Hi! Welcome to our fifth grammar live stream. This time, we will mainly be discussing the continuous, or progressive, form of the verb, so we'll be talking about things like "what I'm doing", "what I was doing", "what I have been doing", and so on. We've got a few specific questions that we will try to answer: QUESTION 1 When we're using "while" to mean during the time something else happens, is it true that the duration of the activity described using while can't be too long ? For example : 'I studied Math every day While I lived in Spain' or 'I studied hard every day while I was a student'. In those sentences many websites say that while is used incorrectly because the living of Spain is of a too long duration and being a student lasted for 7 years and it was too long for me to use while in that sentence about student. And websites say that the correct situation of using while is constructing a sentence like 'while you slept, I talked to my friend'. In that sentence the sleeping only has a 3-hour duration so it's not too long therefore it's correct. What I would like to do here is to confirm if what websites say regarding the use of while is true. QUESTION 2 When we're using the past continuous and the past simple (e.g. "I was playing football when my friend arrived") it seems to always mean that the playing football started before my friend arrived. But you give the example of the past continuous in the video (https://youtu.be/MUvP2jSSOkk?t=3824) which is "I was reading a book when I was 5 years old" and what I'm confused about is that in the example given by you it implies a different thing which is that the reading started after I entered the age of 5 years old and it did not start before i was 5 but in my previous example the playing football started before my friend arrived. The same actually goes to the other continuous forms such as "I will be playing football when you arrive" does the activity described using the future continuous or the past continuous have to start before another action described using when ? If so , the why "I was reading a book when I was five years old" means that I did not start studying before i was 5? So can we actually say "I was studying when my friend played football last night" to mean that the activity of studying started after my friend played football so before my friend played football I did not start studying. Is that actually possible ? QUESTION 3 I went to google to do an exact phrase of 'I am barely working' and 'I am rarely working'. I would love to ask for your explanation that I've googled to find the phrase on Google and I found many people there using rarely in sentences like 'I am rarely working 8 hours a day' and 'I am barely working these days' , those sentences seem to talk about present activities, don't they ? Why are they using rarely and barely in that way ? Is that wrong according to you ? What's your explanation for that? If you have other questions, please add them in the live chat, or on Quora or Facebook, and we'll do our best to explain! © All rights reserved