I can't get the right answer between live or living on a test

Question

Living with a foreign family can be a good way to learn a language.

or

Live with a foreign family can be a good way to learn a language.

Answer 1

One of the tricky things about English is that many verb forms are the same.

Live can be an imperative

live well!

Or a present tense

I live in Egypt

Or an infinitive

I prefer to live near my family

Living can be an active participle

I was living in Tehran at that time

Or a gerund (verbal noun)

Living abroad is exciting

In your sentence, can be is a verb and requires a noun phrase as a subject. You can use a gerund or an infinitive to form a noun phrase:

Living with a foreign family can be a good way to learn a language

To live with a foreign family can be a good way to learn a language

The first (living) is the most idiomatic way of saying this.

Answer 2

Your basic structure is

[[Something]] can be [[something else]]

Subject - verb* - object. What can be the subject of a sentence? Either a noun or a phrase that acts as a noun.

In this case the subject is going to be a gerund which is a type of noun made by adding -ing to a verb: Liv-ing. In this case, we think of living as a something - an abstract something, but a thing, not an action.

Living can be a good way to learn a language.

Now we have a fully grammatical sentence - but it doesn't really make sense. Not just any living is good for learning a language - we need to modify what kind of living it is. We'll turn the noun into a noun phrase by adding a prepositional phrase to it.

Living with a foreign family can be a good way to learn a language.

Note that since the noun is a gerund in this case, we could also call it a gerund phrase.

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Live is a verb, not a noun, so it doesn't work as the subject of the sentence.

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One other form that could have worked, if it were an option on the test is the non-gerund noun "life." This sentence would have a very similar meaning to the one that uses living:

Life with a foreign family can be a good way to learn a language.

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_{* Can be is actually a modal verb phrase. Can is the modal verb, and be is the bare infinitive of the verb to be.}

Answer 3

You could use live, but you'd need to restructure the sentence somehow:

• Living with a foreign family can be a good way to learn a language.

• Live with a foreign family – that can be a good way to learn a language.