Hello, it has been a while. I am just adding this because some of my students have had problems with ‘ing’ actions and ‘go’ verbs. “He went to shopping.” MISTAKE. “He went shopping.” CORRECT. Go to a place but don’t go to an action. Use ‘go to’, ‘went to’ or ‘gone to’ with places. “I … [Read more…]
The adverbs ‘still’ and ‘yet’ are similar in some cases but also very different. For Japanese learners of English they can translate to the same word, and this can cause difficulty. You’re still here? You haven’t given up yet? Read on.
When you talk to or about someone you can use their name first and then afterwards use a pronoun. The problem with this is that it you can, without bad intentions, insult people or sound ignorant.
When you have to say something that needs to be in order you need to sequence your ideas. This can be done with the past, present and future. There are two main ways to do it: numbering your steps or without numbers.
Can you sum up, that is repeat something in a short way? This is what you should learn if you want to make yourself clear when explaining things.
This post is for beginners to use ‘there’ to talk about things in places.
Lots of students read as much as they can, all at once, to take in as much information as possible. However, sometimes it is better to leave space to guess in your reading.
When you read English for fun you might see some words you cannot find in the dictionary. Some of these have apostrophes (‘). This means they may be contractions, words made shorter by missing out letters and replacing them with apostrophes. Ol’ ‘Ol’‘ just means ‘old’, doesn’t it? Yes, but not in the way you … [Read more…]
Talking about periods of time and what goes on can be tough. Should you choose ‘while’ or ‘during’? As a general rule, use ‘during’ when you follow with a noun or short noun phrases but ‘while’ for something longer.
One of my junior high school students asked me this week, “How do I use ‘if’?” There are four main ways, as I’ll explain below.