In this Topic, we're going to learn more phrases to do with experience and tense. Specifically, we will learn about the pattern ～たことがある, which is used to talk about things we 'have done', and about the final use of ている, which highlights habitual or repeated activities. With these, we'll have a complete knowledge of tense and aspect at the N5 level!

Let's recap what we've learned about tense and aspect so far, finishing off our N5 tense and aspect related lessons!

Things Are Getting A Bit Tense

As we know at this point, Japanese has only two tenses. Namely, past and non-past. Tense just tells us the 'when' of a verb. Despite this, we've also already seen how tense is not as simple as 'things happened in the past' or 'things happen in the future', as we've seen both the so-called past and non-past forms used in a variety of different ways.

First, we have the 'past' tense (た).

Second, we have the 'non-past' tense.

Is There Another Aspect To This?

When learning about the various ways ている is used, we have also learned about aspect. As we've discussed, aspect tells us the progress of a verb. It basically tells us if a verb is ongoing or not. We also discussed how different verbs interact with aspect, depending on the sort of action or occurrence they express.

For simple actions, aspect behaves in very intuitive ways.

As we have seen before, for verbs expressing something instantaneous and binary (it has either happened or it hasn't), things are slightly different. Here, ている represents an ongoing state of having been done.

Besides these two, we also saw some examples of verbs which don't normally use ている. These verbs represent states, which inherently have no ongoing aspect to alter.

And we also saw some examples of verbs which normally are only used with ている. These verbs are harder to categorize, but they normally express features and are used descriptively. This point is more advanced, so will be revisited again at higher levels.

Everything's A Remix

When we bring this all together, we end up with a rich and varied way of expressing time and action, with just the simple ingredients of two tenses and ている. We can take some elements and combine them to tell a more complex story.

We can start with a simple non-past sentence.

Then we can add the auxiliary verb た to make it past tense.

Then nominalize the entire thing with こと, and say we 'have' it with がある.

And, then, we can go even further and turn ある into the past tense, to say we 'had' it.

By mastering these simple building blocks at N5, we are perfectly set up for N4 and beyond, where we will start remixing these components even further.