Gerunds are verbs that are used as nouns.
First, you take the base of the verb and you add –ing to it. Like this:
Try making these verbs into their ‘ing‘ form: sleep and drink.
Now, you can use these verb forms as the subject or direct object of sentence. They will act like a noun.
As you can see, skiing is not the verb of either sentence. ‘Is’ is the verb in the 1st sentence and ‘like’ is the verb of the 2nd sentence. Skiing is the subject of the 1st sentence and the direct object of the 2nd sentence.Try making your own sentences with ‘dancing’ and ‘fishing’ as gerunds to get more practice!
Remember not all verbs that have an ‘ing’ ending are gerunds. They must be used as a noun. For example: I am skiing. This is the present progressive of ‘to ski,’ so it is not a gerund.
Can you see the difference?
Hi Yvonne! I’ve a question: in the sentence “I have never gone fishing”, which is fishing’s function?
Fishing is the main verb in that sentence. The tense is Present Perfect Progressive (or sometimes called present perfect continuous).
subject + auxiliary verb + auxiliary verb + main verb
So, have and gone are both auxiliary verbs and fishing is the main verb.
Thanks so much for stopping by and let me know if you have any more questions!
still need another explanation, when we must use “gerund”
I’m going to have to write a few more posts about Gerunds because they are so complicated. Did you see the post on Gerunds vs. Infinitives? I listed a few examples of where you must use Gerunds.