It creates hypothetical future scenarios based on the actions someone carries out in the present. The future perfect uses “will” alongside “have” to show that the thing hasn’t happened yet. It means that someone started “speaking” previously and continues to do so in the present. The present perfect uses “have” because it’s the present tense verb form. The past perfect uses “had” because it’s the past tense of “have.” It means that an event happened in the past and might still impact something in the present. Instead, you should change the verb form of the auxiliary verb to indicate which perfect tense is being used.Īs you can see, “have” changes tense based on the perfect tense case we use. The verb form of “spoken” never changes, no matter what perfect tense you write in. There are three possible perfect tenses we can use when writing with the past participle (past, present, and future). “Spoken” is correct because it’s the past participle, meaning we need an auxiliary verb like “have” to turn it into the perfect tense. The past participle of any verb often comes with extra rules, and it doesn’t work on its own in any sentence structure. We use it to talk about “speaking” in the past, with no possible way to do anything more about the event in the present. “Spoke” is the simple past tense, which works alongside a pronoun.

I spoke with you about this before, so why haven’t any changes been made?.

You spoke too much, and I decided to leave.

She spoke a lot of nonsense when I was there!.We spoke about this already, and I hope you can forgive me.You spoke to my father about my behavior!.Naturally, the simple past tense is just that it’s “simple.” We can show you how you might use it in the following examples: It’s a good way to learn about the verb since it remains uniform. The verb form “spoke” stays the same no matter which pronoun you use. There is nothing more that can be done to affect the outcome of the “speaking” event. Any pronoun works, and it means that someone or something was “speaking” in the past.

“Spoke” is correct when used with a pronoun. The simple past tense is easy to use, so we’ll start by explaining it. Watch the video: Only 1 percent of our visitors get these 3 grammar questions right.

Speek vs speak