Is "Yesterday I go to the market" correct?
Samar writes "Yesterday I go to the market", thinking the word "yesterday" already tells us the time, so any verb form will do. His sister says the verb's tense must change too. Who is right?
Who do you think is right? Pick one.
The answer: His sister is right, it should be "went"
Why
Samar has spotted something real — "yesterday" genuinely does carry time information all by itself, and a listener would understand it means the past even without any other clue. But English asks for that time information to be marked TWICE, in two different parts of the sentence at once: once in the time word ("yesterday") and again in the verb's own form. Saying "yesterday I go" is a bit like a form that asks for the date in two boxes and only filling in one of them — the sentence becomes internally inconsistent, mixing a past-time word with a present-tense verb. The two parts have to agree: "yesterday" calls for the past-tense "went", not the present-tense "go". Test: try "tomorrow I went" — it sounds just as broken as "yesterday I go", because a future time word paired with a past-tense verb creates the same kind of mismatch. His sister is right: the verb's tense has to match the time word in the sentence, even when the time word alone would already be clear.
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