When to Use Simple Present vs. Present Continuous: A Beginner’s Guide with Exercises
Hello everybody. Welcome to one more lesson! I hope that you are doing great and I hope that your English studies are really cool, you are seeing progress, and you are speaking English very much.
Today we are going to learn a new topic. This time we are going to discuss the difference between the simple present and the present continuous.
Simple Present
The simple present, sometimes also called present simple, normally is used to talk about routines. The present continuous, sometimes called present progressive, is used to talk about activities that are happening right now. Let’s get to know this a little bit more in depth!
Let’s start with the present simple. The present simple is normally used to talk about habits, regular or repeated actions. So, activities that are connected with our routine, our daily life, usually we describe in the present simple. For example:
Then, let’s see some examples. In the affirmative, we could say: “I go to the gym every morning.” and “He likes playing basketball.” We see that with the present simple, we have some signal words: words that are normally used with the present simple. They are: always, usually, sometimes, seldom, almost never, and ever.
In this first idea: “I go to the gym every morning.”, I have what we could call my signal word, a time marker. I could also substitute this, and say: “I usually go to the gym.” Now I’m talking about something that usually happens.
Be attentive about these signal words because they help us identify when we should use the simple present and when we should use the present continuous. And then when I say: “He likes playing basketball.” This is his preference. It is a fact about his preference that he likes playing basketball.
In the negative we have: “I do not go.” Here we can see the contracted form of “do not” and “does not”: “don’t” and “doesn’t”.
You can perceive the difference. In affirmative, “he likes.” Right? And when we describe “he” negative, “he does not like.” I will not focus so much on this change (when we add -s), but if you want, you can check out our video on YouTube about Simple Present, in which we discuss this topic.
And then, in the interrogative we have “do” because I’m asking the question.
We should remember that with “I, you, we, and they” we use the auxiliary verb “do.” And with “he, she, and it,” we’ll use “does.” “Does he like? Does she like? Does it like?”.
Present Continuous
When we talk about the present continuous, we are not talking about routine and repeated actions anymore. Our focus is on actions in progress. So there is an idea of “in exactly this moment”, “at the moment”. In affirmative, we have the following structure:
Here we have our subject (our person), plus the verb to be. (‘I am’, ‘you are’, ‘he is’), plus the verb with the “-ing”.
I will not explain this too much either because we have a video that you can access on YouTube exclusively on present continuous. But remember that with the present continuous, we need to use the verb to be, and the main verb needs to be conjugated in “-ing”. Let’s see some examples.
You can see here the verb to be, the verb should be ‘I am studying’ and then the conjugation of -ing is to demonstrate that this is a continuous idea, a continuous tense. The same happens with “she is working at the moment”:
She → Subject
Is → Verb to be
Working → Main verb with -ing
This idea can be represented in the negative.
The only difference is that here we have the ‘not’ to signalize the negative. ‘I am not’, ‘you are not’, ‘he is not’, ‘he is not’, ‘it is not’, ‘we are not’, ‘they are not’. And then the verb in -ing that we want to describe.
And then finally, we have the interrogative. ‘Are you studying right now?’, ‘Is she working at the moment?’
In this case, I invert my subject and the verb to be, so the verb to be starts the sentence. It’s good to not forget to add the question mark too.
Then, one more point that I would like to discuss with you is this idea perceived that in all of these examples I have ‘right now’, ‘at the moment’, because these are signal words that we use with the present continuous. They are, for example, ‘now’, ‘this moment’, ‘right now’, and’at the moment’. It is also possible to use the present continuous with ‘this week’, for example, or ‘in this month’, to talk about the future.
For example, I could say that:
In this way, I can also use the present continuous to talk about future arrangements, future appointments.
Exercises
Alright! So these are the main differences between the present simple and the present continuous. Present simple talks about habits (regular and repeated actions) while the present continuous talks about actions that are ongoing, that are in progress at the moment.
As usually, let’s do an exercise to finish it up. My suggestion, in this exercise, before you begin, is to be attentive about the signal words that we discussed.
- She _____ (study) at the library every day.
- Right now, he _____ (play) basketball with his friends.
- They _____ (watch) a movie every Friday night.
- At the moment, I _____ (read) a book about history.
- He ______ (listen) to music while he works.
- We ______ (enjoy) our vacation in Hawaii next week.
- She always ______ (cook) dinner for her family.
- They _____ (travel) to a different country every year.
- I _____ (play) video games on the weekends.
- Right now, she _____ (talk) to her boss on the phone.
I hope that you have completed the exercise and that you could put this knowledge into action. Let’s take a look at the answer key. The expressions of time that could help us to see if the verbs are in simple present or present continuous are highlighted in green.
That’s it for today, everybody! I hope that you could get the exercise correct and that you were able to practice a little bit more of your English.
Thank you very much for your interest. I hope you enjoyed the text, and we’ll see each other soon! All the best!
Article written by Teacher Alanis
