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- You deny the necessity of learning anything, both words and rules, but there are things in the English language that one needs to know! For example, irregular verbs. Don't they need to be learned?

What did they ever do to deserve this?! What can't these hard-working verbs do? What do you want to teach them?! Of course, this isn't quite a proper play on words. According to Dal and Ozhegov, the meaning of the word "teach" is twofold: to teach someone to do something or to learn something. In the latter case, however, it implies memorizing or studying, which is more applicable to poetry, some logical sequences of events, but to learn a verb with its three forms...

Now let's ponder what the phrase "eat – ate - eaten" really means. Essentially, it's nothing, a meaningless set of words, not even words, but "semi-finished products". Because while the first word can be an imperative "eat!", the second "ate" is hard to imagine without a subject, and the third isn’t even a verb, but a participle "eaten". And it's not at all the same as answering in Russian to the question "do you love?" with a passionate "I loved, I love, and I will love". In English, a similar statement would be practicing the tenses of verbs in the Simple form in the tenses table: "I loved, I love, I will love". In Tamara Ignatova's course, a girl responds to a persistent suitor: "I was busy yesterday, I am busy today, I will be busy tomorrow!" With the same logic, one can "string" any verb, practicing the Continuous horizontally. For instance, if asked to lend a book, you decline saying, "I am reading it now, I was reading it yesterday from early morning until night, and I will be reading it all day tomorrow!". There are numerous games to practice tenses horizontally, vertically, and even making arbitrary jumps through the squares (remember the "strict mother" game?). If we aim to hear the three forms of a verb in sequence, let's create a context where they sound:

- Who has eaten my cake?

- I have.

- When did you eat it?

- I ate it yesterday.

Even better, as always, is to weave these three verb forms into a natural context. For example, if you angrily reprimand a careless student, "Where is your pen? Have you forgotten it? The way you usually do! Every time you forget something! Last time you forgot your book!", it will be a thousand times more effective than rote learning "forget – forgot - forgotten". Thus, we continue to adhere to our golden rule: "Never deviate from natural intonation and pace of speech!", ensuring our speech retains meaning. How we incorporate the necessary grammatical structure into it is our headache, colleagues, our pedagogical task, but...

Turning a student into a parrot repeating nonsense is not our right!

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