by Martin Burke | Sep 28, 2020 | Everyday grammar
A student recently said to me ‘It was raining a lot, so I told my children that they don’t have to go outside’. ‘So’, I asked her, ‘did you give them a choice?’ ‘No!’, she insisted, ‘they wanted to go outside but I refused to let them go outside!’ That’s when I...
by Martin Burke | Jan 27, 2020 | Everyday grammar
When teaching recently, one of my students was talking about persuading English-speaking potential clients to start to use her company’s services. She said; “I will tell them that there are few advantages in using us…” In other words, she had suggested that there were...
by Martin Burke | Jan 16, 2020 | Everyday grammar
Learners of English are often confused about how to structure questions in English. It can seem like a complicated challenge at first. In the case of most other languages, you can ask a question by making a statement and raising the tone of the voice at the end of the...
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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