English grammar (advanced) Past ability (COULD and WAS / WERE ABLE TO) This page uses H5P encoding for interactive content and may take a few moments to load. Thank you for your patience!

Before we start

If you find this difficult, perhaps you should study this a bit more. You can find quite a good explanation here. If you are comfortable so far, then you are ready to carry on!

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The same thing is true of sentences like "I have been studying English for a long time" and "I have studied English for a long time", or "He has worked in the factory since he got married" and "He has been working in this factory since he got married".

Sometimes you may hear people arguing that there is a clear difference in meaning between sentences like these. For example, you may hear people say that "I have lived in Paris for ten years" means that I am going to go and live somewhere else now, while "I have been living in Paris for ten years" means that I am going to continue living in Paris.

This is incorrect. Neither sentence tells us anything about the future; they only tell us that the person has completed the action of living in Paris for ten years ("has lived") or that she has continued the process of living there for ten years ("has been living"), In most contexts the difference between whether living in Paris is an action or a process/activity is not important, and in those contexts native speakers will use both of these forms with no significant difference in meaning. It is only when the context clearly focuses on the ongoing activity or on the completed action that one form has to be used and the other would be wrong.