# Icelandic: Been doing something.



## ShakeyX

Just a little confused on this construction, what is the best way to say the phrase "I have been eating food all day".

"Ég er búinn að borða..." or "Ég er búinn að vera borða"

Sidenote on the second one, is it more proper to add a second "að" to the infinitive or what?

Thanks, just confused in the situation I should use this.


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## Silver_Biscuit

Ég er búin að vera að borða allan daginn / Ég hef verið að borða allan daginn

If you are "búinn að borða" then you finished eating / you have already eaten.


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## Alxmrphi

When you have *vera *and another verb in the infinitive then *að *needs to follow it, yes.
About the naturalness of the examples, I'll reserve comment on that and wait for a native/SB.

Edit: too late!


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## Silver_Biscuit

I'm not actually sure which one is more natural... my instinct says "Ég er búin að vera að borða allan daginn", I can totally imagine someone saying that. But I don't know, I'm pretty confident the other construction is OK as well. Any native please do contradict me if I'm wrong.

Edit: Just as an aside, it sounds odd to me to use the noun _food_ / _matur_ in this sentence in English _or_ Icelandic. I think unless you specify otherwise, people will assume it's food you've been eating.


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## ShakeyX

Okay well a native just wrote to me.... "Hvað ertu búinn að búa lengi á Islandi?" which I can only assume means how long have you BEEN living, yet there is no "að vera að búa"?


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## Alxmrphi

ShakeyX said:


> Okay well a native just wrote to me.... "Hvað ertu búinn að búa lengi á Islandi?" which I can only assume means how long have you BEEN living, yet there is no "að vera að búa"?


It's a recipe for confusion to associate the two tenses together as the same thing, but it's almost impossible not to in the initial stages of getting to grips with it.
If you treat it as an independent construction outside of English and think of it as... "Hvað [...] lengi" means 'How long' and the middle part is the rest of the question, which is 'búinn að búa' (completed stage of living so far), you can see it is asking how long has been your completed period so far of living in Iceland. That's the way you need to mentally think about it, but know that it translates into English as 'How long have you been living in Iceland?'. Note that this is also the translation of 'How long have you lived in Iceland?' or any other number of combinations (there is no strict 1-1 pattern).


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## Silver_Biscuit

Yes, literally this means "How long have you lived in Iceland?", NOT "How long have you been living in Iceland?". In the case of _að búa_ there would be no need to add the _að vera_ because the meaning is clear without it. "Hvað ertu búinn að vera að búa lengi á Íslandi?" just sounds clumsy and long-winded. 
With verbs like _að borða_ that doesn't work - you can't say "How long have you eaten?" or "I have eaten all day". 
I am pretty sure this will normally correspond to the English. If you can say "How long have you done something?" rather than "How long have you been doing something?" and it makes sense, then you can skip out _að vera_.


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## ShakeyX

So what would be your best translation, in several different circumstances, if someone said "Ég er búin/n að borða" rather than "Ég er búin/n að vera að borða"


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## Silver_Biscuit

OK, you are sitting with some other people having dinner. You want to know whether somebody has had enough and doesn't intend to eat any more. You ask, "Ertu búinn að borða?"

You go round to a friend's house and he is cooking something. He asks you whether you want some, but you have already eaten. You say "Nei takk, ég er búinn að borða".

There is something on offer to eat, but you are sick of it because you have eaten so much of it recently. You can say, "Nei takk, ég er búinn að borða svo mikið af þessu nýlega, ég er kominn með ógeð."

OR...

You come home and your housemate is sitting around eating snack food just like he was when you went out, you might ask him "Ertu búinn að vera að borða allan daginn?"

You've been trying to eat healthily and have been eating a lot of vegetables recently. You can tell someone "Ég er búinn að vera að borða mikið af grænmeti nýlega."

I don't know, it's hard to think up situations for these things, but the basic difference is that "Ég er búin að borða" means "I have eaten / I have finished eating" and "Ég er búin að vera að borða" means "I have been eating." It's as simple as that with this verb.


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