Thread: Блин, how do I use them?

Hallo, everyone! It's almost a year I'm user of this forum but I still have been feeling that I don't feel the difference between «did something» and «have done something» (I mean Simple and Perfect past tenses). In books of course I saw explanations that Perfect is used without additional information (time of action) and Simple is used with it. For example «Yesterday I wrote a book» and «Yes! I have written it!». But while reading English texts sometimes I don't see that authors follow these rules. I meet sentences like «Did you see the movie?» or «Yesterday John Petrov has visited public toilet». It confuses me a lot. Would somebody explain it for me? What are these situations when I may use any rule I want and when do I use only one of them? Thanks.

I don't think you've much to be worrying about --- your English seems perfect already! We were told to use the parfect tense when writing; and it was 'just-about' okay to use the imperfect if speaking aloud.

... far too much COLLOQUIAL language in English, in my opinion, but who am I to talk --- it's really my second language anyway. However, my level of my native language is much worse!!

Here we go to and use the bathroom/restroom. Toilet and lavatory is usually not said.

Toilet/loo just varying hte vocab. It was the grammar that was being aked about.
I thought saying 'already' was a colloquialism, i did n't realise that it is considered 'correct'

And about the Toilet/bathroom thing in Harry Potter. I think the bathrooms at the school are seperate to the loos. ie the bathrooms are just that. they may hav one or two loos in them, as opposed to the toilets which contains just loos (and sinks).