[andensande]

The difficulty of mastering the tenses is something that I think a lot of English speakers overlook. There's a lot of really precise and difficult-to-explain subtleties in English. (Of course, English isn't unique in this regard -- but I feel like certain things are taken for granted).

Something that catches a lot of English as second language people out is the correct time to use the gerund form (i.e., the '-ing' form). For instance,

(1) I am walking to the shops.

is clear -- it is occurring in that moment. But what about the subtle difference between (2a) and (2b)?

(2a) I live in Berlin.

(2b) I'm living in Berlin.

To me -- a native English speaker -- (2b) implies that the speaker generally lives elsewhere, while (2a) doesn't. But they're both technically correct if the speaker is, at that moment, a resident of Berlin.

There are more examples I could give. Teaching these sorts of subtleties, though, and mastering them can be very difficult.

A final example that I really like, and one that my syntax lecturer used to use a lot:

(3) She would have had to have been being watched.

Seven (or maybe six, depending on how you view 'watched') verbs in a row! Native English speakers grasp this really intuitively, but non-native speakers may have trouble parsing these into a coherent picture. To illustrate this -- try and gloss this sentence another way while conveying the meaning. If you speak another language, try and translate it! English verbs are hard.

[cycomanic]

I find it weird that many English natives try to claim that English grammar is in fact complex (you are by far not the first). I think it might be because in general many don't speak another language and the most common second language is Spanish which has also a very "simple" grammar.

Regarding your example with the gerund, yes it is subtle, but similar subtleties exist in German, e.g. The difference between perfect and simple past (also exist in English), which many native speakers in both English and German get wrong as well.

An interesting anecdote (which might be related) is, that in my experience having gone to high-school in the US for a year and having done language courses with Australian teachers, that there seems to be much less education on the grammar of the language than in Germany. I often knew the "theory" of English grammar much better than the native speakers (doesn't mean I was better at applying it though).

All that said, mastering English is still difficult, just not due to the grammar. Spelling is one thing, but also the vocabulary is huge. Supposedly Shakespeares vocabulary was 60000 words, the equivalent German poet Goethes was less than 40000.

[maxnoe]

German Goethe researchers claim 90.000 for Goethe im their dictionary of Goethe's work:

https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goethe-W%C3%B6rterbuch

[cycomanic]

Interesting, I wonder if this is due to a difference of counting compound words?

[wink]

Talking of perfect and simple past you might be missing the "fact" that for parts of Germany (Upper Bavaria in my case) the simple past simply doesn't exist. At all. (With the exception of "to be" where the perfect doesn't seem to exist). I know, you can argue that away by calling it a dialect but even though I kinda lost my dialect in all the years at school and at work, this has persisted insofar that is still sounds wrong if someone says "Ich ging spazieren."

[Teknoman117]

English grammar is heavily taught in elementary school (K-5, ~age 5 to 11) and middle school (6-8, ~age 11-14) curriculum in the US.

You're pretty much expected to have the grammar down by high school, where the focus shifts to composition (essay courses, etc.)

This was my experience growing up here anyways. The last time I had a test question ask me to circle the past participle was middle school (and the SAT).

[Symbiote]

Do 14 year olds in the USA know what "gerund" means?

I didn't know terms like that in England in the 2000s, though I picked them up from learning other foreign languages later.

I have heard university professors complain that they can say, simply, "rephrase the paper into the active voice" to a student from <anywhere else>, but many British students don't know what that means.

England now teaches more grammar, but it is not much use generalizing from individual experiences of a particular state/country in a particular decade.

[brightly-salty]

No, I don’t think most 14-year-olds in the USA would know what a gerund is, but most of them would know active versus passive voice. Maybe the kids in advanced or hobbies classes, though. (Speaking as an American high school student)

[Teknoman117]

Yes, we were taught what a gerund _is_, but I never had a teacher who actually called it that.

[cafard]

I did, but because of Latin class, not because of English class.

[bobthepanda]

English grammar in the US would have been elementary and middle school. By high school English classes moved on to just literature and analysis. So you may have just not been present for it.

YMMV; curricula are highly local.

[irrational]

> She would have had to have been being watched.

Well, now I want to see how this sentence would be translated into all the other major languages! I immediately understand the meaning, but can see why it might be hard for a non native speaker to understand. Are their other languages that can say the same thing as concisely?

Google Translate must absolutely butcher this sentence. I just tried Spanish. “Habría tenido que haber estado vigilada.” I know Spanish well enough to know that is hilariously incorrect, but not well enough to know the correct translation.

[mucholove]

I speak both English and Dominican Spanish natively. Here is my translation:

“Tendrían que haber estado mirándola.”

“Vigilado” is a much stronger word and to me it would be much more like “guarded”

Ive studied Chinese before and a translation eludes me.

If anybody can help, my guess the trick is in : “ 本来就” of 她本来就必须被监视

[ahoyleo]

The Chinese translation could work. I'd try 她早该被一直看着

[solatic]

One issue that prevents translation is just how much passivity is in that sentence. In other languages, more active grammar is preferred, to the point where trying to construct such passivity on purpose would be nigh unintelligible.

For example, in Hebrew, I would translate the sentence as חייב להיות שמישהו היה צופה בה, which literally translates as "it must be that someone was watching her". Trying a more literal take, היא הייתה חייבת להיות צפויה, not only (by sheer necessity) injects the infinitive tense into the middle of the sentence, but also would just cause a native speaker to ask you in English, "why don't you tell me in English what you're really trying to say?"

[hilbert42]

Whilst I do not know Hebrew your point is very well taken. It aptly demonstrates the sheer complexity of trying to achieve an exact translation between one language and another (in fact from my understanding of the problem an exact translation between most languages is nigh on impossible).

I both admire and pity translators who work for organizations such as the U.N. as they have to translate documents such as treaties and do so with great precision.

However, I suppose my major concern with translations is how sloppy some actually are—that is that errors in translation are not limited by structural limitations caused by differences in the languages as in your example but rather by sheer carelessness. Frankly, I'm fed up with seeing bad translation of subtitles from German into English. I'd be more than happy if I had a dollar for every time I've seen the verbs glauben (to believe) and wissen (to know) interchanged with one another during translation.

Clearly, to know something is very different to believe something but unfortunately it seems that significant numbers of translators find such precision unnecessary.

[pezezin]

Google's translation is not wrong, but the original phrase is too convoluted...

I would translate it as "debería haber estado vigilada". DeepL translate it as "tendría que haber sido vigilada". Both are much easier to understand.

[Symbiote]

> too convoluted

It's a sentence that would typically be spoken rather than written, but it's only a step beyond "you would have had to have been there", which has genuine occurrences in Google Search.

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22You+would+have+had+to+hav...

[cptsmrk]

Which is also funny, because it's apparently convoluted enough in English to have us regularly shorten it to "you had to be there" (which sounds correct, even though I'm fairly sure it's ungrammatical.

[Xplune13]

My native language is Marathi (India). Though it is not well known globally, it still is pretty dominant if we compare the number of people that speak Marathi (around 83 million).

Anyways, the translation would be: तिला पाहिलं गेलं असतं

[flobosg]

IMO the Google translation is almost correct. My take would be “Ella habría tenido que haber estado siendo observada”.

[bakuninsbart]

In german, I think we would change "being watched" to a noun with the same meaning:

Sie hätte unter Beobachtung gewesen sein müssen.

Still a sentence with 4 verbs though.

E: Interestingly enough, google translate is just plain wrong in a predictable way:

Sie hätte beobachtet werden müssen.

Which implies that she should have been watched.

[shawxe]

My best attempt at Japanese:

その場合、彼女は監視されていたはずであろう。

[lemoncucumber]

A similar example:

As a reply to the question, “what’s the most expensive car on the market?”

1) “I’m guessing it’s some German supercar.”

2) “I would guess it’s some German supercar.”

3) “I guess it’s some German supercar.”

As a native speaker, the first two both sound correct to me, and essentially equivalent. The third sounds a little weird, even though it’s grammatically the simplest. I can’t put my finger on exactly why.

[rsa4046]

The first two seem consistent as tentative responses to a statement that might contain hyperbole, joke, play on words, double entendre, etc., by maintaining some distance with the statement of supercar-as-fact. In contrast, the third seems to accept the fact outright, and lets the accuracy of the responder assume the uncertainty.

[Talanes]

The third reply strips so much away that the tone changes from tentative to apathetic. The third speaker is just doing the bare minimum to keep conversation moving.

[sharken]

My thought as well, the third gives the impression that the person answering doesn't care much for the question.

[reph2097]

That's exactly what a German speaker would do.

[archduck]

In 1) and 2), it's clear the speaker is making some kind of conjecture. In 3), I think there's some bleed-over interfering from the idiomatic "I guess" which indicates that you're reporting hearsay or hedging your commitment to its accuracy. Some languages express this "evidentiary" modality more formally, e.g. via some kind of morphosyntactic change that makes it explicit. English has a ton of ways of expressing modalities, but they're wrapped up together in various kinds of constructions that express tense and aspect as well ("TAM" is an acronym for tense-aspect-mood used in lots of linguistic analysis across all kinds of languages).

Usually it's an error to add -ing to a mental process (Are you knowing the answer?, I'm believing in a deity, etc.). (We can choose to construe a mental process as a material one - it's not a lexical rule about those verbs, but a grammatical means we have access to, e.g. I'm lovin' it, I'm thinking about you contrue them as an activity rather than a mental state.) But perhaps the reason why replacing "guessing" with "guess" changes the meaning so much is because "I guess" is already taken. It should modify the meaning as "I think x" => "I'm thinking x" does, but saying "I guess" sounds like a way of hedging information from a 3rd party.

[sharken]

Not a native speaker, but 1) and 2) seem equal, while 3) somehow gives the impression that you don't really care about answering the question.

In danish the word "Ligeglad" is the state of mind for 3).

[irrational]

I would say “I’d guess it’s some German supercar.” Does contracting the “I would” make it more difficult for a non native speaker to understand?

[detaro]

As a non-native speaker, I'd say it depends on their background and how they learned. To me it feels completely normal and the non-contracted form took longer for me to parse, I think because the contraction is more common in colloquial communication with native speakers, but I'm also sure that if you tried this on me at a point in life where I had mostly school english to go on, the contraction would be more difficult.

[cycomanic]

Actually, if I'm not wrong your example 2a and 2b is about simple present vs present continuous not gerund. Isn't gerund something like "I like swimming" or "I like to swim" (where both works) or while "I enjoy swimming" only works with gerund?

Admittedly both are subtle and somewhat confusing to non-native speakers.

[HelloNurse]

Present continuous is built from gerund, like other continuous tenses. The important difference is therefore between the "simple" verb and gerund. What you refer to is a different use case of gerund.

[User23]

One of my favorites is adjective order. Pink riding big elephant just sounds wrong to a native speaker, but almost none could tell you why.

[msrenee]

Big pink riding elephant would be the more natural sequence to me if there are any non-native speakers who are curious. I know there's an established order of types of adjectives. However in this example, it's more of a part of speech order issue to my ear. With riding being both an adjective and a verb, it feels like someone named "pink" is riding a big elephant when the words are in this order. This may be due to the fact that we don't have much for case indicators. So the adjective "pink" is indistinguishable from a guy whose nickname is "Pink". "Riding" as in a riding animal vs a pack animal is identical to "riding" the verb. All you're missing is the artical "a" before big elephant and it could very well be a sentence fragment.

"Fred, riding a big elephant, burst into the arena" substitutes "pink" for a more common name and adds the article and a prepositional phrase and... some grammar that I can't put into words right now and makes it a full sentence.

I guess what I'm trying to get across is that without the adjective order being in line, it's hard to work out the sentence structure which is extremely reliant on word order in lieu of inflection.

[irrational]

I studied linguistics in college and I remember a class on this. But that was 25 years ago. I think it had something to do with how much a part of the object the adjective is, or how easy it would be to change. Red concrete wall instead of concrete red wall because it is fairly easy to change the color of the wall from red to blue, but much harder to change the wall from concrete to wood. So we put concrete closer to the object and red farther away.

[quercusa]

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/grammar/british-grammar/...

[irrational]

This explains the most common order, but not why that is the order. What are the underlying rules that determine that is the best order?

[scrollaway]

Love that last example. I think "to have been being watched" is a bit of a reach though? "To have been observed / under observation" feels more natural. When translating it to french i got to "elle aurait dûe être observée". Incidentally, French has an easier time with this, I think because we have more options there. I couldn't reproduce the quirky structure at all, the flow is just more natural in french.

[ninefathom]

Native English speaker here, with training in linguistics, and several other languages under my belt over the years.

In my native dialect, statements including "had to have been being" are rather common. My friends, family, co-workers, etc. use them regularly. In fact, I recall saying "he'd have had to have been being reckless" just earlier today. All five of the other people present- both immediate family and non-relatives from this area- knew precisely what was meant. In other words, that intimidating clump of verbs passed unremarked.

Further, to andensande's point, one might be inclined to replace that god-awful monstrosity with something like "he must've been reckless." To do so would be to wipe out some subtleties of meaning from the original. A replacement like "he must've been acting recklessly at the time" feels like the same general meaning to me, but it also sounds stuffy and snobbish in tone (for all that it's probably a much more effective construction).

All things considered, every language that I've ever dealt with in any capacity has had its share of peculiarities. In hindsight, however, I don't recall Arabic, Zulu, or even Gallo-Lati... er, I mean French... having quite as few peculiarities as my sponge-like mother tongue.

[msrenee]

I could see saying "she'd had to have been watched" or "they had to have been watching her". Both sound very natural to my ear. Observed to me feels more like they're looking at every minute detail with some emotional distance and maybe a feeling of something novel. A scientist observes a rare bug walking on a leaf. A psychiatrist observes his patients' behaviors. It's maybe a more scientific and heavily detail-oriented form of watching. But a would-be abductor would be watching his victim. He may observe their habits, but that's while he's watching them. It's a very fine line and I'm sure that other native speakers would disagree. But for me, "observe" would feel out of place here.

[bombcar]

“Had to have been kidding” is a relatively common phrase.

[msrenee]

Very common and feels very natural to me. "You have to be kidding me" "He had to have been kidding" "He had to have been kidding me" or the rougher "he had to have been fucking with me" and "he must have been fucking with me" although "must have", of course, implies more certainty than "had to have". What a wonderfully subtle and complex language we have.

"to be ing", "was ing", and "will be *ing" if I remember correctly, are actually thought to be an early borrowing of celtic grammar. Not much celtic anything was adopted into English, but there's a possibility that this sentence structure may be one of the few contributions of the celtic languages that were displaced by germanic Anglo-Saxon languages that eventually formed English.

[andensande]

You can gloss it with 'under observation' I think fairly well. But the problem with

(1) She would have had to have been observed.

is that it misses out the gerund form preceding 'observed', which alters the meaning slightly in my opinion. It's difficult to get at precisely but I feel like the original sentence has a feeling of time-boundedness around when she was observed which you don't get without that gerund. I think?

[phasetransition]

(native speaker) I agree.

The original with "been being watched" feels like something the detective says when he first discovers the fact about watching. It has an exclamative aspect to it. There's a present sense of realization, mixed with the past sense of when the watching had taken place.

"She would have had to have been observed." is something like a lawyers distillation of what happened later for the court.

[ckarmann]

Trying to translate in French, I came up first with "Il eût fallu qu'elle eût été surveillée", but mostly because of morphological similarity (it's almost the same amount of verbs, right?). It's also just a more literary form of the simpler "Il aurait fallu qu'elle soit surveillée".

That being said, I have trouble to parse the original english sentence so I may be missing subtleties.

[sfblah]

Or just “il fallait qu’elle soit surveillée.”

[bonchicbongenre]

I very much agree with English being a hodgepodge of confusing rules, especially those tense-related.

Re rewtriting (3) though: does not the following suffice? "She must have been being watched".

I can imagine an argument that "She would have had to have" is not equivalent to "She must have" on grounds that the "have had" might suggest additionally that the past-ongoing-watching no longer occurs. I don't really think this flies, though, since the natural reading of "been being watched" already suggests to me that the watching was relegated to the past ("been" being interpreted as only connoting the past, not the "inclusive-or"-type interpretation "previously and perhaps presently"; much as "or" itself is - to my chagrin! - generally interpreted exclusively in standard parlance).

I couldn't think of how to simplify the "been being" though; that is a tough nut.

[penteract]

The "would" makes the claim conditional, so you can't get rid of it without potentially changing the meaning.

[boloust]

Someone must have been watching her

[dataflow]

> She would have had to have been being watched.

OK, now I feel like I don't know English. Is this proper English? What does it mean? How is it different from "She would have had to have been watched"? Is the meaning clear to people? I'm scratching my head...

Did you mean "She would have had to have felt like she's being watched"?

[sfblah]

I’m a native English speaker here and it’s clear to me. I also think it’s somewhat tricky to express it more succinctly without changing the sentence a fair bit.

Essentially it means “it must have been the case that, at the moment we’re speaking of, someone was watching her.”

Your sentence is slightly different, in that it implies that, in general, someone was watching her during the timeframe we’re talking about, but not necessarily in the exact instant we’re talking about. Also, like the example above, your version could mean she’s someone who in general is watched (like the person who generally lives in Berlin), as opposed to someone being watched right during the instant we’re talking about.

Complicated!

[shawxe]

> Essentially it means “it must have been the case that, at the moment we’re speaking of, someone was watching her.”

Another native English speaker here. This would be how I would parse "She had to have been being watched," but I think it's not quite the full picture in this sentence's case. It's important to note that the "would" adds the implication that this conclusion is being drawn based upon some other (possibly unspoken) observation or proposition.

I would say the meaning is probably closer to "In order for some unspoken condition to be true, it must also be true that, during the moment of time in the past about which we are speaking, someone was watching her."

[sfblah]

You’re right. I was doing it on my phone and forgot that word was even there.

[dataflow]

AH! Ok, I think I distilled it down to something simpler: It seems to be similar to the difference between "I would've been spoken to" vs. "I would've been being spoken to". Is that correct?

Ugh, I have to admit it seems technically "correct" after all :-) but with such a painful (and uncommon) sentence structure that it makes you question if it's right...

[reshlo]

The former is past perfect[1], and the latter is past perfect progressive.[2]

There are subtleties involved, but the most basic use case is that the former refers to an action that took place before some point in the past (to which the sentence refers), while the latter refers to an action that was still happening at that past point.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uses_of_English_verb_forms#Pas...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uses_of_English_verb_forms#Pas...

[lmm]

That's perfectly normal English yes.

"She would have had to have been watched" means she would have had to have been watched at that moment (e.g. because someone was watching the area where she did whatever it was), whereas "being watched" implies that the watching was ongoing and therefore that someone was continuously watching her at the time.

[sharken]

Admittedly English is not my primary language, but "She would have had to have been being watched" seems to be a construct used in a class, but not something you would hear in day-to-day English.

[denton-scratch]

Native english speaker here.

It's a very contorted phrase. I struggle to think of a context in which it makes sense. I honestly don't know what it's supposed to mean. It's a mixture of subjunctive mood and passive voice, both of which detract from clarity.

You can make unclear grammatical constructions in any language. If your aim is clarity, and not obfuscation, then you just eliminate tangled grammar such as this example.

I will attempt to offer a re-phrasing with added context, though:

"The only way that anyone could have known X about her, would be if she were being observed."

(Many english speakers would substitute "was" for "were", because the subjunctive mood is rarely taught to schoolchildren in the UK. That is to say, colloquial english is generally pretty sloppy.)

If a native english speaker like me struggles with an english phrase, there's something wrong with that phrase. If I find myself constructing a phrase like that, my first instinct is that my thoughts must be unclear, because my words are unclear. I'd consider thinking again, and perhaps even re-writing an entire paragraph, just to avoid a phrase like that.

The subjunctive in German is routine and explicit. Indeed, the word "were" in my re-phrasing is pronounced in parts of northeast of england to rhyme with "bear", because it comes from the germanic subjunctive "wäre". But in general, subjunctives in English are concealed - we don't use subjunctive forms of verbs much, the listener is supposed to infer subjunctive mood from the presence of words like "if" and "would".

Twain is winding us up; after all, he was a satirist. The German language is pretty regular, compared with English. It's quite easy to learn. English must be a nightmare to learn, as a foreigner.

[lmm]

Obviously the situation is fairly rare, but it sounds like a perfectly natural thing to say when it's true. I don't think it's an artificial example at all (whereas e.g. no-one actually says "buffalo" as a verb).

[dataflow]

> it sounds like a perfectly natural thing to say when it's true

It doesn't sound natural to me at all; it sounds incredibly awkward to me. In a situation like that, I think people would say something like "someone would've been watching her at that moment".

[lmm]

"someone would've had have been" doesn't sound remotely natural. "someone must've been watching her" would be legitimate, but doesn't have the same connotations; it humanises the watcher, whereas "she must've had been being watched" suggests it could have been an organization rather than an individual, and so feels more sinister.

[ddxxdd]

I feel like I'm being gaslighted by half the people in this thread that are saying that "have been being watched" is a normal phrase.

For context, I was born and raised in Northern NJ with Jamaican parents, and have lived in Michigan for the past 10 years. I have never heard anyone use grammar like this.

[lmm]

> I feel like I'm being gaslighted by half the people in this thread that are saying that "have been being watched" is a normal phrase.

I assure you the feeling is mutual :/. It really does sound perfectly normal to me. I can easily imagine e.g. Jonathan Creek saying exactly that.

[cycomanic]

Maybe this is what you are saying, but doesn't "... have been watched" imply that the being watched is finished, compared to have been being watched" implies a that the watching is (or might be) still ongoing, i.e. the use of simple past vs present perfect continuous(?)

[lmm]

No, "have been being watched" is the past progressive. It implies that the being watched was an ongoing thing at that time, not that it's still continuing.

[NoOneNew]

My confusion with complaints about English is the expectation of rules being across the board. Pretty much all languages have irregular verbs or nouns that conjugate differently than the standard method laid out in that language. Portugese and French have a fuckton of these, no one bats an eye. English has a few inconsistencies, everyone loses their shit. The amount of inconsistencies in English are pretty damn few compared to other languages I attempted. While I get the spelling is an issue, it's not like it's alone in that department.

[hilbert42]

"She would have had to have been being watched."

Wow, whoever concocted that mind-twister? That's the sort of problem we students would have given our formal logic lecturer to analyze and draw up into truth tables.

That expression likely exceeds the complexity of an infamous expression (known for its complexity) that was given to us students to analyze, it being 'there is a chance of a possible maybe'.

It hurts my brain just thinking about it, perhaps I'll do so later. ;-)

[Wowfunhappy]

> To illustrate this -- try and gloss this sentence another way while conveying the meaning.

“Someone must have been watching her.”

I’m making some assumptions about the context of the sentence—but as long as you told me what the context was, I’m sure I could come up with an equally simple replacement.

Personally, I found the original sentence quite hard to parse, despite being a native speaker. It’s not good writing and a good editor would replace it.

[kevin_thibedeau]

Your examples are participles, not gerunds.

[wizzard]

That’s how I learned it too, but apparently that is “traditional” grammar. In “modern” grammar any verb with the -ing ending is a gerund now according to Wikipedia.

[kevin_thibedeau]

Gerunds are used as nouns. Nobody writing for wikipedia can change that.

[wizzard]

It's not an invention of Wikipedia editors. If you just read the first paragraph of the article it explains the accepted meaning has evolved over time. It further explains "The distinction between gerund and present participles is not recognised in modern reference grammars, since many uses are ambiguous."