Quote:
Originally Posted by Rizla
If you are learning English tenses, don't be overwhelmed by the progressive forms.
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I wasn't, because it is the same as in my native language. Except we do not 17 fancy names for it (that I know of ;-) ). If you just translate all those "tenses" word-by-word to my language, they pretty much give the right meaning "out of the box".
The tragedy is, many English teachers (and textbooks) here teach you grammar by introducing rules, fancy, scary sounding names. When you take a test, it might look like: "create Present Perfect Progressive form of 'you play football'" instead of asking - "tell us about you spending 2 hours play football recently"
On the other hand, in my Slavonic language we have
Grammatical cases - nouns take one of seven forms depending on the case. So the word book is different when you say "with a book", "about a book" "the book" "to a book" "I am looking at the book" ...
Oh ... and multiply that by two for singular and plural
... and we have grammatical genders, so "a chair" has female gender, but a girl has neutral gender ...
It must be extremely scary to any foreigner trying to learn Slavonic language, such as Russian, Czech or Polish ...