I trained as a sommelier at Uccello and Establishment — two of Merivale's restaurants in Sydney CBD. The vocabulary was its own language. Guests would ask for 'something dry, not too oaky' and I had…
When I was learning French as an adult — working towards C1 — I realised I had stopped thinking in English while I studied. But I had also stopped to check my English grammar. Same…
Positive sentence → negative tagShe works here, doesn't she?
I sometimes lie awake and think: I wish I had written that down. If only I had kept a record from the beginning. Now I write everything. But the grammar of regret — wish and…
"I need an information." I said this. In a job interview. The interviewer smiled kindly and said nothing. Information is uncountable in English — a fact that ruins sentences for speakers of almost every other…
When I managed a team of fifteen at the Ivy, I learned more phrasal verbs in two months than in two years of study. "Hand in the stock report." "Don't put off the complaint." "We're…
My first year in Sydney, 2005: I had been walking for three hours when I finally found a café that was hiring. I walked in. The manager looked up. That was my start in hospitality.…
When my daughter was born, I thought: I will teach her everything I know. But Vanessa, more practical, said: I'm going to book her first check-up tomorrow. And our neighbour texted: We're coming round on…
After the incident at work that cost me a role I had trained for, I spent weeks thinking in the third conditional: If I had known, I would have done it differently. If they had…
People ask me: if you hadn't left Bangladesh, what would your life look like? I always pause. The second conditional is the grammar of that pause — imagining a different present by changing a past…
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Sourov Deb EI · SIRET 106 764 061 00011 · Saint-Pierre, La Réunion