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Showing posts from March, 2011

Verb Tense Inflections

  A verb tense, in the strictest definition of the term, is the time frame in which the action is placed; thus we have the traditional idea of past, present and future tenses and within these three basic time frames, we can also differentiate certain other aspects such as the subjunctive or progressive tenses, plus other ideas such as the imperfect past, the conditional tense, and imperative. The tenses of the verbs, in reality, rely entirely on the directions we employ over them. Whereas conjugation is the movement in the pronunciation which indicates the relative position of the subject of the verb - personal vectors - the tense of the verb is a different relative positioning in our conception of time, thought and attitude. In English, it may at first seem difficult to perceive the difference in verb tenses due to the absence of easily identifiable verb endings; the tags that identify both the tense and person; thus discerning the different senses (or directions) is also, at first s

About this blog

The blog is currently undergoing certain changes to better organise the ideas, features and resources In this space, apart from self learning pages, exercises and ready made video transcripts to link to news, songs and video comedy, you will further find a totally new vision of grammar - which I have called Directed Pronunciation, which, in this case, has been applied to English. The approach is radical and not everyones cup of tea. Indeed, one leading publishing house, Cambridge, said their material would not be confortable next to mine on the same book shelf - so draw your own conclusions. Therefore, be prepared to be shocked but remain open minded in order to change every concept on grammar that you may have ever read. Presented here, grammar is nothing more than a sense (in Portuguese "sentido" sense / direction) a movement, direction, flux or flow. Grammar is the delivery, it carries the voicing and intonation but more than anything else, grammar

Make or Do

Make or Do? With much of the other grammar difficulties falling like flies, how about an explanation for make and do ? The native speaker again has an innate sense of the usage, so once again, in distrust of perfection, without a safety mechanism of some sort, there must be a trick. And it is not as if the choice is deliberate. Only when we compare English to other languages do we see that this separate choice of verbs may be covered by one global solution, for example, Fazer in Portuguese or Hacer in Spanish, which presents one hell of a headache for the poor learner from such cultural comparisons. Now some teachers and teaching methods like to explain the essential difference with arguments like opposing poles of creative actions (make) against the routine ones or even boring ones (do) as the road to success; nevertheless, even with a certain truth to these arguments, I don’t find the argument a conclusive one because this still requires us to think which is right than to simp