Ask a teacher or learner to list the different tenses in English, and most will come up with something like this: present simple, present progressive, present perfect, past simple, past progressive, past perfect, future simple, future perfect, future continuous. This is one way of looking at tense, and can be very handy when it comes to categorising and sequencing language points that we want to teach. Many course books deal with tense in this way. Strictly speaking, though, English only has two tenses, present and past.