Present Progressive or Past Progressive? Continuous Tense Tips!

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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101.com for some other good resources thanks very much for watching this

episode and I will see you again soon bye bye