#present progressive

encorporating my favourite colour combo (gold&mint) to make this brief summary of present progressive formation! (pdf)

further resources: spanishdict lesson, the spanish tutor

music: soda by nothing but thieves

¡Hola!

The “-ndo” part is called the gerund or the present participle, which is a crucial part in forming the present progressive tense. The present progressive refers to an ongoing action that is happening right now. This is different from the simple present tense in that the present tense refers more to fixed routines, something that won’t change now.

This website helps explain the difference between the present tense and the present progressive in English grammar (which may help if English is your native language in order to get some background on how we use it in English). And this other website goes into more detail about the Spanish present progressive and when to use it versus the English one (a super helpful website, I highly recommend it).

In your examples, “el hombre cocina” is in the present tense, merely stating the fact that the man cooks. On the other hand, “el hombre está cocinando” lets us know that right now the man is cooking.

I have a gift for you guys today.. it’s grammar! .. Yes, I often disappoint people.

Today we’re gonna talk about the present. Usually, when we write sample sentences we do write them in the present, that’s the most basic form, so congratulations you already know this, so that was my gift to you... 

Okay, so since I’m here and you’re here right now let’s talk about that. Because you’re on Tumblr right now, you might not be in 5 minutes. You’re reading this post right now, you might not be in a second.. but I hope so because there is a way of expressing this in Korean and I’m gonna teach you how to use it. Now that’s a present in the present!  

Okay so those of you who think terms are important this it’s called present progressive and for the rest of us it’s “doing right now”. The structure we use for it is called -고 있다 it goes on the back of a verb and as the brilliant Smarties you all are, you might have figured out that since it ends in 다 it can be conjugated - but we’ll get back to that later, for now, we just conjugate it into present tense so it looks like -고 있어요.

Example time: 

하다 + 고 있다 → 하고 있어요 - (pronoun/subject) is doing. 놀다 + 고 있다 → 놀고 있어요 - (pronoun/subject) is playing.  자다 + 고 있다 → 자고 있어요 - (pronoun/subject) is sleeping.

This structure is only for something that you’re doing for a limited amount of time. Therefore if someone asks you what you do for a living, you cannot answer “I’m dancing for a living” using -고 있다.

You can, however, use it to ask someone what they’re doing right now. Imagine you’re bored and wanna text a friend wyd this is the perfect use for -고 있다 because all parties know, that you’re not asking them what they’re doing with their lives, you wanna know what they’re up to at this exact moment. 

And this is how you ask: 

뭐 하고 있어요? - What are you doing?

So as I said this can be conjugated and not only that but it can be conjugated in tenses. And since we have yet to learn future tense in the future, we’ll conjugate it in past tense which we’ve learned in the past. This is past progressive or “was in the middle of doing”. Often this structure is followed but a “but then...” construction but we’ll get to that later, for now, we’re just looking at -고 있다 + past tense, and it looks a little like this: 

하다 + 고 있다 + past → 하고 있었어요. (pronoun/subject) was doing. 먹다 + 고 있다 + past → 먹고 있었어요. (pronoun/subject) was eating. 연습하다 + 고 있다 + past → 연습하고 있었어요. (pronoun/subject) was practicing.          

Finally read Half of a Yellow Sun, and couldn’t help but binge on Adichie interviews afterward. I love this one ... because the counterpoint provided by Zadie Smith is amusing and intelligent and adorable. 

I wish I could like Zadie Smith’s fiction as much as I like her ... I just can’t, so far. Between magical realism (White Teeth) and present tense fiction (NW) and forced narratives about U.S. life that don’t feel real (On Beauty), she hasn’t written the novel I could stomach yet. However, her essay collection is high on my to-read list. I think I could listen to her pontificate all day. (I guess I have a high tolerance for stylistic lecture, but a low tolerance for stylistic experimentation.)

Adichie, on the other hand, has such a clear and unadorned voice it borders on intoxicating. As Smith puts it in this interview, you feel as if there is nothing between you and Adichie’s characters. What Zadie DOESN’T mention is that Chimamanda’s chosen style in some way achieves this great end. Half of a Yellow Sun is written very traditionally in terms of prose rules and tenses and an almost completely linear structure (with the exception of a flashback section that is written in the same past-tense style, but is presented out of chronological order). I think this just goes to show that all those experimental fiction--creative fiction--literary darling writing tricks are often just smoke and mirrors to distract from a writer’s or a story’s flaws. As Pullman put it in that infamous Guardian essay, present progressive is a tool to diminish writer’s postmodern anxieties about “Truth” and “Perspective” by allowing an author to “abdicate” “narrative responsibility.” Personally, present progressive makes me feel claustrophobic if it goes on for more than a few sentences, as if somebody has chained me to an eternal present. That’s our outer lives already, so I don’t see why we want it in our imagined lives. 

My exception might be for the use of present progressive to communicate another language’s idioms or temporal reality. Like in works of translation. I’m slightly more prone to be understanding if you are writing outside the bounds of a Western literary tradition. But, in my opinion, present progressive is more often used as a way for non-white/non-Western writers to gain Western approval... a la the Man Booker prize. Or a way to gain independence from the colossus in the room: Victorian and Edwardian fiction. 

I wish I could tell the majority of contemporary writers this:

Don’t sell yourself short. 

If you want to write in the present tense, if that is how you feel your story exists naturally, then do what you must. 

But don’t be afraid of your own opinion, or to play God, or to create a reliable narrator, or to bring out of chaos a beautifully ordered reality. Cause and effects are yours to manipulate on the blank page, and ours to internalize. I want the catharsis you can bring to me by making sense out of senseless events. Don’t make an idol out of ambiguity. Make ambiguity your bitch. Resolve things without always resorting to absurdity. 

Your audience wants to experience agency through your characters, not anxiety.