Good morning/afternoon: 2 common phrasal verbs you will find useful that our English students have trouble with are
'to be fed up with' meaning 'estar harto de' and 'to put up with'
meaning 'aguantar algo'. So we could say 'she is fed up with getting up
so early' and 'she can't put up with the barking dogs any longer'. Have a
Nice day/evening.
http://www.clasesinglesonline.com/
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
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.
http://www.clasesinglesonline.com
Good evening, another common error committed
by out clients in our Skype English classes concerns the use of the structure 'one of the'. When this
is followed by a noun students have the tendency to put the noun in a
singular form. Eg 'one of the pick up is a Toyota'. 'One
of the' must be followed by a noun in the plural form. Thus, 'one of
the pick ups is a Toyota'. A 'pick up' is a 'camioneta' in Spanish (most of our students are Spanish) in case you were
wondering. http://www.clasesinglesonline.com/
Another common error from our Skype English classes concerns 'familiar'. remember
'familiar' isn't an adjective of 'family' usually. So we wouldn't say
'I had a familiar reunion yesterday' but we'd say 'I had a family
reunion yesterday'. 'Familiar' is used to indicate that you have
knowledge about something. For example, 'I am familiar with Paris' or 'I
am familiar with chemical engineering processes'. Remember, the
preposition with 'familiar' is 'with'.
When we are talking about studying Spanish speaking students, in our skype English classes, often translate ‘asignatura’ with ‘signature’. Unfortunately, we have
a false friend here. A ‘signature’ is normally a ‘firma’ for example on
contracts, cheques and other documents. ‘Asignatura’ would be ‘subject’ such as
history, maths or linguistics.
Students wrongly translate in our skype English classes ‘en los ultimos meses/años/semanas etc’ literally. So we would not say ‘in the
last months’ or ‘in the last days’... what we can say is ‘in recent
months/days etc’ or ‘in the last few years/minutes/weeks etc’, or even
‘in the last couple of years/months etc’. Pick out the phrase which you
think is easier for you to remember.
http://www.clasesinglesonline.com/
