Teacher Discussion Forums

Hello People Who speak a latin-based language like me, talking about subjunctives is quite common, for we use and abuse of them a lot, but, when it comes to English there are people who claim that English has subjunctives in sentences like: (1) If I were you, I would be here on time next Monday. (2)...

Dear Larry Yeah, I got you, giving it a second thought , I think that sometimes we as teachers perceive things in a narrow way and lose all the opportunities which looking at the big picture can gives us. We (I'm talking about me and teachers who behave like me) teach our students some bad habits wh...

English and Portuguese are both Indo-European languages, thus they both have inherent structural and lexical similarities. José, you'll know better than me what exactly these similarities are. That means after learning the natural sentence structure of our native language we should find other relat...

Hi all. There was a comment about fuzzy areas, and we know how many of those there are in any language. I always tell my students that what I teach them is correct up to a certain point, but there will always be strange situations. But most students seem to want to know the "rule". Only some can de...

Hey Lorikeet , could you tell me one thing? Using your two sentences: (1) He went to the laundromat to wash his clothes. (2) He went to the laundromat for washing his clothes. Why is sentence(2) wrong? Using FOR, it wouldn't demand a noun (or a verb transformed into a noun)? Or is it pragmatical (no...

Now, if you accept the basic idea of departments, then it's becomes really important in which department a thought began. A piece of language that begins in English and gets later translated into Spanish, isn't going to follow the same path as something that started in Spanish. Which language you t...

Oh yeah Larry ,as clear as the bluest skies of summer

The way I describe uncountables is: if you would normally only use part of the whole, and you have to measure it when you buy it then it's uncountable. For examples, peanuts are uncountable, "I want 40 grammes of peanuts, please". However, if you buy them in a pre-packaged bag, then the bag (and th...

Hello Iain I got you, in fact sometimes we come across some words that seem unpronuncedable (this one would be a very good example, if it exists :shock: ) anyway, our pupils tend to think that we should know the foreign language we teach even more than our own, and the book I use is the kind of show...

Iain Indeed, no native is the same as another one, but my question was in fact focused in the big picture, for example, a Portuguese speaker may have problems in identifying 'g' or 'j' when these letter gather with 'e' or 'i' (for both letters bear the sound /j/) or identifying 's' or 'z' gathered w...

Hello again I am aware that some verbs like like, love, realise, believe and etc are considered in English state verbs and thus one cannot use them ina progressive form (I'm knowing, I am realising...) I would like to know whether there is any possibility for using these verbs in a progressive form ...

Hello People That just came on my mind, English is known for being a language with poor ortographical x phonetical relationship (for instance the letter 'a' can bear the sounds of /a/ as in fAther, /ea/ as in bAd, /eI/ as in mAde, /I/ as in villAge) and adding the fact that there is no graphical acc...

Hello people

Iain, I never gave it a thought, how Spanish has been influencing American English, that's quite interesting.

José

Hello people I'd like to ask you some things about comparasion (and by extend the superlative): 1. The rule of the thumb is one syllable word adds an -ed at the end of a given word (cold-> colder, small-> smaller, tall-> taller, fast-> faster...) 1.1 But, I've seen lots of natives (mainly) deviate t...

Hello people I am new here, I am Brazilian and a EFL teacher. As far as pronunciation is concerned, I always try to force my self to reach at least an almost native-speaker pronunciation, for Brazilian Portuguese has fewer vowels sounds than English some words like least and list can bear the same p...