Use question tags to check information
Question tags are a part of English that a lot of non-native speakers make mistakes with. Here’s a quick guide to some of the most common tag questions.
Grammar
Almost Everybody Loves This Site
‘Almost’ is a tough adverb to use. It describes similarity or quantities. However, it is often confused with ‘almost all’ and ‘almost everyone’.
I’d like to help you use ‘would like’.
It should be simple to use ‘would like’ but this is taught and checked so badly that many students can’t use it accurately. In this post I’ll use the contracted form ”d like’ because this causes most of the errors I encounter.
Basic Punctuation Guide
This is a very basic punctuation guide. It should help you with academic English and also English for general purposes.
Podcast: Daily Routines
This week’s podcast is about daily routines. Remember, adverbs of frequency (always, sometimes, usually, never) go before the verb. I always wake up at half-past six. Adverbial phrases go at the end of the clause. I go running three times a week. 20140723_routine.mp3 The podcast is also available in the iTunes Store by searching for … [Read more…]
How Do I Speak Faster?
Speaking speed is one of the things most students feel nervous about at one stage or another. What is the right speaking speed? How do you get it? What do we talk about when we talk about speaking speed? I think I have all of your worries covered.
An Easy Way to Vary Your Sentences
Whenever you write, it is advisable to vary your sentence structures in order to keep your readers’ interest. In this post, I’ll show you an easy way to do this using relative clauses.
Regrets
Regrets are difficult for students to talk about. What’s a regret? It’s wishing you could change the past by doing an action you didn’t do or by not doing an action you did do. You can express regrets by using the verb ‘regret’ in the following way. Using a gerund (‘~ing’ verb) and object: “I … [Read more…]
Colloquial Pronouns
Everybody knows the ordinary ‘I’, ‘we’, ‘you’, and ‘me’ pronouns. However, there are other more colloquial pronouns that native speakers use which can be a little tricky for non-natives. The first-person singular ‘us’ This is pronounced as /uz/ and is used in place of ‘me’. It is used throughout Britain, though not as much in … [Read more…]
Practise Grammar Using Your To-Do List
I have written before about using your to-do list as a way to practise English but why not use your to-do list for more repetitive grammar study? You could use this system for present perfect tense, modals and contrasting the simple future, present continuous and simple past tenses. Present Perfect Tense Simply add the item … [Read more…]