'The sun rises in the east' - a commonly used example of the Present Simple Photo by @CliveSir via ELTpics on Flickr In a recent discussion in one of the Facebook groups (this is what seems to prompt my occasional posts these days), the Present Simple was referred to as 'one of the hardest tenses for students to get'. This made me wonder whether the Present Simple, contrary to what its name suggests, is indeed not so simple, or it is just another one of those teacher-induced neuroses. Let's see why there's so much ado about the most common, unmarked English tense. Form and Function Structurally, the Present Simple is indeed simple : Subject + Verb. Granted, there is that annoying little 3rd person singular -s ending that complicates the matters, but research has convincingly shown that it's acquired invariably late - both in L1 and L2 speakers (see Goldschneider & DeKeyser, 2001 for meta-analysis). As far as the function is concerned, things are less