Use of the nuetral possessive 'their'

What to do with possessives when group is both genders or unknown and subject is third person: we can use the neutral possessive. Students in our Skype English lessons have great problems with this. Read on:

The neutral possessive used in third person for people is 'their'. So if we have a group of people composed of both sexes we should use 'their'. Consider: 'each student/everyone should hand in their homework on time'. Unless we know that the people involved is one gender, we should assume that there are 2 genders and thus utilise 'their'. If we know that the group has one sex only then we could employ 'his' or 'her' depending on the gender of the group. An alternative to 'their' often employed is 'his or her'. E.g. each student should hand in his or her homework. Have a good day/night. www.clasesinglesonline.com

Issues with 'since'

Good afternoon! Another problem area that Spanish speaking students have in our Skype English lessons is using 'since' . For instance, you cannot say 'I have been here since 1 year ago'. 'Since' used with the present perfect, present perfect continuous or the past perfect continuous tenses has to have an indication of the starting time of when the action began. So we would say 'I have been in Venice since Monday' or 'she has been studying Norwegian since March 2013' not 'since 1 year ago'. With the 3 afore mentioned tenses make sure you indicate the actual start time. If you translate structures like 'desde hace 1 año' literally you are gonna have trouble. With regard to other tenses not indicated above 'desde' when it indicates when an action starts should not be translated by 'since' but by 'from' for instance. Thus, 'she has class from Monday to Thursday' or 'they will be on holiday from January to March' or 'the trip occurred from June to August'. Hope that helps. Have a great day/night.

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