Grammar - Using 'ing' with Spanish Verbs

'ing' Verbs

Words that end in 'ing' can either be an adjective, a noun, an adverb or a verb. It can be very confusing to know what they are unless you look at the meaning of the word in the context of the sentence in which it falls. For this particular quiz, you will only be looking at 'ing' verbs.

In Spanish, when an 'ing' word is being used as a verb, the verb tense is, again, known as the progressive tense. Progressive tense verbs are used with the 'to be' verb. The 'to be' verb to use in Spanish is the verb of estar. In other words, you would not say: he sleeping. Rather, you would say: He is sleeping. Both 'is' and 'sleeping' must be used together in order to show the action. It is because they are used together that they are progressive.

The Spanish 'ing' Endings

As you need to use two verbs and here in this instance those two verbs are estar and dormir, estar gets conjugated as it normally would in the present, past and future tenses. However, the second verb of dormir, which is an irregular IR verb gets translated differently. The root form of the verb become 'durm' after dropping its IR ending and then the letters of 'iendo' are added to the end of the root word. Therefore, dormir becomes durmiendo. As you can see, it remains an irregular verb in the progressive tense.

Now let’s take another look of the above sentence that reads: He is sleeping. The progressive sentence in Spanish will read as: Él está durmiendo.

To make an ER verb an 'ing' progressive verb tense you will also drop the ER ending and add the letters of 'iendo'. However, to make an AR verb a progressive tense verb, when you drop the AR ending, you will need to add the letters of 'ando'.

As is might be very new to many of you, please do take your time going through this quiz. Think about the verbs and remember that some verbs are irregular in different tenses. There are no new verbs presented here so you will only be given verbs that you are already familiar with. Therefore, in the quiz section below you will be given ten sentences in English and your challenge is to locate the Spanish translation of the progressive tense verb in that sentence. Again, pay close attention to spelling and whether the verb in its base form is an AR, ER or IR verb.