English tenses › Research
We counted 584,000 verbs on YouTube. Here is how English speakers really use tenses
We pulled the captions of 1,022 YouTube videos, 427 hours of real English from 82 channels and speakers, and ran every line through the Tense Lens tagger. Three findings stood out: two tenses carry 83% of everything people say, British YouTubers use Present Perfect about 1.6 times as often as Americans, and native-speaking football managers use Perfect tenses twice as often as their non-native colleagues.
Two tenses do most of the work
Present Simple and Past Simple make up 83% of all tensed verbs. Add Present Continuous and Present Perfect and you reach 93%. The other nine tenses share the last 7%.
Two tenses carry 83% of spoken English
How often you hear each tense: one every…, and verbs per hour of speech
The tenses that fill whole chapters of grammar books are rare in real speech. You hear a Past Perfect Continuous (“I’d been waiting”) about once every three hours, a Future Perfect (“I will have finished”) once every four and a half hours, and Future Perfect Continuous only twice in 427 hours. Six tenses together make up less than 1% of what people say.
Brits really do say “I’ve”
English teachers say Americans often use Past Simple where Brits use Present Perfect: “Did you eat yet?” against “Have you eaten yet?”. The data agrees. On British channels, Present Perfect accounts for 25% of the Present Perfect + Past Simple pair; on American ones, 16%.
British YouTubers reach for Present Perfect 1.6× as often
Present Perfect as a share of Present Perfect + Past Simple, per channel (“I’ve seen” vs “I saw”)
The gap holds within each format: 27% vs 17% among solo YouTubers, 22% vs 13% among podcasts. It is not a fluke of a few channels (p < 0.001 in a permutation test over channels). British speakers also used Perfect tenses overall more often: 6.5% of all verbs against 4.3%.
The top of the chart is Jamie Oliver, and cooking explains part of it: “I’ve added a bit of salt, I’ve just chopped these”. The point stands without him; the podcast comparison has no cooks in it.
Native speakers live in the Perfect
To compare native and non-native speakers fairly we needed people who talk about the same things, in the same format, every week. Premier League press conferences are exactly that. We took up to 12 recent press conference videos each from 15 managers who grew up speaking English and 16 who learned it later.
Native-speaking managers use Perfect tenses twice as often
Share of verbs in a Perfect tense, Premier League press conferences
native English speaker English as a second language
Native-speaking managers put 9.4% of their verbs in a Perfect tense; non-native managers 4.7%, half as many. The difference is almost all Present Perfect: “we’ve worked really hard this week”, “he’s been excellent for us”. Non-native managers more often say the same thing in Past Simple or Present Simple. They also use a narrower range of tenses: 8.1 different tenses in a typical 500-verb stretch, against 8.8 for native speakers.
The overlap is small. Only one non-native manager, Arne Slot, sits among the native speakers. Continuous tenses show no difference at all (6% in both groups), so this is not about overall fluency. Perfect tenses are the part of English grammar that even very fluent second-language speakers use least.
News anchors vs professors
What you watch shapes which tenses you hear. In TV news, almost one verb in five is something other than a Simple tense: “has been arrested”, “are calling for”, “had been warned”. University lectures and stand-up comedy sit at the other end, at about one in nine.
News anchors use the most tenses, professors and comedians the fewest
Share of verbs outside Present, Past and Future Simple, by genre
The reasons differ. Lecturers explain how things work, so they live in Present Simple (70% of their verbs). Comedians tell stories, but in quick Present and Past Simple (“so I walk in, and he goes”). Storytime vloggers spend 38% of their verbs in the past, almost twice the YouTube average of 21%. News leans on Present Perfect and uses the most Present Continuous of any genre, because it reports what has just happened and what is happening now.
So if you learn from lectures and TED talks, add some news or long-form podcasts to hear the Perfect and Continuous forms in context.
What this means if you are learning English
Learn the tenses in the order real people use them. Present Simple, Past Simple, Present Continuous and Present Perfect cover 93% of tensed verbs in our data. Get those four automatic before you spend an evening on Future Perfect Continuous, which turned up twice in 427 hours.
The gap between native and non-native speakers is not exotic grammar. It is Present Perfect. Fluent non-native managers, people who give interviews in English every week, still fall back on Past Simple where a native speaker says “we’ve done” or “he’s been brilliant”. If you want to sound more natural, that is the tense to practise.
And don’t worry about choosing British or American English. Both use the same tenses; they just lean on them differently. If your teacher was British and your favourite YouTuber is American, you are not making mistakes, you are switching dialects.
Try it yourself. Everything in this article was counted with the same tagger that runs inside Tense Lens for YouTube, a free Chrome extension. Open any video with English captions and it colours every verb by tense, shows a tense map of the whole video and counts each tense as you watch. Pick a channel from the charts above and see the pattern for yourself.
How we did it
Data. We took 82 sources, up to 12 recent videos each (33 short clips for movie scenes, 30 for storytime vlogs), and downloaded their English captions: 1,022 videos, 427 hours, 4.7 million words. A source is one speaker or one channel, and it is the unit of every comparison, so a talkative channel cannot outvote a quiet one. All sources were chosen before we looked at any results.
Tagger. Every caption line went through the tagger used by the Tense Lens extension, unchanged. It finds finite verb phrases and labels 12 tenses plus be going to; modal verbs (can, would, should) are counted separately and left out of the percentages. Example: “I’ve been thinking” counts as one Present Perfect Continuous.
Metrics. Shares are per tensed verb. Tense range is measured on random 500-verb windows from each source, so long podcasts don’t win just by being long. Differences between groups are tested with a permutation test over sources, with 95% bootstrap intervals.
Accuracy. We checked 150 random caption lines by hand. About 94% of verbs on human-made captions and about 87% on auto-generated ones were labelled correctly. The typical errors: a plural noun read as a verb (“prices rose” tagged on prices), “he’s arrived” read as Present Simple instead of Present Perfect, and be going to split across two caption lines. The first adds noise; the second undercounts Present Perfect everywhere, so the real gaps are, if anything, slightly larger.
Caveats.
- 80% of the videos only have YouTube’s automatic captions. Speech recognition sometimes drops a short “’ve” or “’s”, especially with a strong accent, which could exaggerate the native vs non-native gap. On the videos with human captions the gap is smaller but in the same direction (Present Perfect: 9.5% vs 6.0% of verbs).
- Press conferences include the journalists’ questions. That mixes some native speech into the non-native group, which makes the measured gap smaller, not larger.
- Genre samples are small for TED (5 hours) and movie scenes (1.9 hours), so treat those two bars as indicative.
- These are 82 sources, not a random sample of all English speakers.