My 12 year old son, a native English speaker, goes to school in Spain where we have lived since he was four. He has just come back from school with a 9 out of 10 in an English exam. He was marked down on the oral exam for pronouncing ¨girls´¨

English presents a number of issues to non-native (and sometimes native) speakers. It is grammatically unlike other languages, even those from which it has borrowed large vocabulary groups, and possesses a number of irregularities. Understanding

You cannot form irregular plurals by standard means, ie, adding -(e)s ending (one example is children ). 'Girls' is a regular plural formed by standard means. In the genitive case, it is both pronounced and written without the -s suffix:

Dear friend, else's - Charles' - - even though there is not -'s in writing, it is generally pronounced. boys' - - the suffix is neither written nor pronounced with regular plurals (unlike irregular ones, cf children's - )

Welcome to EF, badgrammar! I hope you'll soon be able to change your screen name to Good Grammar. It is correct to use the possessive form whose as a relative pronoun whenever a possessive form is needed: This house, whose windows are shut,

hi , the following contents are copied from another forum (very interesting) they suggest that vacancy should be treated as a collective noun the logic for sentence 1 and 2 is correct the logic for sentence 3 is wrong part1 Vacancy should be

Prescriptively speaking, "is" would be safer to use for formal English. However, when "neither" is followed by "of + plural noun", using a plural verb is extremely common -- particularly in everyday informal English.

They went back to the store again looking for another cart but there were/was none. Shouldn't it be was since cart is singular? I think I failed miserably to make my point. Yes, the verb agrees with "none," but if I'm not

The 2009 entry vacancy we currently have is for a position in our investment team. Our 2010 entry holds both investment and accounting vacancies. You say "clearly there must be more than one vacancy." Why "clearly"? It's

The second is correct, since the sentence is speaking of the single quantity of years as being / not being one era. If you use the plural, then we might think someone was considering each year as a separate era!