I really enjoyed your presentation of one of my favourite English tenses!

And the example with the thief made it very concrete!

Call me ignorant with typical Anglophone arrogance, but I reckon the English tense system stands out clearly in its intricacy compared to many other languages (much to the annoyance of learners!).

English is rarely/never cited as a beautiful language unlike Italian or French, but for me its beauty lies the precision it allows when expressing order/temporal aspects of events.

I've dabbled in a few languages from a range of different language families: Romance, Sino-Tibetan, Germanic, Austronesian not Slavic though (yet!).  For instance, many languages have only one present tense while English has three (I do, I'm doing, I do do), all of which have their respective nuance/subtelties.  I particularly appreciate the present progressive (I'm doing ) to really and simply stress the present instant moment!

I do realise that these ideas can be expressed with context in other languages, but there's something special about English because so much is "built" into the tense system!

It does not seem to be as difficult as it sounds before.

Short? Really? LOL

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