>>>What you're saying in English is "During quite some time I continued to fail to pull it up" :-)
>>
>>Which is actually (or accidentally) the correct meaning :).
>
>No, it suggests you tried but failed several times, or went to pull it out but decided against it. As in "I went to the tobacconist's every day for a week, but didn't buy any cigarettes" cf "I haven't bought any cigarettes for a week".
>
>Trust me.

I do trust you - I just don't trust myself to learn the difference and speak accordingly. In Slavic languages there's a clear distinction between imperfect and perfect verbs (i.e. where the action is continuous or one-time) that I simply feel; in English I only know that "to be *ing" is definitely continuous, and that simple present tense usually means a continuous (i.e. imperfect) verb, and the rest is unclear. I say "usually" - because even in this sentence, "I say" is not continuous. There are too many exceptions that I simply cannot feel the rule.

>BTW I've been reading a book about Latin recently, "Amo, ams, amat and all that" and came across a subject of ours from a few weeks ago: those English verbs that, when "ing" is added to, become like a noun, e.g. "Hear" - "Hearing". They're the neares we have in Eng. to the Latin gerund - that's the expression I was ytrying to get out. :-)

It was called gerund when I was learning English. Has anything changed?