Good morning, good afternoon and good evening, readers! Today’s English snack is small, but important. A lot of English learners get this wrong, and it’s easy to get confused. When is it considered morning, afternoon, evening and night? How do…
Do you ever feel ‘stuck’ in your learning? Have you ever felt like you don’t progress for months and you lose the motivation to study? Trust me, this doesn’t only happen for English learners! Here are some techniques that I…
When I started learning Spanish, I realised that there is only one word for these two verbs in English: ‘hacer’. It made me understand more easily why some English learners get these two verbs confused. Here is my tip to…
In my first article about how to learn phrasal verbs, I mentioned that you should group your phrasal verbs together with a common verb. Today’s common verb is ‘break‘. I also mentioned that conjuring mental images and stories to help…
The two words ‘speak’ and ‘talk’ are synonyms and can very often used interchangeably. However there are some grammatical structures where only one of the two can be used. Let’s explore these today: The first thing to remember: Speak is…
Very vs. Too I often see this common error in people from all native lanaguges. “I went to the movies on the weekend and it was too much fun.” I always think to myself, “Why is that a bad thing?”…
Have you ever heard someone say the words ‘wanna‘, ‘gonna‘ or ‘dunno‘? These are informal contractions or abbreviations that shorten the full words, which have formed in the English language over time during faster conversation. When you watch movies and…
I have conversations every day with English learners and they all tell me the same thing: the hardest thing about English is the pronunciation. I have posted a recent article about how to improve pronunciation for Spanish speakers. However I…
In English, we do not use the double negative grammar point, which can lead to mistakes if you use it in your native tongue. I’d like to write today about when to use ‘nothing’ and ‘anything’. The word ‘nothing’ is…
You all know the basic English greetings “Hello“, “Good morning” and “Good afternoon“. However, what do you say at night? If you said, “Goodnight”, you would be wrong. We say “Goodnight” when we are leaving or going to bed. Note: The…
Recently I posted a blog about English pronunciation which outlines how many different vowel sounds there are in English – nineteen. NINETEEN! 19!! No wonder you find it difficult. So here is an article that explains why. I am studying English…
One of the hardest things for Spanish speakers to get when learning English is the pronunciation. You can be a master of grammar and know a mountain of great vocabulary, but the different accents and ways to say each sound…
I often see people writing sentences like this: “I was running very quick to the park.” This is a common error that can bee avoided by explaining the difference between adjectives and adverbs, and when to use them. Adjectives These are words…
Everyone tells me that they have trouble learning phrasal verbs. In my first post about phrasal verbs, I mentioned that you need to learn the expressions as a whole, and try to think of stories or pictures to go with them.…
I started learning Spanish nine months ago. Since then, I have reached a point where I can have a full hour-long conversation with someone, write a story without many errors and watch a movie without subtitles. People I meet tell…
One of the most common mistakes I see from English learners is the absence of the word ‘it’. This word just appears magically in English sentences and corrections, doesn’t it?! Don’t worry, even advanced learners that I speak to still leave it…