In Spanish, we use the Present Progressive, also known as the Present Progressive tense (called “Presente Progresivo” in Spanish), to talk about things that are happening now or taking place while we’re speaking (at this very moment).

It’s formed with the present tense of the verb “estar” and the gerund of the main verb:

The verb “estar”, which is an auxiliary verb (a verb that helps form a tense), has to be conjugated differently depending on the subject pronoun:

On the other hand, the gerund has two different endings: -ando (for verbs that end in -ar in the infinitive) or -iendo (for verbs that end in -er and -ir in the infinitive) and stays the same for all subject pronouns. In English, we recognize the gerund by the “ing” ending of verbs (speaking, running, living).

There are, of course, irregular verbs. So, just to mention a few important ones:

For -er verbs whose stems end in a vowel, we add -yendo instead of iendo, like leer, traer, oir, etc.

Verbs that have a stem change and end in -ir, like dormir, repetir, pedir, decir, venir, etc. also have a stem change in their gerund, either o –> u or e –> i.

Some verbs are also totally irregular.

Note: “yendo” is not often used in Spanish. It’s used when we want to emphasize we are in the process of getting somewhere, like saying “I’m on my way to work” (estoy yendo al trabajo). In English, we use “going” quite a lot because we need it to form the future. In Spanish, we use a completely different grammatical construction to form this way of expressing the future and we do not use the gerund “yendo”.

And then, we have reflexive verbs, which are verbs indicating that a subject (someone or something) does an action to itself:

These become two-word verbs when we conjugate them:

They must keep the reflexive pronoun that goes with them when we transform them into the Present Progressive (Present Continuous). There are two possibilities for this: adding it to the end of the gerund or putting the reflexive pronoun before the entire tense.  Notice that if we use the first option, we must also add an accent on the gerund endings -ándo / -iéndo. 

Notice that in English, we use the present continuous for a variety of reasons, not just when we’re talking about things we’re doing now. However, in Spanish, we mostly just use the progressive for actions that are in progress, happening right now.  

It’s also possible in Spanish to use the Present Simple to talk about things taking place while we’re speaking:

A good rule of thumb is to use the present continuous in Spanish when you want to emphasize that the action is on-going or in progress.

Now test your knowledge with these present progressive quizzes.

Present Progressive Quiz

In this lesson, you’ve learned how to conjugate the present progressive (present continuous) tense in Spanish.  This tense is formed with the verb “estar” in the present and the gerund, recognizable by its -ando, -iendo endings.  To form the present progressive, we only need to conjugate the “estar” part of the tense and then add the gerund. Use the present continuous to describe on-going, in progress actions happening right now. Don’t forget that we can also use the “Present Simple” to talk about continuous actions. If you haven’t looked at “Reflexive Verbs” yet, be sure to do that next!