Christmas Christmas is fast approaching and, as if you didn’t have enough on your plate at work, you now have to remember all that once-a-year vocabulary you need to be nice to your English-speaking contacts. If you’re not sure about the differences between a bank...
WHAT HAPPENS WITH «JUST»? JUST is one of those useful words that fills the gaps you need for thinking while you’re speaking. Native speakers use it often in a range of common expressions because its meanings are flexible, highly useful and normally invoke the Latin...
Nobody wants to be the bearer of bad news and it’s even worse if you have to do it in a foreign language. It’s best to do a bit of advance planning: think about what you’re going to say and how to say it in English. Apologise It’s best to get the bad news out of the...
If you’ve been near an airport this summer there’s a good chance that you’ve come across the English word ‘DELAYED’ at some point. Delays seem to be a fact of personal and professional life these days, but this is dangerous territory if you have to do business with...
What the February…? In my previous blog, I recognised how hard it is to pronounce the days of the week in mydysfunctional language. This time, we’re dealing with the months, so there are twelve of thebastards, but the good news is that not all of them bite… Badly...
A History of the Days of the Week in English (And how to pronounce them) When it came to calendar stuff, Germanic people generally copied the Romans, who named their days of the week after gods or planets. The traditional first day was given the name of the most...
Last time, I tried to summarise the uses of the keyword LIKE in English. This time, I’m attacking its confusing partner in crime: the even-more-useful AS. AS versus LIKE The first problem with this word for many people is how to distinguish it from LIKE. I said last...
Do you know how to love Like? In recent blogs, I attacked the tricky differences between the verbs do and make, but there is another pair of problem children in the English language: AS and LIKE. They both correspond to one keyword in many languages, like como in...
In my last blog, I said that if you’re not sure about the differences between the verbs do and make, you should start with do as your main option and learn ‘exceptions’ when you need make. The first occurs when you want to emphasise that you’ve created something new,...
Do or make? If you have problems choosing between do and make when you’re speaking English, you’re not alone. It’s one of the most common questions that I hear in my classes, and the truth is that I still don’t think that we teachers have a totally satisfactory...
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