[Grammar] "it's fun to watch", or "it's fun watching"? and similar

[euromike]

Hi, so Hillary Clinton tweeted

It’s so much more fun to watch FOX when it’s someone else being blitzed & sacked!
​

I'm not a native speaker and as such I often make mistakes. TO DO vs. DOING is something that I often find confusing. In the above example, especially if it was the past tense, I would have written "It was fun watching ..." Would that be correct? Does it depend on the tense (is/was) used?


Another, similar question: can I write/say "My preference would be not having to take indirect flights" ? Or is only "My preference would be to not have to take indirect flights" correct ? And while we're at this one, would "I'd prefer to not have to take indirect flights" sound much more natural, or are the examples starting with "my preference" also correct?

thanks

 

[bhaisahab]

Hi, so Hillary Clinton tweeted

It’s so much more fun to watch FOX when it’s someone else being blitzed & sacked! ​

#SuperBowl

I'm not a native speaker and as such I often make mistakes. TO DO vs. DOING is something that I often find confusing. In the above example, especially if it was the past tense, I would have written "It was fun watching ..." Would that be correct? Does it depend on the tense (is/was) used?

Hilary Clinton's tweet is perfectly OK. It would be wrong with "It was fun watching...".

 

[euromike]

Obviously Hillary's tweet was correct, I never suggested otherwise. I was merely asking whether some of the other forms that I mentioned would be correct, also those in the second part of my question.

 

[MikeNewYork]

Obviously Hillary's tweet was correct, I never suggested otherwise. I was merely asking whether some of the other forms that I mentioned would be correct, also those in the second part of my question.

There may be a misunderstanding here. Your original sentence was "

It’s so much more fun to watch FOX when it’s someone else being blitzed & sacked!"
​

I would have no problem with either the infinitive form "to watch" or the gerund form "watching" in either the present tense or past tense.

It's so much more fun to watch FOX when it’s someone else being blitzed & sacked!
It's so much more fun watching FOX when it’s someone else being blitzed & sacked!
It was so much more fun to watch FOX when it was someone else being blitzed & sacked!
It was so much more fun watching FOX when it was someone else being blitzed & sacked!

If you change the first part to "It was fun watching" much of the original meaning is lost.

Your next questions were:

"​

Another, similar question: can I write/say "My preference would be not having to take indirect flights" ? Or is only "My preference would be to not have to take indirect flights" correct ? And while we're at this one, would "I'd prefer to not have to take indirect flights" sound much more natural, or are the examples starting with "my preference" also correct?"

In this first question, you can use either form. I prefer ​

"My preference would be not having to take indirect flights" because it eliminates the repetition of "to". For the second question, you could use "I'd prefer" with either form.

[edited to add: I have no idea what happened to the formatting.]​

 

[Raymott]

[...] I was merely asking whether some of the other forms that I mentioned would be correct ...

And bhai said, no, your suggestion is not correct. I agree.
Clinton was mentioning a universal truth; she was not describing one episode of watching Fox.

 

[c2k5]

(1) In the city, fawns are fun to watch.
(2) In the city, fawns are fun to be watch.

Washington, D.C. is home to many deer. They are sweet-looking, especially the baby fawns with their white spots. In the city, they are fun to watch, but they do cause trouble. https://learningenglish.voanews.com/a/deer-caught-in-headlights/5578858.html

Are they all grammatical, identical and natural?

 

[teechar]

The first one is okay, but the second is ungrammatical.

 

[Rover_KE]

c2k5, please start a new thread for this question, which is completely unrelated to the eight-year-old thread to which you have appended it.