Wednesday 30 November 2011

Improve your English (4)

Describing people is a topic that beginner students have to develop for the conversation courses and I couldn’t help noticing some mistakes they tend to make.
During the first courses, students study the auxiliaries, “to be” and “to have” and with the help of some vocabulary, they try to develop some conversation topics. Describing people is one of them.

A few  tips:

Pay attention when you use the auxiliaries (and verbs) “to be” and “to have”. Due to some false similarities with the Romanian language, students tend to use them in the wrong contexts. So say: “he is tall and he has got blue eyes”. In Romanian we say: “El are ochii albaștri”, so students associate “are” from Romanian with “are”( to be) from English and they sometimes say “he are blue eyes” or “he is blue eyes”, instead of “He has got blue eyes”.

More mistakes students make when they use the word “medium” in their descriptions. So say:”he is of medium height” or “He is of medium built” and in this context of is the right preposition to use.

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