Time clauses It's been a while since I posted last, and it took me long to recall how to write a notebook on italki. I am an intermediate learner and can communicate what I want to express to an extent. Though many say "don't care too much about grammar", I sometimes feel that to reach a more advanced level, it is good to know grammar, which I learned at school a long time ago, and so is getting rusty. Therefore, I decided to learn it again and post what I learned today. I sometimes got confused about the tense of verbs in time clauses like "after I finish/finished my homework, I will go out". Today, I learned again that the basic rule is to use the present form. So for the above sentence, the right one is "After I finish/have finished my homework, I will go out". If I understand correctly, the past tense can be used if the main clause is also in the past tense (I forgot the name of this rule). For example, "The director stopped the actress before she had finished her line." or "The thief had escaped when the police arrived."