I've been watching my favorite TED talk: "Inside the mind of a master procrastinator" again and again. 

That's when I realized that the speaker is using the present tense when he is talking about imaginary things that did not happen. I must be making progress with English. 

I've started caring about English structures more than I used to. The Japanese language doesn't have the strict rules for tense. 

We use both the present and past tense to express something hypothetical. 

I should stop comparing these languages to comprehend English grammar rules. I guess that some rules can't be explained in other languages.