Grandiose Grammar

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It’s been a while since I last produced some content for this website and my podcast. Last week, I had some very interesting feedback from a friend regarding a comment I made about the sa…

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this week while preparing a lesson for one of my grammar classes I stumbled across a footnote in a grammar book on cognate objects. The topic is absolutely fascinating from both a gramma…

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This week I’m chatting with you about how to address people in emails. In this episode I have things to say about honorifics and mention the conversation about gender-neutral titles. If …

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I’m back with more from my interview with Anna. In this episode we talk about the impact of Covid-19 on teaching and what the future might bring. We also spoke about how a digital future…

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This week I’ve got another interview; this time it’s with my friend Anna. She works in adult education and has lots of really interesting insights into teaching. This week we talk about t…

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This week I’ve got part two of my interview with Anja. In particular, we discussed how Covid-19 has impacted our teaching. Anja brought up the topic of teacher bashing and the widespread …

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This week I’ve got part one of an interview with my friend Anja who is a teacher in Bavaria. This week Anja introduces herself and tells us a little about her work before we start digging…

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This week I’m going to talk you through the processes I follow when I see a verb phrase that my English-native-speaker gut feeling tells me is wrong and I automatically know how to correc…

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This week I’m back with another episode of say this, not that. I’ll be talking you through two errors that my students frequently make in written English and one transfer error from tha…

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This week I have part of my interview with Victoria Gath. In this week’s episode we discuss whether or not native English speakers make better English language teachers. Victoria speaks fr…

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In this episode, I bring to you an interview with my friend, and colleague, Victoria Gath. In this episode Victoria introduces herself and tells us about how her own experience of languag…

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I’m back with an episode on the as and when introducing adverbials. I’m slightly perplexed by a translation error lots of my students made in a recent piece of work. In an effort to untan…

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As promised, I’m back with an episode on mixed conditionals. This is a very dense topic and I’m sure it’s one that I’ll revisit in the future. Please note that while I’ve talked about a l…

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It’s good to be back! This week we have a topic that many people find tricky, namely conditionals. I’m starting off with the zero, first, second and third conditionals. These are all pre…

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Welcome back to another episode of say this, not that! This week I’m tackling some false friends from German. The first item that we’re taking a look at this week is the locative adverbia…

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This week I’m back with some errors that I routinely hear in my classes. While the present simple can be used to refer to the future in both German and English, Germans (or at least my st…

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This week I’m making a start on future time reference. As you know the linguists out there view the future as a tense but many grammarians think of future time as a semantic category. Tod…

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This week I’m correcting errors mainly with the prepositions of and for. And we’ll be taking a look at a false friend which has turned up in my inbox quite a few times recently.

If you wa…

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I’m going to take a look at how the German word sondern messes up your English. This is an error that I see fairly frequently in work produced by my students even at a very advanced level…

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This week it’s another episode of say this, not that. In this episode I’m focussing on errors that are made with interrogatives. All of these errors are a result of first language interf…