Fiel Wrote:Also, this sentence:
Past: If I were you, I would tap that ass.
It's not really past tense, I don't feel like. Because it's like saying, "If I were you right now, I would tap that ass." So it feels like present tense. Even the first example is weird.
No it is NOT past tense, as this is not about tenses. The past form of the subjunctive indicates the impossibility, non-happening of the event, basically the same as the second conditional "if" statement: an unreal situation (though technically speaking, the second conditional uses subjunctive mood for its verb, not the other way around).
The first sentence should be correct, that's as much as my confidence goes.
I find it rather irrelevant that the English language names them with names of the tenses when their usage has very little to do with the actual tense they are in.