would

[veggie]

two sentences from a book:
"I used to smoke, but I gave up 5 years ago."
"He would/used to always be the first to arrive at parties."
my question is why can't you say "I would smoke..." if WOULD is used to talk about regular/repeated past actions?
and why can you say "He would always be..." if "to be" is a state and you can't use WOULD with states (and situations)? or maybe WOULD here is similar to "that's typical of him"?
look forward to hearing from you

[Jacek]

HEYA

Check this link out! republika.pl/clickandbite/minilesson5.htm

Andre gave there a complete lowdown on this grammar issue.

Minitest no 43

[veggie]

still, i can't find an answer to my questions there

[veggie]

hey how about my answers? can anyone help?
thank you!!!

[par]

It is not clear what "would" means in this construct. The sentence vacillates somewhere between " I wouldn't mind having a smoke (because I still feel the urge?) but I don't want to break my five-year-old resolution of quitting smoking" and "I used to smoke, but I quit five years ago."

To show that your "would smoke" is about my habitual smoking in the past, you would have to explain it somehow.
For example,
"I would smoke three packs a day when I was younger, but my wife made me quit five years ago."

[xeo]

"Used to + infinitive" and "would + infinitive" have similar meaning except for annoyance on the part of the speaker. If "would" is stressed it means that the speaker didn't like a certain pattern of behaviour or events happend presistently in the past.

So veggie I think you can use these two expressions interchangeably, the only difference: emphasis...

just look at any kind of transformation... "used to" is always substituted by "would" and the other way round.
We've always been taught that transformations have to have, more or less, the same meaning so it means that you can use it in that way...interchangeably...