> The “-ing” progressive form of present tense (“I am reading”) is unique to English from other European languages (in French “Je mange” can be translated as both “I eat” and “I am eating.”)
At a minimum, Dutch and Spanish, among European languages, are also generally recognized as having a present continuous/progressive tense. Though this is somewhat arbitrary:
In English, the sense of the present continuous can be subsumed by the simple present, too, the present continuous emphasizes the continuous nature, but is not essential to communicate it.
And French has a construct that serves a similar emphatic function (être <conjugated in simple present> en train de + <infinitive>)
So this construct that communicates the exact same thing is not a present continuous tense but the english (to be <conjugated in the present tense> + present participle) construct is a present continuous tense; a fairly arbitrary distinction as to which productions that are applied to verb roots to form an expression which conveys a particular semantic combination of tense (time/location), aspect, mood, etc. is considered a grammatical tense and which productions that serve that purpose are instead considered idiom or something else that isn't a grammatical tense.
Yeah, that sentence is bullshit. Italian has a construct that matches the English one precisely: io sto mangiando, I am eating; io sto leggendo, I am reading; lei stava facendo, she was doing...
It's just a form of gerundio. As an Italian speaker, that's actually one of the easiest English forms to learn.
I remember I was surprised when I learned English at school, because they seemed to make a lot of emphasis on the present continuous and past continuous, and I found them trivial: they work exactly the same as in Spanish, i.e., at least off the top of my head, every English sentence analogous to "I am/was eating" can be translated literally into Spanish directly as "Yo estoy/estaba comiendo" without a second thought, and vice versa. It's not something where a native Spanish speaker learning English would make mistakes, even from a very basic level.
On the other hand, from the Spanish point of view it's much, much easier to make mistakes with the present simple, because there are many things that you can say with the present simple in Spanish but not in English. For example, to ask someone what they are eating in the present moment (not in general), in Spanish you could use both "¿qué estás comiendo?" and "¿qué comes?" (the second being more common in informal speech) and you could answer both "estoy comiendo kebab" and "como kebab". In English the first versions work ("what are you eating? I am eating kebab") but the second ones don't ("what do you eat?" "I eat kebab") and it's a super common error to make for beginner/intermediate learners, but almost no emphasis was made on that because we were busy doing a lot of exercises about writing sentences in present continuous.
I guess it was an effect of using British books written for a global audience (not tailored specifically to learners coming from Spanish) and the teachers following the books without questioning or adapting their methodology.
It's a grammatically correct sentence but it's asking something else (ambiguously). A native speaker would probably respond with "What do you mean? What do I like to eat? What type of food do I normally eat?" But they probably wouldn't take it, unless adjusting for a poorly phrased question, as "What are you eating right now?"
I was learning Italian some years ago in a class where others students were all English speakers, and it felt like cheating as the grammar was basically the same, just the words changed a bit, so I was having a much better time than anyone else! But when the teacher spoke fluently to me in Italian, obviously I would suddenly realize my Italian was still very poor and I had a lot to learn.
EDIT: by the way, the author must have meant that other germanic languages don't have "gerundio"? Looks like all Latin languages do.
In Italy it’s a running joke that everyone thinks they can speak any “Latinesque” language if necessary, because “they are just Italian pronounced a bit differently” - when obviously that’s far from the truth, resulting in very funny attempts to invent words on the spot. But yes, there are a lot of structural similarities; which is natural, considering how these languages came to be.
At a minimum, Dutch and Spanish, among European languages, are also generally recognized as having a present continuous/progressive tense. Though this is somewhat arbitrary:
In English, the sense of the present continuous can be subsumed by the simple present, too, the present continuous emphasizes the continuous nature, but is not essential to communicate it.
And French has a construct that serves a similar emphatic function (être <conjugated in simple present> en train de + <infinitive>)
So this construct that communicates the exact same thing is not a present continuous tense but the english (to be <conjugated in the present tense> + present participle) construct is a present continuous tense; a fairly arbitrary distinction as to which productions that are applied to verb roots to form an expression which conveys a particular semantic combination of tense (time/location), aspect, mood, etc. is considered a grammatical tense and which productions that serve that purpose are instead considered idiom or something else that isn't a grammatical tense.