Present Perfect: Tense of the Living Past
On Time Perhaps unsurprisingly, English grammar is quite punctual. Tenses are used fairly consistently to separate past from present and although we never got round to inventing future tenses, we manage with will. Unlike some other languages, the rules are pretty...
Further Comparison
Comparisons can be difficult for us to learn. Last week, I outlined the rules we traditionally teach for making comparisons with adjectives in English and suggested that they may be too complicated to learn naturally for many adult learners (including me). If you...
Comparatively Speaking
When I started teaching English, I worried about how I would remember all of the grammar rules in class. Slowly, I memorised all the grammar sections of all my textbooks until for a short time, I felt like I could relax. Whatever anyone asked me in a class, I could...
Can you make do with “do”?
The question in the title may be a bad teacher joke, meaning something like “Can you survive with just do?”, but it is also a serious one. For many of my students, choosing between “do” and the similar word “make” when speaking English can cause a lot of problems, and...