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I do not know what tense is the best. Can you tell me which one and why?

When I speak to somebody and I forget some information that he/she told me, what tense do I use? It is in day (from 0 a.m. until 12 p.m.). Past simple or present perfect? He/she told it before 5 minutes or more.

What did you say? or What have you said?

I didn't know it. or I have not known it.

I spoke to him. (I mean today) or I have spoken to him.

Mick
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Ľubomír Masarovič
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    You might find it helpful to look at Canonical Post #2: What is the perfect, and how should I use it? Short version: don't use the perfect unless you have a really good, specific reason. – stangdon Dec 15 '16 at 19:14
  • I don't fully understand what's being asked here. It seems the context is one where you might say something like He spoke to me earlier today, but I've forgotten what he said. But what exactly is the utterance you're asking about? Note that Present Perfect is particularly "enabled" in contexts like to have forgotten**, so it's not a typical verb for asking about how Perfect forms work. – FumbleFingers Dec 15 '16 at 19:28
  • I do not know what time to use. Both look in this example good. – Ľubomír Masarovič Dec 15 '16 at 19:31
  • The difference between "I spoke to him" and "I have spoken to him" is that in "I spoke to him" you're saying, perhaps for no reason, that sometime, somewhere, about some subject even if only that it was raining, you said something to him; but "I have spoken to him" is nearly always the answer to a question about whether you have ever spoken to him; you'd be confirming or removing doubt; that form is not usually used for any other purpose. Example: "have you spoken to the doctor?" "yes, I spoke to him yesterday" – MMacD Dec 15 '16 at 20:30
  • Let me try that example again :-) "Have you ever spoken to the President?" "Yes, I have spoken to him. I was the navigator on AF One for awhile and he used to come up to the flight deck to chat" – MMacD Dec 15 '16 at 20:38

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The general rule is: use the simplest form that works. In ordinary conversation about the past, that's nearly always simple past ("What did you say?", "I didn't know that", "I spoke to him just a few minutes ago/about an hour ago/earlier today/this morning").

The "why" is that you are talking about something that (a) started in the past, (b) ended in the past, (c) and doesn't have any implications for the present or future. It's a capsule, self-contained.

If you speak Russian you can almost always use the English form that corresponds to the Russian form you'd use. («Что Ты сказал?», «Я это не знал», «Я с ним разговорил только несколько минут тому назадь»). I don't speak any Slovak at all (tylko kilka słów po polsku) but it's quite possible that you can use Slovak the same way one can use Russian. It doesn't work for special features, of course, that exist in one language but not the other, but for the general case it's an easy way to understand whether you need to use a participial expression--which you mostly don't!.

MMacD
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  • No, I can't speak Russian. My native language is Slovak. :) – Ľubomír Masarovič Dec 16 '16 at 11:15
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    Yes, I did grasp that your native language is Slovak :) Unfortunately (for me) my only West-Slavic language is Polish, and my Russian keeps interfering with it. But try the trick of mapping Slovak onto English, if you're not doing it already--you might be pleasantly surprised. – MMacD Dec 16 '16 at 14:04