Job Discussion Forums

[Stephen Jones]

Let's try and explain it simply.

2) When I am sitting on the soft bed, I feel very comfortable.

This is grammatically correct but the situation it is describing is a lilttle strange. There are at least two beds in the room and one of them is soft and the other(s) is/are hard. The speaker (Goldilocks?) is in the habit of stting on the bed (presumbly there aren't any sofas in the room) and is very comfortable doing so, which suggests he/she is in the habit of doing other things in that room which don't make her anythng like as comfortable.

Note that the contrived nature of the sentence comes from the definite artilce. Note also that you could change the present continuous "am siiting" for the present simple "sit" and the meaning would be exaclty the same.

Now let's look at

1) When I was entering into a dark room I felt very nervous.

The first obvious mistake is that "into" is incorrect because enter is a transitive verb - unless we want to enter into the special meaning of "enter into" :)

The second mistake has to do with the article and with the use of the past continous as opposed to the use of the past simple. As another poster has said:

1b) When I was entering the dark room, I felt very nervous.

is quite correct. entering[ b]a[/b] dark room can only mean repeated action in the past, and for that we use the past simple.

1c) When I entered a dark room, I felt very nervous.

or probably better

1d) When I entered a dark room, I would feel very nervous.

The construction "when + past contnuous//past simple" is used to refer to a one-off action which is interrupted.