Verbs not used in continuous form

1.      Some verbs (eg like,understand) are normally used only in the simple forms, not the continuous form.

အခ်ိဳ႕ ၾကိယာမ်ား (ဥပမာ- ႏွစ္သက္သည္၊နားလည္သည္)ကို ရိုးရိုး V1 ပံုစံျဖင့္သာသံုး နိဳင္ျပီး၊ V-ing သံုး၍ မရပါ။

ဥပမာ- ကၽြန္မနွစ္သက္သည္I like သို႕မဟုတ္ 

သူမနားမလည္ဘူး She doesn’t understand လို႕သာသံုးပါတယ္။

I’m liking. She is not understanding . လို႕သံုးလို႕မရပါဘူး။

Here are some of the important verbs which are not normally used in the continuous forms:

V-ing form ျဖင့္သံုး၍မရေသာၾကိယာ အခ်ိဳ႕ကိုေဖာ္ျပလိုပါတယ္။

a. Verbs of thinking(စဥ္းစာျခင္း၊ ေတြးေခၚဆင္ျခင္ျခင္းႏွင့္ဆိုင္ေသာၾကိယာမ်ား)

Think(=believe)           believe             understand                  know         see(=understand)

Recognize                    suppose           remember                    imagine           forget

Mean                           realize

I think (believe that) you are right. (not: I am thinking.....)

Do you know Pamela? (not: Are you knowing.....?)

She didn’t understand what you said. (not: She wasn’t understanding........)

b. Verbs of feeling(စိတ္ခံစားခ်က္ကိုေဖာ္ျပေသာၾကိယာမ်ား)

like       dislike  hate     love      prefer   want    wish

I like the music. (not: I am liking the music)

I want to know about him. (not: I am wanting .......)

c. Verbs of perception (အာရံုငါးပါး၊ အာရံုခံစားမွဳကို ျပေသာၾကိယာမ်ား)

see       hear    taste     smell    feel

I hear your voice. (not: I am hearing......)

This spaghetti taste delicious. (not: This spaghetti is tasting..........)

d. Other verbs (အျခားၾကိယာမ်ား)

have(=possess)            own     belong to         owe      need     include     cost            

weigh               sound               be               seem    desetve    contain

I weigh 70kg. (not: I’m weighing 70kg.)

We were at home last night. (not: We were being ...........)

2.      But note that some of the above verbs have more than one meaning: we can use these verbs in the continuous when they describe actions. Compare:

အထက္ေဖာ္ျပခဲ့ေသာၾကိယာမ်ားမွာ အဓိပၸါယ္တစ္မ်ိဳးထက္ပိုရွိတတ္ေသာေၾကာင့္ ျပဳ ျခင္း(action) ကိုေဖာ္ျပတဲ့အခါ

V-ing form ကိုသံုးနိဳင္ပါတယ္။

SIMPLE USES                                                 CONTINUOUS USES

I think you’re right. (think=believe)                 Imm! I’m thinking. (action using mind)         

ငါ့့မင္းမွန္တယ္လို႕ငါထင္တယ္။(ထင္ျမင္ခ်က္)               အင္း..ငါစဥ္းစားေနတုန္း။(စဥ္းစားသည္ျပဳ ျခင္းကိုျပသည္။)

I’ve had my car for six months. (had=possessed) I’m having lunch. (having/eating  is action)

၆လေလာက္ငါ့မွာ ကားရွိခဲ့ဘူးတယ္။(ပိုင္ဆိုင္ျခင္း)         ကၽြန္ေတာ္ ေန႕လည္စာစားေနတယ္။(စားျခင္းသည္ ျပဳ ျခင္းျပ)

Do you see what I mean? (see = understand)   Are you seeing the doctor tomorrow?

ငါေျပာတာမင္းနားလည္လား။                                   မင္းမနက္ျဖန္ ဆရာ၀န္သြားျပမွာလား။

Compare also these simple and continuous uses of  be:

V1  နဲ႕V-ing  မတူညီတဲ့ အသံုးအႏွဳန္းေတြကိုလည္း ေလ့လာၾကအံုးစို႕။

He’s stupid. (Generally)                               
သူ အသံုးမက်ဘူး(ေယဘုယ်အသံုးအႏွဳန္း)    

He’s being stupid. (Behaving in stupid way at that time)            
သူကအဲလိုမသံုးက်တာ (အခ်ိန္ကာလတခုတြင္အသံုးမက်ေသာ အျပဳအမူကို ဆိုလိုသည္။)
 

3.      We often use can and could with the verbs of perception see, hear, smell, taste, feel and some verbs of thinking eg understand, remember.

            အာရံုခံစားျခင္းကိုျပေသာၾကိယာမ်ားနဲ႕ understand, remember ကဲ့သို႕ေတြးေခၚစဥ္းစားျခင္းကိုျပေသာ ၾကိယာ    မ်ားကို can/could တို႕ျဖင့္ တြဲသံုးေလ့ရွိပါတယ္။

I can see you.

We could hear someone outside.

4.      Compare hear, see and listen, look, watch.

            - When we hear or see, it is not always a deliberate action, and we do not normally use the 
continuous. အာရံုခံစားျခင္းကိုျပေသာၾကိယာမ်ားျဖစ္တဲ့ ၾကားသည္၊ျမင္သည္ စတဲ့ၾကိယာေတြဟာ ရည္ရြယ္ခ်က္ေၾကာင့္မဟုတ္ပဲ အသံရွိသျဖင့္ၾကားရျခင္း၊ ရုပ္သ႑ာန္ရွိသျဖင့္ျမင္ရျခင္းျဖစ္သည္။
  ထို႕သို႔ရည္ရြယ္ခ်က္မပါေသာ အာရံုခံစားျခင္းျပၾကိယာကို V-ing ျဖင့္မသံုးပါ။
  When I was in the garden I heard the telephone ring. ( not: I was hearing)       ကၽြန္မဥယ်ာဥ္ထဲမွာရွိေနတုန္းက တယ္လီဖုန္းျမည္သံၾကားလိုက္တယ္။ (တယ္လီဖုန္းျမည္၍ၾကားျခင္းျဖစ္သည္။)

-  When we listen, look or watch, it is a deliberate action, and we can use the continuous. နားေထာင္ျခင္း၊ ၾကည့္ျခင္း စေသာၾကိယာမ်ားသည္ ရည္ရြယ္ခ်က္ျဖင့္ျပဳေသာေၾကာင့္ V-ing  ျဖင့္သံုး ပါတယ္။

           I’m listening to the radio.
          They were watching TV last night.

5.      Verbs of physical feeling, for example, feel, ache and hurt, can be used in either continuous or simple forms.

          ရုပ္ပိုင္းဆိုင္ရာ နာက်င္ခံစားမွဳမ်ားကိုျပလိုေသာအခါ V1, V-ing ႏွစ္မ်ိဳးလံုးကိုသံုးနိဳင္ပါတယ္။

I am feeling/ I feel ill.

         My head is aching/ My head aches.
 

Note: Some verbs which are not used in continuous, for example, know-ing or have-ing are used as a subjects and    after prepositions;

မွတ္ရန္။      ။ ကတၱား(ျပဴသူ)အျဖစ္လည္းေကာင္း၊ ၀ိဘတ္(preposition)ဧ။္ေနာက္တြင္လည္းေကာင္း သံုးလိုပါက   V-ing ျဖင့္တြဲသံုး၍မရေသာ အခ်ိဳ႕ၾကိယာမ်ားျဖစ္ေစကာမူ V-ing formျဖင့္သံုးၾကပါတယ္။

Knowing how to drive is very useful. (as a subject)

I’m looking forward to having my own car. (after preposition)

EXERCISES: Choose the correct forms. ေလ့က်င့္ခန္းေတြ လုပ္ၾကည့္ရေအာင္ပါ။

1.      You’re very quiet. What (do you think/ are you thinking) about?

2.      What (do you think/are you thinking) about my idea?

3.      How long (has Simon known/has Simon been knowing) Maria?

4.      What (does this word mean/is this word meaning?)

5.      (Did you hear/Were you hearing) the news?

6.      I (cannot remember/am not remembering) my password.

7.      (Do you like/Are you liking) this painting?

8.      I (want /am wanting) to buy a car.

9.      This man is a stranger for me. (I had never seen/I had never been seeing)  him before.

Reference: The Heinemann ELT, English Grammar, An Intermediate Reference and       Practice book.