Past Continuous

Introduction

In this lesson we're going to look at Past Continuous tense.

Examples of Past Continuous are: 'I was waiting', 'it was raining' and 'we were living'; and we make Past Continuous tense with 'was' or 'were' plus the verb, plus '…ing'.

So let's start with some example situations and if this is now and this is the past, then Past Continuous looks like this.

It's a continuous action which finished in the past.

Let's look at some example sentences.

Number 1: 'I saw her while I was having lunch'

This would be 'was having' and 'I saw' would look like this.

In other words we have Past Simple – 'I saw' in the middle of Past Continuous – 'was having'.

Next sentence – 'he phoned as I was walking to work'.

So again, if this is 'he phoned' – in the Past Simple – then this is 'was walking' – the Past Continuous action – continuous action which finished in the past.

Finally, sentence 3: 'It arrived (a letter for example) while we were talking.'

So this is 'it arrived' – Past Simple – and 'were talking' is this – Past Continuous.

So that's how we use Past Continuous, and as you can see it's very common that we use it with Past Simple.

Let's now look at the verb conjugations and we're going to look at the verb: 'to live' in the positive, in the question and the negative forms.

So, 'to live', positive form:

– I / he / she / it …was living.

– You / we / they …were living

Question form now, and this is

– Was I / he / she / it …living

And here we have:

– Were you / we / they …living.

And finally the negative form:

– I / he / she / it …was not living

– You / we / they …were not living

And in the informal we would say:

– I / he / she it …wasn't living

– You / we / they …weren't living

So those are the conjugations, and that's the end of this lesson.

Here is the PDF with the verb conjugations and there are some example sentences at the end here.

Join me in Part 3 for the practice exercises and in the next lesson we'll be looking at the super-important Present Perfect tense.