If you can talk about your day, you can speak English. Yesterday, last week, last year — almost everything we say about the past follows the same simple pattern. Master it once, and you unlock thousands of real conversations.
In this vlog I take the same 23 daily routine phrases from Vlog #2 and move them into the past simple tense — the tense native speakers reach for constantly, whether they're telling a colleague about their weekend or explaining what happened at work yesterday.
Regular vs. Irregular Verbs (The Only Rule You Need)
Most English verbs are regular — just add -ed (walk → walked, watch → watched, finish → finished). But the verbs we use most to describe daily life are irregular, meaning they change form completely (go → went, have → had, get → got). The good news: there are only a handful you need for talking about your routine, and you'll see every one of them below.
23 Past Simple Phrases for Your Daily Routine
Here's the same daily routine list from Vlog #2 — now in the past. Read through it once, then try narrating your own yesterday out loud.
- Woke up
- Got up
- Had/Took a shower
- Got dressed
- Had breakfast
- Went to work/school
- Got to work/school
- Had a coffee/tea
- Started work/class
- Had lunch
- Went shopping
- Finished work/school
- Went home
- Went to Italian class
- Went to the gym
- Got home
- Made/cooked dinner
- Had dinner
- Took the dog for a walk
- Watched TV
- Did homework/housework
- Went to bed
- Slept/Went to sleep
Turn the List Into a Story
Once you know the phrases, the real skill is stringing them together into a story. Notice how each new action connects with a linking word like ‘then’, ‘after that’, or ‘so’:
"Yesterday I woke up at 6:00 and got up straight away. I had a shower, got dressed, and then had breakfast before I went to work. I got to the office at 8:30 and started work at 9:00. I had a coffee, worked through the morning, and had lunch at 1:00. After work, I went home, made dinner, and had dinner with my family. Later, I watched TV for an hour and then went to bed."
This is exactly what I ask my students to do in the vlog: take your own real day and narrate it out loud, phrase by phrase, until it becomes automatic. That's when a list of vocabulary turns into real fluency.
3 Common Mistakes to Avoid
- Don't double-mark the past. "I didn't went" should be "I didn't go" — didn't already shows the past, so the second verb stays in its base form.
- Watch your -ed pronunciation. "Watched" ends in a /t/ sound, "arrived" ends in a /d/ sound, and "started" adds an extra syllable — /ɪd/.
- Learn irregular verbs in pairs, not lists. Say "go/went", "have/had", "get/got" out loud together, every day, until the pair feels like one word.
Your Practice Tip This Week
Go through yesterday and list every action, exactly as I demonstrate in this video. See if you can remember the whole sequence by heart — then add a time to each one, e.g. "I woke up at 6:00, I got up at 6:10," and so on. Do this for five minutes a day for one week and the past simple will stop feeling like a grammar rule and start feeling like the way you naturally talk about your life.
Enjoy learning English, and let me know how you get on! If you understand everything here but still can't speak English confidently in real conversations, you're exactly the kind of student I love working with.
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