What English particularly excels at is the ability to describe very precise pieces of time. What do I mean?
In a lot of languages, there is no grammatical difference between "I go to the store" (in general) and "I am going to the store" (right this minute). There is no present continuous - no ing form - in many other languages.
It works in past and future tenses too. You could say something like "Bob was going to the store when he saw Cathy." That seems simple but in German for example, you would have to translate that as something like "As Bob was directly en route to the store, he saw Cathy". You have to go out of your way to specify in another way exactly what action he was doing at that precise moment because there is no verb form that allows you to easily do that like you can in English.
yep.
in not so many words.
hehehe