This is an All Ears English Podcast, Episode 2360, Your Grammar Questions Answered, Past Simple or Past Progressive.
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the IELTS whiz, and Lindsay McMahon, the English adventurer, coming to you from Arizona and Colorado, USA.
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Have you ever wondered why native speakers use simple past versus past progressive?
Sometimes it seems to have no rhyme or reason.
Today we break it down and give you a simple secret to tell the difference.
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See you there. Hello, Lindsay.
How are you? Hey, Aubrey.
I'm doing fantastic.
How's everything in your world today?
Amazing. I'm curious.
I know you've been getting a ton of snow in Colorado.
When was the last time you went sledding?
It's been a really long time, Aubrey.
I don't even remember the last time I went sledding, unfortunately, I know, skiing instead, probably.
Yeah, I, when, when I went skiing last winter with my brother and my niece, they went sledding at Copper Mountain, but I was doing, I don't know, I was still skiing or something or doing something else.
So I missed it. I missed the opportunity.
I have a question here.
I'm intentionally asking you about sledding because this came up in our Q and A, um, where a student said I sledded last weekend.
I'm like, oh, we would say I went sledding.
We would use the past progressive there.
Would it sound strange to you if I asked, when's the last time you sledded?
Yeah, it does. Unfortunately, it sounds a little strange.
We just don't say it that way sometimes.
Yeah. And so I started diving into this because we have gotten quite a few listener questions about, you know, past simple or present simple versus progressive.
How do I know when to use which because this is very tricky in English.
Sometimes it seems like there's no rhyme or reason.
One person will use one and somebody else switches it up and we don't understand why.
So I'm excited to get into this today.
Yeah, me too. I'm super excited.
This is a great skill for the upper intermediate, you know, B2 level to move into C1 to really understand this.
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All right. Absolutely.
Yes. And grammar, vocabulary, we get into it all.
Oh, yeah. There's no question we won't answer if it's a good question, right?
So, send us your questions to support at allhearsenglish .com and our team will make sure your question gets routed in the right direction.
All right. So, let's do a quick overview of the grammar we're talking about today.
First, past simple tense.
When do we use past simple tense, Lindsay?
All right. So, we use the past simple when we are describing a completed action that happened at a very specific point in the past so we know when it happened.
Exactly, right? This is created with a subject and then a verb conjugated in past simple tense.
So for example, I thought I saw your dog in the park.
I thought. Yes, past simple.
Right, exactly. But then we talk about past progressive tense, which is used for actions that happen over a period of time in the past.
Exactly. And this is constructed with the past tense of be, so was or were, and the present participle of a main verb, which is verb ing.
So for example, I was thinking about you yesterday.
So same verb. I thought I saw your dog.
That happened at a specific point in time.
I was thinking about you.
This happened over a period of time.
Over a period of time, right?
It's not a specific point.
It's over a period of time.
Yesterday, could have been any time yesterday, right, Aubrey?
Right, exactly. So in general, this is going to help you know which to use.
But when it comes to activities that we do that take a certain amount of time, this is where I think this gets the trickiest and people will get tripped up because we'll use both verbs in the past and they're a little more interchangeable.
Like for example, why do we say,
