Can you use present tense and past tense in the same sentence?

I say "which taught me A and B" but both A and B are different tenses. It seems to make sense to me, because this one event "taught me" something and also "makes me feel" something continuously. is this grammatically correct?

Yet BUT: it should probably be a Compound Sentence joined by a conjunction, in your case /and, therefore, would require a subject: /and this makes me feel/ etc. We did something in the past [yuck yuck] and this makes me feel alright. No problem. Couldn't resist a joke.

@Lambie Could you reconstruct my sentence with your suggested improvement? I can't understand exactly what you mean.

I would say not correct. I would change it to, "We managed to talk and share ideas between us which taught me how to communicate well within a team and to make me feel confident in my ability to communicate with new groups of people." Or perhaps just, "Talking and sharing ideas between us taught me to feel confident in my ability to communicate with new groups of people."

@MikeJRamsey56 It would also be possible to put a full stop after team and replace the and with This. The sentences would then become We managed to talk and share ideas between us which taught me how to communicate well within a team. This makes me feel confident in my ability to communicate with new groups of people. In my opinion the two topics are sufficiently different from each other to justify this.

@BoldBen Agreed. I went further and cutout the first phrase because to me it didn't add much. Gaining confidence implies learning by doing.

2 Answers 2

There is an incorrect assumption in the question.

Someone seems to have promulgated a rule saying that you can't use present tense and past tense in the same sentence. This is not true -- indeed, it's silly, and shows that wherever that rule came from is not to be trusted on English grammar.

In this particular case, conjunction reduction deletes the second which from the relative clause (which) makes me feel .., but that has nothing to do with the tense of the verb in the relative clause.

Executive summary: There is no reason not to use those tenses, if that's what you mean.
And you can certainly use all kinds of tenses and constructions together.
Provided you follow the rules. The real rules, that is.