By Tenses, Learning English

I don’t know when and where to use verbal or verbal phrase: The bird singing is a robin. Does it mean a bird is singing right now is a robin? ‘singing’ emphasizes the present continuous tense? Or it describes ‘the bird’, functions as an adjective? But I think there should be a Be-verb before...

You certainly have a knack for languages given the fact you only have been learning English for a mere year. Have does not carry meaning in perfect tenses; it is just a grammatical auxiliary verb.

Learning English by listening to songs is not always the best path. Like you said, there are often lines or words that are omitted. A lot of lyrics are written to fit the music. This causes many lines in certain songs to be grammatically poor. If you randomly listen to any song out there, you may...

English grammar is ok to me because Ukrainian grammar is much more complicated (similar to Latin in a way) :-S The only REALLY odd thing about English grammar is the tense system. The great problem about learning English is pronunciation because it's rather peculiar (at least it seems so to me)....

Soylista wrote:I am confused with this expression, "will be going to + Vb". eg. I will be going to visit Aunt Carol tomorrow.To me, this expression is sort of redundant. Why do you need to use both "will" and "be+going to"? I somewhat understand the differences between future meaning...

GoodmanI'm sorry I have no intention to argue with you, because I know we are on the different tracks. I'm rather interested in how queer or illogical idiomatic expressions in current English are formed, that sort of stuff seems far from your interest. One thing more, don't assume everyone here...

From "English Grammar in Familiar Lectures" (authored by: Samuel Kirkham) (published from Robert B. Collins, New York, 1828)When the perfect participle of an intransitive verb is joined to the neuter verb "be", the combination is not a passive, but a perfective form; as, "He is gone" ...

Um….Where do I begin? Well, I am almost sure one or two of you on this forum may have already heard the story before. As I’d said many time before, learning English is much harder for Asians than Europeans for the simple fact that Asian langauges are not made up of alphabets, except Vietnamese....

My mother tongue is Cantonese. I also learned Mardarin / Putongqua which is the official Chinese language in the Mainland at the same time I was learning English. Learning two languages at the same time really was quite a workout for my brain! I was Hong Kong born and have lived in the US for...

Paco, It’s rather coincident. I happened to start learning English at 17. At a late age like this, I’d struggled for 2 years without affectively learning much because I didn’t have any clue how to learn, retain and improve on English until I realized I wasn’t applying and practicing what I’d...