Do English-speaking children study grammar in school?

[Tarheel]

I don't know anything about conditionals, but it seems that people can understand me anyway.

 

[Skrej]

Gee, I didn't know there were ten tenses.

Depending on how you're willing to look at it, English could be said to have twenty-four tenses, while others argue there are only two true tenses (Simple Present and Simple Past). Depending on how you want to categorize things like aspect, voice, and modal forms, you can wind up with other numbers between the two extremes.

Some argue that English doesn't have a true future tense, since we form it with modal verbs. Some classify the progressive/continuous, perfect, and perfect continuous/progressive forms as aspects, not true tenses. Others argue that the passive forms are just that - passive forms of the active voice, and not new tenses.

The most commonly quoted number of English verb tenses is twelve. If you accept the simple forms of present, past, and future combined with the aspects of perfect, continuous, and perfect continuous, then that works out to twelve possible tenses. Making them passive accounts for the high-end number of two dozen. I suspect there will never be 100% consensus on the issue, and I'm not going to lose any sleep over it, regardless.

Even accepting the dozen tenses, some of them aren't used nearly as much as others, and few if any native speakers consciously think about or recognize what form they're using at any given moment of speech. We just intuitively open our mouth and let the words spill out. However, when I try and use my (very poor) German, I frequently do stop and recall (or at least try to recall) the grammar of what I want to say, along with the particular vocabulary I need.

That's probably a good measure of fluency in another language - the extent to which you do or don't have to think about what you want to say.

If you're really interested in verb tenses, 5jj shared his thoughts through a series of essays(?) with his thoughts on tense, aspect, and other verb musing over in the Linguistics forum. The first one starts here, with links to successive related posts contained within.

I don't know anything about conditionals, but it seems that people can understand me anyway.

Right, because again we as native speakers have probably learned by imitation and internalization, not by studying grammar. We know what sounds right and what doesn't, but unless you've studied grammar, you probably couldn't explain why it's right (or wrong) to someone else. I can almost guarantee any native speaker uses conditionals, even if they don't know what they are or have never heard the term.

I imagine I learned probably 75% or more of what I know about grammar through becoming an English teacher. I had to learn the 'why' aspect to explain it, even though I already could tell you whether something "just was" right or wrong. Beyond some very basic rudiments, I was never taught grammar in school.

 

[Tdol]

Many linguists would disagree. One view is that there are only two tenses in English.