French · Chapter 8 · Lesson 3 · Grammar primer
Participe present gerondif
Prescribed by the AQA specification.
The short version
French has no continuous tense
Je suis mangeant does not exist, and producing it is the clearest signal of an English speaker. Je mange covers both I eat and I am eating; je mangeais covers I was eating. If you genuinely need to stress that something is in progress, French says être en train de.
Je suis en train de manger.
The gérondif belongs to the main subject
En plus the -ant form only works when both actions share a subject. En entrant dans la pièce, j'ai vu Marie means I came in and I saw. It cannot mean you saw Marie coming in; that needs a relative clause, j'ai vu Marie qui entrait. English ignores the rule, which is why learners break it.
En entrant dans la pièce, j'ai vu Marie.
That's the gist. The full article goes deeper - more examples, the edge cases, the why - and the practice below scores like a vocabulary session and earns the same XP.
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Lesson 3 of 9 in this chapter