Hi. My name is Rebecca. In today's lesson, you are going to have a chance to correct
some errors in English grammar. I've written some sentences on the board, and each of these
sentences has some kind of English error. It might be in verb tenses, it might be in
prepositions, word order, or something else. Go through the sentence, I'll give you a little
time to look at the sentence and try to find the mistake, and then I'll explain the mistake,
okay? Let's get started.
First one: "I have met John last year." "I have met John last year."
There is an error in every one of these sentences.
Do you know what the error is in the first sentence? Any idea? Think about it. Okay.
I'm going to correct it now. The error is in this part. Because we have said "last year",
we can't use the present perfect tense. Right now, when we said "I have met John last year.",
it's the present perfect tense. With present perfect tense you can't use a finished time.
So: finished time, as in "last year". As soon as you use something like "last year", "yesterday",
"last month", "last summer", and so on; that means you are talking about the past or even
three hours ago, which is already the past, and that's a finished time. When you use present
perfect, you cannot use a finished time marker. You can use an unfinished time, like "today",
"this week", "this month", and "this year", but you can't use a finished time. If you
need to mention a finished time in a sentence, then you just go back to use the past simple
tense, as we've done right here. I've taken out the "have", and it says
"I met John last year." Now, that sentence is grammatically correct.
Let's look at the next one: "She's engaged with a dentist." "She's engaged with a dentist."
Take a second. You have any
idea where the error is? The error is here. It's the wrong preposition. The preposition
should be: "She's engaged to a dentist." We actually say "engaged to", "married to". Here,
the problem was with the preposition.
Next one: "I must to go home now." "I must to go home now."
What's wrong there?
Here is the error. The error is the fact that we don't need to say,
"I must to go", but just, "I must go home now." "I must go home now."
"Must" is a modal, just like "should",
"could", "can", and so on. You should be saying, "I should go home now.", "I must go home now.",
"I could go home now." With all these modals, the verb that follows should be used directly
and not in the infinitive form. We don't need to say "I must to do something." "I must do
something", "I must go", "I must study", "I must work", and so on. That was the error
here.
Next one: "She's been in London since 5 months." "She's been in London since 5 months."
Take a second. What's the mistake there?
Now the error is over here, because we cannot say "since 5 months". We use "since", plus
the point in time when something happened. If you're giving the length of time, or the
period of time, then you have to use the preposition "for". This part is present perfect, that's
fine. Very often with present perfect, we do see time prepositions, like "since" and
"for", but you have to learn how to use them correctly.
Next: "My wife engineer." "My wife engineer."
What's wrong with that? Well, there're a couple of things wrong with that.
First of all, in every English sentence, it's very important to know that you do need
to have a verb, and this sentence has no verb. The verb in English can also be the verb "to be",
because that is a verb, but you need some verb. Every English sentence requires
a verb, so we need to add a verb here. "My wife is..." But now, because 'engineer' is only singular,
it's one person, we need to add the indefinite article, "a". But it's not "a" because there
is an "e" here, so we actually need to add "an". "My wife is an engineer." So there are
a couple of grammatical points to think about in making this a correct sentence, right?
First, we had to add the verb, "is". Next, we had to add an indefinite article. Normally,
if it was something else, like a doctor, then we would have just said "a doctor", "a dentist",
but because the word starts with an "e", we need to say "an engineer".
To improve your English, you need to do these kinds of exercises. Go to the RESOURCES section
of our website, www.engvid.com , and download a list of 50 of the most common grammar errors
that we have listed for you there. Good luck with your English. Thanks for watching.
Learn English for free www.engvid.com