When do I use past tense and past participle?

Question

It can be tricky to know which one to use when talking about situations that already happened. How can you figure out the difference?

Answer 1

For additional clarification one could add that, strictly speaking, only the term past refers to a tense and that participle more properly refers to a verb form. The past participle is used in the formation of compound tenses, such as the perfect (has walked) and the past perfect (had walked). This distinction may sound a bit like splitting hairs but it is meaningful because some participles can also function as adjectives. When used as adjectives they obviously have nothing to do with tenses.

Example: In John has painted the doors of his old house, the word painted is a verb form (used to form the perfect tense, just as explained in the answer above). But in there are painted doors in this old house it is an adjective (and not part of a tense).

Answer 2

Past tense, for regular verbs, uses "-ed" at the end of the verb. An example of the verb "walk" in past tense is "walked." Past participle requires something called an "auxiliary verb."

What's an auxiliary verb? In this case, it's usually "have" or "had."

Here are examples for the verb "walk":

Past tense: "I walked to the park with my friends."

Past participle: "I had walked to the park with my friends."

Past participle is usually used when events happened recently, whereas past tense can be used for any event that already happened in the past no matter how long ago.