What Were You Doing? The Past Continuous and the Art of Storytelling
2026-09-13 17 min
Description & Show Notes
Had a great holiday – but struggle to make it sound interesting in English? In this episode, we turn your holiday experiences into stories worth listening to. Discover how to use the past continuous naturally to set the scene, pick up simple English storytelling phrases that keep your listener interested. Grammar meets real-life communication – without the textbook feel.
0:00 – Introduction and the episode theme
1:31 – Understanding the Past Continuous
5:04 – How to begin a story naturally
7:00 – Using real holiday experiences to bring a story to life
9:00 – Building interest, climax and a strong ending
10:34 – How important Is the Past Continuous?
13:14 – The important difference between “While” and “During”
14:40 – Golden Nugget: “I was wondering…” and Birgit’s new book
15:40 – Preview: Motivation and overcoming a learning plateau
16:54 – Closing message and call to action
Download the template from our free resources Padlet:
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Birgit: https://birgitkasimirski.de
Du hattest einen tollen Urlaub – hast aber Schwierigkeiten, das auf Englisch interessant zu erzählen? In dieser Folge verwandeln wir deine Urlaubserlebnisse in Geschichten, die es wert sind, angehört zu werden. Entdecke, wie du das Past Continuous ganz natürlich einsetzt, um die Szene zu beschreiben, und lerne einfache englische Formulierungen für das Geschichtenerzählen, die das Interesse deiner Zuhörer wecken. Grammatik trifft auf echte Kommunikation – ganz ohne Lehrbuch-Charakter.
0:00 – Einführung und Thema der Folge
1:31 – Das Past Continuous verstehen
5:04 – Wie man eine Geschichte natürlich beginnt
7:00 – Mit echten Urlaubserlebnissen eine Geschichte zum Leben erwecken
9:00 – Interesse wecken, einen Höhepunkt schaffen und ein starkes Ende gestalten
10:34 – Wie wichtig ist das Past Continuous?
13:14 – Der wichtige Unterschied zwischen „While“ und „During“
14:40 – Goldtipp: „I was wondering…“ und Birgits neues Buch
15:40 – Vorschau: Motivation und das Überwinden eines Lernstillstands
16:54 – Abschlussbotschaft und Aufruf zum Handeln
Lade die Vorlage von unserem kostenlosen Padlet mit Ressourcen herunter:
Transcript
(Transcribed by TurboScribe. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) Hi, we are the 3 English Experts.
I'm Rebecca.
I'm Dave.
I'm Birgit.
And welcome to this episode.
3 English Experts is your English podcast to help you speak better English and create a positive and happy mindset for your English learning journey.
So hello everyone and welcome to another episode.
And today, it's all about your holiday, your wonderful summer holiday.
I'm sure you had a great time.
Speaking of which, our dear Rebecca is still on holiday.
So lucky her.
Hope you're having a great time if you're listening to us, Rebecca.
And today we're going to talk about your holiday experiences.
And that involves two things.
Firstly, a little bit of grammar.
Pass over to Birgit in a second where we're going to talk about the past continuous.
And secondly, a nice little storytelling template to give to you that you can explain your wonderful experiences on holiday in a fantastic template form that you can then share in the pub, in the restaurants, with your friends, family, whoever it might be.
So first of all, let's jump over to the grammar section with our grammar queen, Birgit.
Did you have a nice holiday?
Hello, everybody.
Thank you, Dave.
And welcome to my classroom.
Since I'm the grammar, I did have a nice holiday.
Thank you.
Perfect.
And I'm going to tell you a little bit about it.
But first, my introduction into today's topic is to tell a little bit about what past continuous is or past progressive.
You know, always continuous and progressive are two words for the same thing.
And the continuous progressive is the ING mode.
Something is happening in the present tense, but you can picture this as a period of time starting and ending.
And you could put that into the past also.
Ich war am machen.
We could use this in German, but we shouldn't really.
It doesn't sound so nice, but the English language uses it.
And this is what it is and what we are talking about today.
We are recording currently, but we could say a while I was recording or we were recording last time.
And this is putting the moment of time into the past.
And that was, again, starting point and ending.
And this is what we are talking about today.
And with the storytelling, it's so useful since you can set the context.
So I'm jumping in into the template, which you could download and have a look at.
You set a context and then you talk about a moment in time in the past.
So I could say while I was living in England, while I was staying with my English family and now a picture or an image opens up in my mind or hopefully I'm carrying you along with my story.
But before I go on and hand over to Dave to talk about the beginning of the story, I just want to add some information here why some people struggle with it or where the mistakes lay with this tense.
The first thing is I can think of people forget about it, forget using it.
So they use simple past.
But this you would use rather for listing, Aufzählung.
So yesterday I went, I got up, I brushed my teeth, I had breakfast.
So you're not setting a scene.
And this is a very good expression here, Dave, this setting a context.
And the next thing is that people struggle with using were.
So we need to make sure with the correct subject, I was, but you were.
You as one person or you as two people when you were living in England, for example.
So was living or was staying or were staying or people use it maybe in the wrong situation.
You can ask yourself, do you use it at all?
Do you use it in the wrong situation?
Yeah.
And maybe hopefully this episode will help you to introduce it a little more to your come to your awareness.
Now, I have set the scene now, the context while I was living in England or while I was staying with my British family.
Now, over to Dave, we're going to jump into a storytelling templates or beginning of a story.
This could be the beginning, but there are better ones, Dave.
Yeah, absolutely.
As Birgit said, if you want to get this template, go over to the show notes on our website and there you can download or find the template actually on the Padlet that it will be linked in the show notes.
Okay.
So beginning the story, here are some really cool phrases if you want to tell the story of your holiday.
So for example, talking of or speaking of, you heard me talk about this earlier on in the episode already, speaking of holidays, Rebecca is on holiday right now.
So talking of or speaking of, that's a nice little starter into any little story that you want to tell.
Another one that maybe you could use, this reminds me of the time when, this reminds me of the time when.
And maybe if you want to tell your audience, the people you're telling the story to that you're actually telling them a story, then tell them that you're telling them a story and say something like, let me tell you the story of when, how, where.
Okay.
Then we come back to what Birgit mentioned, setting context, setting the scene.
For example, I was living in, I was working in, I was staying in Greece when, for your holidays, while I was staying in Greece, something happened.
There was a forest fire and all these things.
So you have the continuous that is setting the scene.
And then what actually happened, the thing that happened, that is the past tense.
Okay.
So there was a forest fire or a fire broke out or something like this that is setting the scene.
Okay.
I think now Birgit would like to go on with the audience.
The audience.
So I'm the audience today of what Dave is telling us about talking of holidays.
Dave, while you were staying on your last holiday, I don't know, you went to Albania.
What were you doing then?
Because before I involve the audience, I need to have the scene here.
So tell us something about what was happening.
What were you enjoying most in Albania?
Well, I really enjoyed the food because I'm a foodie and a coffee guy.
So I loved the food out there.
It was really good.
So while we were staying in Tirana, which is the capital of Albania, I think we went out daily to various restaurants and we ate fantastic food and not all that expensive, but the prices are also creeping up over in Albania too.
Okay.
What I have done now, Dave, I'm just realizing so you need to involve me now because I'm listening to you.
Sorry about the confusion.
Yeah, exactly.
But I can tell you something about my holiday when I was staying in Italy with my family.
We were enjoying the food.
Surprise.
So you're a foodie as well.
Yeah.
Yes, of course.
Yes.
We're enjoying the sunshine and you should have seen that.
So I'm now trying to involve Dave into my story.
You should have seen the nice sunsets in Italy.
Maybe you would add something in.
So maybe you've been there or what parts of Italy were you?
Yeah, we were in the very south Calabria.
That was beautiful.
And it was just beautiful.
The weather, the lights, the sunshine and the sea.
Do you know what I mean?
Again, I'm trying to involve Dave here.
Do you know what I mean?
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
And you could also use the phrase you never guess what or who.
So you could maybe say you never guess what I did on holiday or you never guess who I saw on holiday.
Maybe you saw a friend of yours or maybe even somebody famous.
It depends on your story, of course.
And then it's finally coming towards the climax.
You want to maybe add some emphasis to the whole thing.
You can add a phrase, something like, but that was the least of it or that's not all.
Okay.
Or a nice little phrase and to top it all.
So this is like, this is the big thing.
To top it all is a nice way to bring it to the end of the story where you want to say maybe a surprise.
It turned out in the end that this is a nice little phrase.
So in the end, what happened was, and that's another way that you can finish off your story with the ending surprise, a shock, whatever way you want to close your story, depending what your story was from the very beginning.
So this little template, I hope, will help you out when you're trying to tell a story about your last holiday, where you were, what you did, where you were staying, et cetera, et cetera.
Maybe some surprising topic, maybe something that shocked you or anything like that.
Yeah.
Very helpful to have the storyline.
And as you mentioned them all, the little phrases are very useful because they don't come straight to my mind, all of them really good input.
But again, coming back a little bit more to the past continues, just for our listeners.
Do you use it a lot?
So I'm now asking you as a native, do you really use it a lot?
Because as I said, people only use it because they listen, they hear it when people speak.
Would people pick it up naturally, do you think, from natives a lot?
Yes, but I don't think it's something that we use all that much, to be honest with you.
I think it's one of those sort of fringe tenses that people should learn and to know how to use, but it's not one of the, as you call them, the big five, which is the big five are the big five and they really need to be known and well known.
But of course there are situations when we want to use them and we could come back to that a little bit later with our golden nugget today.
Yes, I think I'm going to mention this.
Just one more thing for the best takeaway for today is when they teach or when past continues here in Germany is taught in schools, it's always this explanation, two activities happening at the same time, which it is.
So the setting is, so you're on holiday or you were on holiday and that's going on for longer.
As I explained earlier, you have this image, this is ongoing for some time, could be two weeks, could be three weeks, could be a year spending time abroad.
And another thing happens at the same time.
So two activities and one is the framing activity.
And they just want to bring up one example of the school books very often.
When we arrived at the campsite, so this is just one point in time, it was raining.
And of course the rain started before you arrived and it continued while you were arriving.
But in theory you could use this to extend moments to a little longer period.
Yes.
And I agree, Dave, we don't use it as much, but it's very useful.
And once you have understood the concept of ongoing for some period of time, you can transport that into the past.
So I'm working and I was working, very useful because we don't use that in our language.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Maybe to come back to some problems that some people have, is this idea of the while and the during.
So if you want to talk about while, after the while, we need this past continuous.
So while I was traveling to Italy, we had a puncture, for example, with the car, with the wheel punctured.
So we had a puncture, that's the past.
So while we were traveling is the longer time and then this thing happened.
Often though, German speakers maybe say during we were traveling.
And that's of course a mistake because the during, after the during, we need the noun phrase.
So during the journey, we had a puncture.
Or while we were driving to Italy, we had a puncture.
So make sure you get it right.
The while with the verb form, the verb tense, the I was, we were, and then the during less than noun phrase.
I think that is also a small tip.
Very good point because that's really, really tricky for a German native to find out if it is correct because it sounds kind of okay.
During I was driving.
No, while I was driving, while I was staying.
Yeah, wonderful.
Cool.
Very good.
The golden nugget.
And the golden nugget for today is something that people also use the past continuous for is some people say I am wondering, but also I was wondering, this is a little more polite and less confident.
If you say I am wondering, maybe that's more towards the I think, but I was wondering is less towards the I think I believe a little weaker and a kind of requesting.
I was wondering the boss asking the boss, could I have a day off next week?
Yeah.
So people might use this.
And I was wondering whether you'd be interested in learning about my new book, which has been published recently.
It's about the big five, but international in English for an international audience.
So there might be people listening.
We know people listen from other parts of the world, not only Germany.
You could read all about the main, the five core tenses for English, which I believe are really important.
So that's out now.
Just take a look at my website and we link it here to the episode.
That would be wonderful.
And I was wondering whether you could buy it and write me a review, maybe hopefully a good one.
All right.
And in our upcoming episode, we'll be talking about how to keep up motivation and how to get over a learning plateau.
We know from our students, our learners, our clients, very often they find it hard to notice changes and progress.
And that can feel like disappointing or demotivating.
And this is a mindset topic.
Rebecca will give us very valuable input.
And we'll talk about this, how to motivate yourself to keep going and how to notice then further learning achievements.
Hopefully you'll be Pressing Play again.
And thanks for listening today.
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