[etni] Re: etni Digest V10 #66
- From: Adele Raemer <araemer@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: reidnomad@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 10 Mar 2012 12:01:25 +0200
Ok - I took up Daivd's idea and went to Google
fight<http://www.googlefight.com/>.
Here are the results:
go: 643 000 000 results
going: 206 000 000 results
eat: 60 900 000 results
eating: 45 200 000 results
play; 101 000 000 results
playing: 98 900 000 results
read: 517 000 000 results
reading: 133 000 000 results
simple wins out by far every time. There is no question about it - native
speakers use simple far more often than progressive - unfortunately, too
few of our students really understand the difference.
Adele
*This week's words of wisdom:*
*" **I wondered why the baseball kept getting bigger. Then it hit me.**"*
*
**
*
On Sat, Mar 10, 2012 at 9:45 AM, David Reid <reidnomad@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>wrote:
> Hallo, all,
> re: the posting of Ilana Rosansky (received on the 10th of March), who
> states that it is clear how little one uses the present progressive, and to
> check it one can do a count..... I'm not sure she actually did this. Try,
> for example, taking a verb in the present progressive tense, put it in your
> search engine, and count. For example, I put "am doing" in a Google search,
> and within 0.11 seconds it came up with about 656,000,000 results. With "is
> doing" it came up with about 1,140,000,000 results in 0.13 seconds; with
> "are doing", about 1,100,000,000 results in 0.11 seconds, and so forth. So
> it is a little early to hold the funeral on the present progressive.
> David Reid
>
>
>
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