Other uses of the Present Continuous tense

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In our last lesson, we looked at the present continuous tense and how we use it to talk about actions that are in progress at the time of speaking. However, there are a couple of other ways we can use the present continuous tense.

00:00 Introduction
00:17 Main Use of Present Continuous Tense
00:30 For Future arrangements
04:25 Unusually often
06:32 Join the Club

The main use of the Present Continuous tense is to talk about an action that is in the middle of happening at the moment of speaking for example:
“You are watching this video.”
But what about this example?
“We are meeting for lunch tomorrow.”
When does the action happen? Well, it happens “tomorrow,” in the future. It hasn’t already started and it isn’t in the middle of happening. What’s going on?
One of the things I have discovered from teaching English is that each tense seems to have one strange thing. This is something unique or tricky about that tense. For the present continuous tense, it’s the fact that sometimes we use the present it to talk about the future!
That’s right, the present continuous tense is often used to communicate a plan for a future action.
Here are some more examples.
I am walking home this evening.
You’re going to university next year.
He’s working from home next month.
She’s leaving in a minute.
We’re arriving at 6pm.
The doctor is seeing me next.
You can see that the action of the verb for each of these sentences happens in the future. The action hasn’t started yet. So why are we using the present continuous to talk about a future action? For whatever reason, English doesn’t really like to use the future tense. It finds ways to say what will happen by talking about a present intention. We often say we “are planning” to do something, or we “are going” to do something. Planning, considering, or agreeing on something is an action that must be in process for a while, which is why we use the present continuous tense for it.
But this is such a common way of talking about a future arrangement that we often leave out the part where we explicitly say this is a plan or arrangement. Instead, we just say that the action “is happening”.
We don’t say “We’re planning to arrive at 6pm,” but rather just, “We’re arriving at 6pm.” Instead of “He is arranging to work from home next month,” we say, “He is working from home next month.”
And that’s the other thing you’ll notice about each of these examples. They all say when in the future this action will happen. This is called a time marker. When you use any future time marker with the present continuous tense, you are basically saying that you are “planning” an arrangement for the future.
There are lots of things that can be used as time markers and they can be in the near future or the distant future, like [tomorrow, this evening, next year, next month, in a minute, at 6pm, or next]. The time marker can go after the verb, like in these examples, or at the beginning of the sentence, like this.
You are watching this video.
Tomorrow, we are meeting for lunch.
This evening, I am walking home.
Next year, you’re going to university.
Next month, he’s working from home.
In a minute, she’s leaving.
At 6pm, we’re arriving.
Next, the doctor is seeing me.
The other major thing that the present continuous tense is used for is to say that something is happening unusually often. For this usage, the word “always” is used. Let’s look at some examples.
You are always buying sweets.
He’s always forgetting things.
She’s always eating something.
Its always raining in Scotland.
They’re always laughing at me.
For each of these sentences, it is obvious that the action isn’t actually happening all the time, literally every moment. But this usage isn’t just saying that it happens a lot, either. In fact, this usage of the present continuous means that the action is happening an unusual amount of the time.
When we say of someone that, “He’s always forgetting things,” we mean that he forgets things more often than one would normally forget things. We say, “It’s always raining in Scotland,” because Scotland is known for having a lot more rain than most places. The sentence, “They’re always laughing at me,” means that they laugh at me too often, or more often than is acceptable.
To use this usage of the present continuous, you use the word “always” between the auxiliary verb and the main verb.