Stative verbs and continuous tenses in English. Verbs can be divided in to two groups – stative verbs and dynamic verbs. Stative verbs talk about states – how you feel, what you see, what you like, what you hate. It is important to know the difference between stative and dynamic verbs because we generally do not use stative verbs with continuous tenses (the +ing tense).
Here’s an example:
- Present simple: I like Coca-Cola
- Present continuous:
I am liking Coca-Cola
Here are some more stative verbs:
- agree
- appear
- believe
- belong
- consist
- contain
- deny
- disagree
- dislike
- hate
- hear
- know
- lack
- like
- love
- need
- prefer
- see
- seem
- smell
- sound
- suppose
- surprise
- taste
- understand
- want
- wish
We will look stative verbs in more detail in Level B2.