Going to vs Will — How to Talk About the Future
💬 True story: Working in hospitality, I once told a VIP guest: "I will get your table" — as if I'd just decided. It was booked for weeks. The right sentence was "Your table is…
Tag: Grammar
Past Simple vs Past Perfect — Which Came First?
💬 Story: A student wrote: "When I arrived at the party, everyone went home." — This means he walked in, and then they left. The real story was they'd already gone. One tense, completely different…
Present Simple vs Present Continuous — The Key Difference
💬 A student once told me: "I am loving this city!" She'd arrived in Sydney two hours earlier. The feeling made perfect sense — but English grammar didn't agree. Let me show you why.
Intensifiers: Very, Really, Absolutely, Utterly
One of the things I noticed moving from hospitality English to academic English is that 'very tired' felt wrong in writing. In speaking, it is fine. But the more precise you are — 'utterly exhausted'…
Prepositions of Time: At, On, In — Get Them Right
'I arrived in 2005.' 'I work on Sundays.' 'The restaurant opens at noon.' These three prepositions — at, on, in — govern time expressions in English. Bengali doesn't use prepositions the same way. French is…
Conjunctions: Connect Your Ideas Clearly
My daughter is 18 months old. She already knows 'no' — but she doesn't yet know 'however'. That one word, 'however', is the difference between a child's logic and an adult's argument. Conjunctions are the…
Adverbs of Frequency: How Often Do You Do Things?
When a French customer at the Ivy asked me how often I worked nights, I said 'I work night always.' The look on her face told me something was wrong. The correct order is: subject…
Gerunds and Infinitives: Stop to Think vs Stop Thinking
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…
Question Tags: Checking, Confirming, Connecting
Positive sentence → negative tagShe works here, doesn't she?
Wish and If Only: The Grammar of ‘I Should Have’
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…