Gerunds

I'm fairly sure gerunds are one of the reasons English is so hard for non-English speakers to learn the language. We'll use any noun as a gerund . . .

A little lesson from Braingle:

A verbal is a verb that is used as a noun, adjective or adverb. For example, the verb sing can be turned into a noun by adding -ing as in, "People enjoy my singing". There are three types of verbals.

Gerunds
We have just seen this type of verbal. These are constructed by adding -ing to a verb to turn it into a noun. Here are some more examples:

"I went fishing."
"I love reading what you write"

Participles
A participle is a verb that is used as an adjective. A present participle always ends in -ing but a past participle can have different endings (-ed, -en, -d, -t, -n). Here are a few examples:

"The crying baby was hungry."
"Bob crawled away from the broken toy."

Infinitives

An infinitive is an unconjugated verb with the word "to" in front of it. These can be used as nouns, adjectives or adverbs. Some examples:

"I waited for the weekend to arrive."
"He wants to fly."

Now, all that seems perfectly reasonable.

What we do as Americans, possibly all English-speaking nations, and really, maybe other languages do this too:

My husband prefers porching when reading, i.e., he likes to go out and sit on the porch to read his books.

I have a friend who goes mushrooming, not as inane as some gerunds, she's going to pick mushrooms.