golfer:
The binyanim are not tenses. They are actually a very easy to use device to manipulate roots. It also allows one to “invent” a word as needed, which happens all the time.
The tenses in Hebrew are Avar and Atid, roughly equivalent to the “Past” and “future” (some would say “definite” and “indefinite”), and to simplify matters we manage to do a “present” by using a gerund. However the complex tenses in English (there are over a dozen, which are true of most Indo-European languages) have no equivalents. Whereas Indo-European langauges have very definite verb constructions, Semitic languages are “laid back” about time. The fact that Semitic languages make limited use of a very “to be” is also a serious complication.
Hebrew closely resembles Arabic and Aramaic. Using a translation of the Rambam from Arabic to Hebrew won’t lose much, and neither will a translation from Aramaic to Hebrew. German (of R. Hirsch) is very close to English – at the time of the Gaonim, the people in England could still carry on a conversation with the people in what is now Germany since the languages weren’t that different yet – while English got a lot easier after the Norman conquest, underneath they are still very similar.
So if someone wants to study our Sefrei Kodesh, best to learn enough of the original langauges so at least you can work with a bilingual linear translation, even if you can’t read them outright.