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Trey t 47a7871c38 Add 13 new grammar notes with 1010 exercises from video extraction

Scraped a 4h Spanish fundamentals YouTube video (transcript + OCR on
14810 frames), extracted structured content across 52 chapters, and
generated fill-in-the-blank quizzes for every grammar topic.

- 13 new GrammarNote entries (articles, possessives, demonstratives,
  greetings, poder, al/del, prepositional pronouns, irregular yo,
  stem-changing, stressed possessives, present/future perfect, present
  indicative conjugation)
- 1010 generated exercises across all 36 grammar notes (new + existing)
- Fix tense guide parser to handle unnumbered *Usages* blocks
- Rewrite 6 broken tense guide bodies (imperative, subj pluperfect,
  subj future) with numbered usage format
- Bump courseDataVersion 5→6 with TenseGuide refresh on upgrade
- Add docs/spanish-fundamentals/ with raw transcripts, polished notes,
  structured JSON, and exercise data

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>

2026-04-16 08:40:05 -05:00

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06. The Present Progressive

Source: video link

The Spanish present progressive expresses an action happening right now (English "I am ___ing"). It's built with conjugated estar + the gerund (gerundio) of the action verb. The verb estar gets full coverage in the next chapter — here we focus on building the gerund and using it.

Key Rules

Formula: conjugated estar + gerund.
-ar verbs → drop -ar, add -ando: hablar → hablando.
-er / -ir verbs → drop ending, add -iendo: comer → comiendo, vivir → viviendo.
Spelling rule: you cannot have three vowels in a row. Verbs whose stem ends in a vowel switch the i of -iendo to y: leer → leyendo (NOT leiendo), traer → trayendo, oír → oyendo.
Stem-changing -ir verbs change their stem in the gerund:
- o → u: dormir → durmiendo, morir → muriendo.
- e → i: decir → diciendo, pedir → pidiendo, sentir → sintiendo.
Subject pronoun is optional, but estar must agree with whoever is doing the action.

Conjugation: estar (present indicative)

Pronoun	Form
yo	estoy
tú	estás
él / ella / usted	está
nosotros/as	estamos
vosotros/as	estáis
ellos/as / ustedes	están

Gerund Formation

Infinitive	Type	Gerund
hablar	-ar	hablando
comer	-er	comiendo
vivir	-ir	viviendo
leer	-er (vowel stem)	leyendo
traer	-er (vowel stem)	trayendo
oír	-ir (vowel stem)	oyendo
dormir	-ir (o→u)	durmiendo
morir	-ir (o→u)	muriendo
decir	-ir (e→i)	diciendo
pedir	-ir (e→i)	pidiendo

Examples

Spanish	English
Yo estoy hablando.	I am speaking.
Yo estoy comiendo.	I am eating.
Yo estoy viviendo en Madrid.	I am living in Madrid.
Yo estoy leyendo un libro.	I am reading a book.
Yo estoy durmiendo.	I am sleeping.
Yo estoy diciendo la verdad.	I am telling the truth.

Notes & Gotchas

Don't use the present progressive for habitual or future actions the way English does ("I'm working tomorrow"). Spanish reserves it for actions in progress at this moment.
Avoid common learner errors: leiendo → correct is leyendo; dormiendo → correct is durmiendo; deciendo → correct is diciendo.
The full rules of estar (uses, accents, conjugation traps) are in the next chapter.

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