hi everybody my name is Alisha in this
episode I'm going to talk about the present progressive tense and the past
progressive tense you might also know these as the continuous tense but many
people have questions about the difference between these two so I'm
going to talk about a few different ways that we can use these grammar points and
some patterns that you might commonly see don't let's begin first let's look
at in general the progressive or the continuous tense when should we use it
we use these tenses for continuing actions so their actions that are
temporary so they're only for a short period of time or for a limited period
of time so these are ongoing actions during a certain time period so the time
period can be short it can be very long many years but it's something that's
temporary so depending on the situation you can choose to apply the progressive
or the continuous tense it just depends on kind of the the action and you have
the period of time so it's sort of up to you to make that decision in some cases
but we'll see a few examples of maybe some common ways to use this so another
point I want to make about the progressive tense is that there are some
verbs that are rarely used or it's fairly uncommon for these verbs to be
used in the progressive tense so it's a category really a verb so that means for
example your mental state verbs like think or know or understand and
emotional verbs like for example like or love so these are verbs which typically
we don't use in the progressive tense of course sometimes we do like I'm thinking
about for example is a common one but verbs for example the verb like we don't
generally say very commonly I am liking or he is loving or something like that
generally we use these more for the simple present tense or the simple past
tense so they're a bit more common in in that type of grammar so we won't
see that so much today okay so with this in mind let's begin with
the present tense the present progressive tense or the present
continuous tense a few things I want to talk about with the present form first
as we've talked about already up here is for actions that are happening now so
its present tense meaning they're occurring now something that is
happening now so basically I am teaching for example so remember we see the
progressive tense in this ing ending this ending on our verbs in this case I
am teaching it's something happening now you are listening in this case ing form
it is raining when we talk about the weather or he is taking a shower so
something that is happening now it's just a short period of time
a temporary action we can use the present progressive tense to talk about
that so to kind of give a visual of this then I've created a timeline up here in
the top on the top right so this point here this is the present I'm talking
about now if you can imagine this is an action that is happening around to the
present time so maybe I started teaching for example a few minutes ago
I'm teaching now and then in the future maybe it's going to finish very soon so
this is maybe a good way to visualize the present progressive tense something
that's continuing and it's going to end maybe in the near future depending on
the action so that might be helpful the second point I want to talk about with
the present progressive tense though is how we can use it for trends so here I
talked about how we use it for actions like that we are in control over someone
else's in control of we can also use the present progressive tense however for
trends so something happening in your community or in your society for example
so I have here lots of people are watching black mirror on Netflix these
days so this could be like one example this is an example perhaps of a recent
trend I've noticed here I've got the progressive tense to show that maybe
it's temporary it's a and really another example Twitter is
becoming a place for up-to-the-minute news for example so this is another
example something that's just kind of happening recently or some trend you've
noticed recently you could apply this or you could explain this rather with the
present progressive tense all right final plan our final sorry final use of
this I want to talk about it's for future plans so we can use the present
progressive tense actually to talk about future plans it's slightly different
this this grammar point is slightly different but you will see it it's
similar to going to using going to if you have a plan that you are sure it's
100% definite you are going to do that thing you can describe that plan using
the progressive tense so for example I'm going to the beach tomorrow
so here I've used going in the progressive tense this means this is
something I am definitely going to do I'm going to the beach tomorrow but you
will see this progressive tense form used same thing in the second example
sentence we are baking a cake for my friend's birthday party so again a
temporary action not something we do every day kind of a special action
something that's only for a limited time period but it's something I've decided
to do it's definite in the future so I can use this progressive form of
the verb to describe that so these are three ways that you may see the present
progressive form used okay let's continue on then to the past progressive
so the rules that we talked about for present progressive like actions that
are happening now can still apply in the past it's just that the action has
already completed so to give a visual then this is an action that was
continuing in the past it's finished we're done with this action it's it's
over it has stopped but it was continuing at some point so we often
include a specific point in time along with this you might not necessarily see
this here because it's an action happening now but in the past if we need
to explain clearly when an action was happening we can attach this specific
point in time so let's look at a cup of examples first I was doing my
homework at 8 p.m. last night so here I was doing my homework here is our past
progressive tense and here we have the specific point in time 8:00 p.m. last
night so when was I doing my homework at 8:00 p.m. last night if I say I was
doing my homework we don't know when if I say I am doing my homework it means
now so it's very clear therefore in the past we don't know when the action was
happening unless we attach a specific point in time let's look at one more
example he was driving to work at 9:00 this morning so here is our specific
point in time so both of these sentences it's like
when would I use the sentence how do I know when I need to use this sentence
these are perhaps responses to a question like what were you doing last
night or what were you doing this morning what was he doing this morning
if you need information about someone's activities you can use a question like
that and expect to get an answer like this so sometimes these questions imply
a little bit of like suspicion like what were you doing last night or what was he
doing this morning so something that you don't know some action a temporary
action you don't know about another person so there might be a little
element of suspicion here but these aren't ways to talk about a continuing
action in the past okay I want to talk about two other patterns though the
first one is for interrupted actions so we can use the past progressive
to talk about an interrupted action and this is something that we'll see we use
the word when to describe this so first I want to introduce the examples and
then I want to talk about it more let's look at this I was listening to music
when the phone rang so here I have my past progressive was listening to music
here I have when when the phone rang and here the second action in the sentence
is in the simple past tense so with past tense I have here so this is the action
that was continuing and then something happened that stopped this
action so on our timeline if you want to imagine it this point is like an action
continuing that then stopped and was replaced by a different action actually
that they should probably be in the past though here so something in the past was
continuing something happened in this case the phone rang something happened
here and my action maybe changed to a different action this is sort of a
visualization of what happened in this sentence when shows us the point at
which something changed when shows us that moment of interruption so we see
past progressive in the first part when to show the point of change and simple
past tense to show the action that interrupted the first action so there's
a lot happening here let's look at another example he was cleaning his
house when the electricity went out so when the electricity went out means
stopped or turned off the electricity went out it went it went off
so here again past progressive he was cleaning his house when is my point of
interruption when the electricity went out so he's cleaning cleaning cleaning
and then the electricity went out so something happened and then maybe he had
to change his action here so we use when and the simple past tense to show an
interrupted action alright last thing I want to talk about here is for
simultaneous actions we can use the past progressive tense simultaneous means at
the same time as something else so two actions happening at the same time for
this one you'll notice that we use the word while while is used here so let's
look at the examples I was listening to music while doing my homework here I
have the progressive tense in both parts of the sentence and I've connected it
with while in this case so while shows that the two things are happening at the
same time so you could say I was listening to music and doing my homework
that's pretty clear but if you really want to emphasize that nuance of those
two things opening at the same time you can use
while let's look at the last example she was texting her friends while cooking
dinner so this while shows us that these two
things are happening at the same time this part shows us it was happening in
the past as well so these are a few situations where you might see the past
progressive tense but they're referring to continuing actions and maybe an
action that stopped or maybe an action that is going at the same time as
another action so there's a lot of stuff we can do with the past progressive and
the present progressive tense all right so I know that was a lot of information
but I hope that it was helpful for you if you have any questions or comments or
if you just want to try to make a sentence please feel free in the comment
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