I strongly disagree that there is any coffee on that table with the Nescafe powder.

Either bolded could be correct. If you want to specify that the year isn't over and he might go again, make the prompt "So far this year..."

@ Lapka- 250 is the highest possible score - it's not necessarily 100% but it means you would go into the highest groups we run.

Yes, that's true, because someone could be taking the test at the end of the year. - You get a few "New Year's resolution to learn English" registrations.

In order not to Zoltan the hell out of this thread, so I'll put the rest of my comments in this post.

General. If you use which is not correct/normal/etc., make the "not" VERY obvious, or you'll get false positives from folks reading the first snetence and just clicking on it if it's fine.

Bolded is not formally incorrect, but it's very unlikely. "...proven his ability..." imo

I don't think I'd say that one "gets" capital punishment.

If any of your folks learned American English, rather than British, they may be taken aback by "plaster" in the medical question. While most of your Brit-isms are easy to get from context, that word doesn't make any sense in a medical context in 'Murica.

No, it just isn't idiomatic. You can point at 'that group of middle-aged men over there' but you can't say someone is 'in the group of middle-aged.' It would have to be 'in the middle-aged group'.

Americans say 'in school.' And, weirdly, they even say it when they mean 'at university.' Of course, American university courses are equivalent to British sixth-form ('high-school') courses, not that that's any excuse.

Even with lapka teaching, I suspect the drop-out rate would be pretty severe once she reached 'the aspects of the verbs' -- the element of Russian grammar that just makes you give up.

Zoltan the universities truther?

Thanks - have changed most of the "not" to "NOT" and the instance of "incorrect" to "NOT correct".

re: proven - originally that was "I have proven my" and I changed the "I" and "have" but missed the "my" - thanks for that particularly. It could have sat there for years. The wrong (therefore right) answer in that one is meant to be the one that starts "She proven" when it should be "She proved" or "She has proven".

Ok, I've taken the "get" off all the options in the penalty one.

In the UK "a plaster" is "a band-aid" or also "plaster" is the stuff used to make plaster casts around broken legs. If it doesn't have either of those meanings in the US it's still fine as the answer to "Which is NOT a symptom of a health problem?"


Adjectives substituting for nouns are pretty rare in English and they tend to be of the form of "the" plus adjective and refer to a whole group in society. E.g. "the rich", "the poor", "the dispossessed", "the hungry", "the elderly", "the young", "the French". You don't become part of "the hungry" just by not eating for 5 hours.

(for those who doubt these are adjectives rather than nouns that are derived from adjectives, there is a book I'd highly recommend to people interested in this stuff called "A Student's Introduction to English Grammar" by Huddleston and Pullum which advances justifications for this - particularly that the above are modified by adverbs not adjectives - e.g. "the extremely rich" rather than "the extreme rich")

The above aren't used for discussions of small groups, though you can split them a bit in discussions which are still whole-society - e.g. "Some of the poor don't deserve our help."

Apparently "the middle-aged" can be used in the same way but it's much rarer

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dict...%20middle-aged

https://books.google.com/ngrams/grap...or%20.%3B%2Cc0

It does register though beating (imho) some invalid ones like "the tall." (the dot is to make it only count ones where the sentence ends and therefore there isn't some other word following).

I was aware of those meanings, as I lived in the UK for about 3 years. It will still work in American English, it just won't have the subtle variation that it is something used to treat a health problem instead of a symptom thereof. Instead it will just be a random old-fashioned construction material thrown in to a list of health issues. Not a huge issue, I just wanted to bring it up in case you were preferring something health related.

Agree totally.

Wait now, i would say 'a couple of seconds' 100% of the time and I'm as American as apple pie.

(I'd also say that I had a couple of beers, worked a couple of extra shifts, etc. The 'of' would be abbreviated to an 'a' sound, of course. Couple-a seconds)


I don't know if there's anything technically wrong with this paragraph but it's very clearly written by a non-native speaker. It makes me smile. Your 'foreign sounding English' is a charming, pleasant exoticism.

In the first sentence, i think moving the word 'here' to after 'no one' would make it sound more natural. "I appreciate big time that no one here ever trolled me bad or was mean to me for my English". That's not proper English but it is how an English speaker would speak informally.

Although I once witnessed an interesting scene

Once, I was sitting there listening to my music and saw a couple in the opposite seat...
or One time I was sitting there listening to my music and saw a couple in the opposite seat...(2nd version is better imo)

Suddenly the dude put his hand...

lapka,

Whatever you do, don't stop writing gems like this - "I am slightly amused, thinking that he is going to pull out his best piece."

present tense (is/do) means "now".
past tense (was/did) means "at that time"
present perfect (have been/have done) means "before now, till now, so far, never at least till now"

So "no one ever trolled me" would mean "nobody ever trolled me during that (longish) period". Or for example "No one ever bullied me when I was at school." What you want is "Nobody here has ever trolled me badly or been mean to me because of my English."

For the same reason, it should be "Russians who have lived ...", because you're not (only) saying they live there now, or (only) that they lived there in the past, but you're saying both together. ("have been living" is also possible)

The Slovaks have the same tendency as this. I always give them the example of the info under a youtube video - it tells us how many people have watched the video (so far) and how long the video has been up (so far). The equivalent in Slovak (and from the above I assume Russian too) would use past tense for the number of people and present tense for the length of time, yet in both cases we are referring to the same time period. "has done" / "has been" is for exactly this kind of case on the boundary between present and past.

It's true that in American informal speech the above rules can sometimes be ignored but that doesn't IMHO make it any easier for learners unless people can give further rules or info explaining when the rules can and can't be ignored. But tbh I hear "no one ever trolled me" as someone trying to say "no one has ever trolled me"

I'm teaching a lot of women from Ukraine at the moment, and every time I correct their pronunciation of the "H" sound (they pronounce it in the throat like the "ch" in "loch" or a Spanish "J") I feel like I'm destroying something beautiful.

Thank you guys. I understand every piece here. I understand why "the dude", I understand why I should use present perfect I even understand why I don't do it although I know better. In Russian it would be either present or past tense similar to Slovak. Mehhhhh. Kick me!

And clearly it feels good to read that my English is "charming" and "pleasant" and that I produce "gems" (completely unintentional ). But it is better to be at least able to speak proper English and be intentional with effect my words produce.

Lapka,

intentional about the effect

Understand that proper English and being intentional about the effect do not necessarily align. Sometimes, you might want to specifically use improper English and/or idioms to stress a point you're trying to get across.

Example: if I were to tell a specific idiot ex-manager, "How 'bout you stop being so ****ing stupid for a change?"

Sure, but in a certain form of demotic American English you can omit the 'of'. And otherwise you can't.

And which role does chop play in this game?

What do you do if you have no clue what you want and also no real clue what the other player in game wants (the suspicion is that he is also kind of confused )?

The question here is "What do you do __________________?"

The rest of it is not questions so shouldn't have question sentence order.

Consider the following:

Question 1: Where do you live?
Question 2: Which street do you live on?
Fact 1: I live in Slovakia.
Fact 2: My address.
Fact 3: Which street I live on.
Fact 3: Lapka knows I live in Slovakia
Fact 4: Lapka doesn't know my address.
Fact 5: Lapka doesn't know which street I live on.

Note that Fact 3 follows normal fact sentence order similar to Fact 1 and not similar to question 2. This is because (as seen in facts 4 and 5) "which street I live on" is a fact (or better described as a piece of information) equivalent to "my address".

Question 3a: Do you know any interesting facts?
Question 3b: Do you know my address?
Question 3c: Do you know which street I live on?

Note that all questions are asking if we know various facts. In 3c, even though the sentence as a whole is a question, "which street I live on" is a fact being asked about in the question.

... so that's why it should be "what you want" and "what the other player wants"

In materials for EFL learners these are called "interrogative clauses" though in more hardcore linguistics stuff that term can also include normal questions.

I couldn't get the context from the thread but unless there is a limited set of possible roles to choose from that chop could play, then "what" is better than "which". Also I'm not sure if you're really asking a question or just continuing the above, in which case it would be ....and what role chop plays in this game.

Adjective with so
Africa is so exciting.

Noun with such
Africa is such excitement.

Noun phrase with such
Africa is such an exciting adventure.

Meeeeehhhh. I know it. Why am I doing such really easy stuff wrong although I know it better?

Lektor, tx.

This both haven't been in my head as a formal rule. If we ever end up in the same city, dinner is on me. Given that I did two times ski hollidays in Tatranska Lomnica the likelyhood of that is even greater than zero.

Neither of those have been in my head...
.. I twice took ski holidays...

Gonna have to go with Loveable Rogue here.

Given that I've taken ski holidays in Tatranska Lomnica twice, the likelihood of that is even greater than zero.

The important part of this one is moving the number of times to the end of the clause.

There is a mild preference for using the past continual "have Xed" form, since you are hinting that you may do so again, but the simple past is OK too.

There is a very mild preference for "taking" holidays, rather than "doing" holidays, and I'm not even sure it matters in British English. There is also a very mild preference for "twice" over "two times," but "two times" doesn't sound wrong.