"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…
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…
At CDG airport, it was snowing. Vanessa had been waiting for four hours. She said: "I knew you would make it." Years later I still replay that sentence. In English, to tell someone else what…
Réunion is the island where my daughter was born. The hospital where she arrived was small, clean, and impossibly calm. The nurse who handled the C-section had been working since 4 a.m. Relative clauses pack…
"I want a water." I said this on my first week in Sydney. The waiter stared. Water is uncountable — you don't say a water unless you mean a bottle or a glass. Articles were…
💬 From my own experience: In hotel incident reports, we always wrote 'The bottle was broken' rather than 'Tom broke the bottle.' That passive form is not evasion — it focuses attention on the event,…
My first mentor at Merivale said: "You should taste before you pour. You had better know your list. And you ought to remember every regular." Three modal verbs, one shift. I learned all three that…
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Sourov Deb EI · SIRET 106 764 061 00011 · Saint-Pierre, La Réunion