2

It is well-known that action verbs, such as "go" can go before "would" to refer to past habits. But a friend of mine says that it cannot be used in the following example:

When l was a child, l would go to my grandpa's farm.

He insists that we should use "used to". He even didn't give any explanation. Is he correct?

Mo Ali
  • 33
  • 3
  • 1
    You have picked up the habit of using lower case "L" (l) instead of uppercase i (I) in some fonts these look the same. But don't trust that. Use Shift+i to create the right spelling. – James K Jan 28 '23 at 15:19
  • 1
    see also https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/118175/would-and-used-to?rq=1 and https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/247441/used-to-vs-would?rq=1 – James K Jan 28 '23 at 15:21
  • Does this answer your question? Would and used to – Joachim Jan 28 '23 at 15:23
  • Your friend is mistaken - *would* and *used to* are both perfectly natural for the cited context. The only contexts I can think of where they're not interchangeable are as in @Joachim's link. You can say *I used to be fat* to mean you were fat for a relatively long time in the past, but *I would be fat* is either nonsense or it means something completely different. – FumbleFingers Jan 28 '23 at 18:51

1 Answers1

2

"Would" has several meanings: it forms future-in-the-past sentences, it is used to form conditional clauses and it can be used for past habits.

To make it clear what sense is being used, you need some context:

When I was a child, I would go to my grandpa's farm if the weather was fine (conditional)

When I was a child, I would go to my grandpa's farm every summer (past habit)

Without that little bit of context, it is rather unclear. Which is why "used to" is probably clearer.

James K
  • 217,650
  • 16
  • 258
  • 452
  • The conditional sense in your first example comes from "if", not "would". It's perfectly natural English to say, "When I was a child, I used to go to my grandpa's farm if the weather was fine." I agree with @FumbleFingers that would and used to mean the same thing in the OP. – Peter Kirkpatrick Jan 28 '23 at 21:34