help me find an English grammar rule?

[ratcreature]

In English with some verbs you can use their ing-form after go, i.e. sentences like "I go running often", "we are going shopping" etc., but with other verbs this is not allowed, i.e. you don't say "we are going eating"(*) but "we are going (out) to eat".

I think the rule is that the construction is only allowed with movement verbs, like go walking, swimming, dancing, etc. all work, but not with reading, knitting or painting. I'm actually unsure about playing, but I think not? OTOH working and hunting seem okay in the construction?

I tried finding the rule for this in grammar explanations but I'm not even sure whether the -ing is considered a gerund or a present participle here. So I was hoping that maybe the English language geeks on my f-list could point me.

Comments

[sealie]

I googled, and one website summed it up as: Sorry, there isn’t a rule. You have to learn which verbs go with which pattern.

https://learnenglishteens.britishcouncil.org/grammar-vocabulary/grammar-videos/verb-ing-or-verb-infinitive

this link is quite interesting and also points out that there is a difference between British English use and American English use in some cases

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/words/verb-tenses-adding-ed-and-ing

Also to add confusion to the mix there's informal and formal use.

how does it go?

spanish and italian: So THESE words are feminine and THESE words are masculine, and you ALWAYS put an adjective AFTER the noun.
french: haha i dont fuckin know man just do whatever
german: LET'S ADD A NEUTRAL NOUN HAHA
english: *shooting up in the bathroom*

[ratcreature]

It's always something with languages. And yet Esperanto never makes much of a dent.

But you know what is far worse with German than the genders is that plurals are not regular. You don't just have to memorize the article together with the noun, but its plural. There are some regular patterns, but many nouns don't follow, so the only way is to memorize. Not just some exceptions like the English mouse/mice and child/children, German words are almost all like that. And there are six different ways to make a plural (not counting the irregular ones coming from Latin and Greek imports), so no lack of choice.

Actually for many nouns there are competing plurals. Sometimes that changes the meaning (e.g. in German "the bank" and "the bench" are both "die Bank" but banks are "Banken" yet benches are "Bänke"). Sometimes there are regional differences. Sometimes as native speaker you don't know which plural to use, and often words adopted from other languages shift their plural as they become common.