weekly posts on literature, languages, and learning
In response to a recent question from several of my students, here’s a grammar post about two confusing verbs: lie and lay. (Actually, it’s three verbs, but we’ll come to that later.) TO LAY ‘To lay’ means to put something down. It is followed by a direct object, i.e. it’s a transitive verb—after it we …
In this post we’ll look into the basic differences between two English tenses that students often confuse: Present Simple and Present Continuous (also known as Present Progressive). If you are in a dilemma about which tense to use, ask yourself the following: I. Are you talking about something PERMANENT or TEMPORARY? For something permanent or …
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Please email me for further information. To reach the post office, walk farther down the street. Further, farther… What’s the difference? Is it just two different spellings of the same word? The answer is yes—and no. Please read on for some explanation. Both ‘further’ and ‘farther’ are irregular comparative forms of the same adjective (and …
In this grammar post we’ll be discussing different types of conditional sentences in English: how to structure them and which tenses to use. At the end, you’ll find an online grammar quiz on this topic. We have a lot to cover, so pour yourself a nice cup of coffee and let’s get started! CONDITIONAL SENTENCE …
This post has been written with ESL / EFL students in mind, intermediate level and above. The verb ‘to use’ is a key element in several widely used grammatical structures that students sometimes confuse or don't use properly. In this post we’ll go through them, explain their meaning and, finally, practise a bit. USED The …
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[This post has been written with ESL/EFL students in mind, CEFR level B1 and above.] Are you bored or boring? Was the last film you saw interested or interesting? There are many adjectives in English that can be used with the endings -ed and -ing, and students sometimes confuse them. If you are unsure when …
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In a recent grammar post I wrote about personal pronouns in English, but one thing I deliberately omitted there was the presentation of the archaic forms of the 2nd person singular. Those are thou / thee / thy and thine, which you may have come across in literary or religious texts. Let's first see what …
[This post has been written with ESL/EFL students in mind, CEFR level B1 and above.] Thus sang Billie Holiday in a lovely song first recorded in 1937. Besides her, many others have made use of the three forms of the 1st person singular pronoun like that, to emphasise the intensity of their feelings: not just …
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[This post has been written with ESL/EFL students in mind, CEFR level B1 and above.] Correlative conjunctions are used to join words, phrases or clauses within a sentence. They always come in pairs, which is where learners sometimes make mistakes. In languages such as the South Slavic ones (which most of my students speak as …
Mark arrived on time. Or was it in time? At time??? The use of prepositions in English can be quite confusing to native speakers of other languages. Prepositional phrases can be even trickier because they seem to have a special logic of their own; one needs to learn them one at a time, understanding the …
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