by Martin Burke | Jan 16, 2020 | This is how we say it
I’ve noticed quite a number of my (otherwise linguistically competent) learners of English making the following (admittedly not very serious) mistake when translating the French word ‘après’. In fact, it’s not really a mistake as such, but another example of something...
by Martin Burke | Sep 22, 2019 | This is how we say it
‘How about’? or ‘What about’ Some advanced learners of English occasionally confuse these two expressions… If you say ‘What about…?’, it has a sense of ‘I think that you’ve forgotten about…’, or ‘I think that you...
by Martin Burke | Sep 19, 2019 | Everyday grammar
For those of you learning English, you might have encountered the interesting situation where a single person is referred to as ‘they’. Consider for a moment the following sentence in French and think about how it might be translated into English… ‘Si tu rencontrais...
by Martin Burke | Sep 19, 2019 | Everyday grammar
How do we usually talk about the future in English? Present tenses to talk about the future We saw in my previous blog post that when we know about the future, we often use the present tenses. We use the Present Simple tense for something scheduled, or which you...
by Martin Burke | Sep 15, 2019 | Everyday grammar
When beginning to learn future tenses in another language, we often use the grammatical structures in our own language as a reference point, and, at the beginning of that process we often apply the future tenses according to the same rules. For example; English ...
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