What is Tense?
tense (noun): a verb-based method used to indicate the time, and sometimes the continuation or completeness, of an action or state in relation to the time of speaking. ORIGIN Latin tempus "time"
The concept of tense in English is a method that we use to refer to time - past, present and future. Many languages use tense to talk about time. Other languages have no concept of tense at all, but of course they can still talk about time, using different methods.
So, we talk about time in English with tense. But, and this is a very big but:
- we can also talk about time without using tense (for example, going to is a special construction to talk about the future, it is not a tense)
- one tense does not always talk about one time (for example, we can use the present tense, or even the past tense, to talk about the future - see tense and time for more about this)