What is the difference between ''have lived'' and '' have been living''?

[LukeShum]

I have lived in Hong Kong for 10 years

and

I have been living in Hong Kong for 10 years

Could anybody tell me What the difference is?
Please

[Thackology]

Both tenses are correct. However, “have been living” oftentimes indicates a temporary situation. For example, “I have been living in Hong Kong, but I intend to return to my native country someday.” If you consider Hong Kong your permanent residence, then “have lived” would be the more common usage.

[LukeShum]

But i tnink that ten years is not a temporary situation, why is “have been living” correct

[Thackology]

Both tenses, present perfect simple and present perfect continuous, can usually be interchanged. The concept of “have been living” implying a temporary status is not a rule, more of a tendency.

[OxfordBlues]

Actually it has nothing to do with temporary or permanent.

First, it’s important not to mix up terms: Tense is only present/past/future (and variants of those). These examples are both the same tense (present). Aspect is the use of structure to express duration (in English durational aspects are expressed with the form BE+verb-ing). Perfection is the use of structure to express completeness of the verb (HAVE+participle of the verb) – this allows the speaker to show that the action of the verb used is completed as of some point in time (which when used with the present tense is always now – the time when the sentence is uttered, so it reads “as of now, the verb (live) is completed”. Completeness and duration can also be inherent in the meaning of the content verb itself (as in part of the idea of the verb is that it naturally has some sort of duration or is naturally finished (like die or sneeze or cough). These characteristics as part of the verb’s meaning are called Aktionsart. Perfection and aspect can either emphasize or override the aktionsart of the verb.

In your examples you have:

I have lived in Hong Kong for 10 years. ==> this is perfected, non-durational aspect in the present tense (that’s how you actually read that).

and

I have been living in Hong Kong for 10 years. ==> this is perfected durational aspect in the present tense.

So the only difference between the two sentences is that the second one uses its structure to express duration of the content verb ‘live’ while the first one does not.

That is normally a big difference, but in these examples, the content verb used already has natural duration as part of its aktionsart (because you naturally ‘live somewhere’ over a period of time versus for a single moment). So, because the verb is already durational, using a durational aspect doesn’t change the meaning at all. Now, if you were to use this combination in the past or present tenses, having durational aspect with durational aktionsart would allow you to further specify or accentuate a given part of that duration. For example: I had been living in Hong Kong for only 3 months when the storm hit, but I’ve lived there for 10 years overall.

Check out the TAMPA series on my site for a more thorough explanation of how tense and such works together to express time information.