By Tenses, Indefinite articles

Hi all!I've been giving English conversation lessons to a theology professor for about a year now. He's getting on in the years - a couple years from retirement - and his primary goal has been just to get his spoken English going a little stronger. His mother tongue is French but he's...

Just to clarify about the indefinite article: it's OK to say "stores and restaurants see sharp decline in sales" without the article when using the present tense; in fact it has the ring of a newspaper headline. On the other hand when using the gerund not using the article in this...

Thank you, Avangi. In my previous post, I should have used third-person verb tenses, 'sounds' and 'gives' -- proper subject-verb agreement wasn't made due to my carelessness. Going back to your request for examples of cases where I would feel something in quotes could not be...

Hi,could you please answer the questions below? They're all related to giving directions.1. Someone is asking for directions to the bank. What can you say instead of the highlighted part below to sound most natural?Take the first right. Take the first right. The bank is the first building on...

Neither of your natural-sounding examples has an indefinite article followed by a time unit followed by "before" within an "if" clause. It seems to me that one or more of these factors must be contributing to the difference we sense. "I think we have met before" has no article and time unit, so...