My first question to myself was: If I wanted to translate 'Ich bin am Kochen' for an English-speaking person so that he could understand what the German 'am' or 'beim' means how should I translate it. This 'a-' must be the rest of a preposition. In English there are older forms of expressing continuity: - We were a-hunting (spelling?). It was the German 'Ich bin am/beim Kochen' that gave me the idea that the English continous form (to be + prpa) might be historically to be + gerund. Not every speaker uses this form, but every speaker understands it.) Both sentences are 'I'm cooking (at the moment)' in English. (That is a widespread way of speaking in a lot of regions. Couldn't they be gerunds? German expresses the aspect of continuity in a different way: - Ich bin gerade beim Kochen (Kochen is a gerund after a preposition). But there came a day when I asked myself: Are these verb forms really prpa-s. So for many years it never came into my mind to ask myself about the nature of these verb forms. And schools in Germany take great pains to teach pupils the use of the continuous forms which in German have not the same importance as in English and schools have a lot of difficulty to make the continuous forms understandable.
Influenced by school I took the verb forms of the three examples above for a prpa. Anyway, that's not the problem I want to present here. As gerund (ger) and prpa have in the historical development taken on the same form and as sometimes it is a bit difficult to distinguish between ger and prpa - English textbooks for the English language often speak of ing-form, which on the one hand is elegantly avoiding a grammatical difficulty ( to distinguish between the two), on the other hand it's an a bit lazy method.
I'm cooking - I'm reading - I'm spring-cleaning Generally the verb form in these three examples are seen as a present participle (prpa).
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