over to you and you can get in touch with me and let me know. Well, let me know about yourself using this grammar. 6:32 So a really well not really simple, but a somewhat simple way to describe this tense is it's used to talk about an action in the past, that has some kind of result now in the present. So the sentence I always like to use is, I have opened the door, I have opened the door. So the action in the past is opening the door. In the past, I opened the door, the result in the present, is the door is still open, I have opened the door, it's still open. Now. If we use past simple, I opened the door. This is just a simple past action. And it kind of means now maybe it's open, maybe it's not, I don't really know, the present is not important. It's only the past, I opened the door, I have opened the door, it's still open, so don't worry. Another example, we were married for two years. This probably means you're not married anymore. We were married in the past for two years. However, if you say we have been married for two years, we have been married. That means you're still married. Now, it's very important, you don't get that wrong. If you are married, that would be a terrible thing to get confused. Your wife or husband would be very angry. As you can see, it's very useful. 8:21 So while I'm talking, think about yourself, think about something that could be true in the past, but also still true now. Okay, and I'm going to go over in more detail. Now five ways in which we use present perfect. So what I just mentioned, this was kind of a summary, the simplified version. Now we can go into more detail. So the first way we use present perfect is to talk about an action that started in the past, but it's continuing now in the present. This is the action. For example, I have lived in England for 20 years. And I still live here. I lived here in the past I live in now. And probably I will in the future too. I have lived here for 20 years. 9:23 So again, think about what you have done - anything in your life that was true before that is still true. Now an action that you have taken. Another example, I have been talking to you on this podcast for 10 minutes. I was talking before, I'm still talking now this is a bit different because we we said continuous I have been talking but it's kind of the same rule. It's just something continuous. But that's maybe another episode. 9:59 The second way we use present perfect is to talk about an action in a time period that has not finished. So it started before and still continues. Now, maybe the action has finished. But the time has not finished. For example, I have been to the supermarket twice this week. So we often use present time phrases with present perfect like this week today, at the moment, this year, anything now anything, this that kind of idea. 10:42 So I have been to the supermarket twice this week. I'm not at the supermarket anymore, the action has finished.