Pre-course Study: Grammar
You’ll be glad to hear that I did, eventually, manage to get my desk tidy yesterday. Then, having no further excuse for not doing any work, I took another look at the pre-course study pack provided by ULT. Because it’s such a short course, we’ve all been sent this pack to give us some preliminary knowledge of grammar and phonology. I’d read through the whole thing before; yesterday I set about actually trying to learn the grammar part of it.
This is grammar as I’ve never seen it before: grammar with a highly practical application. Instead of learning the names of different tenses and how to form them with different kinds of verbs, the important thing here is to know the context in which each formation would be used. Some things are counter-intuitive. The Simple Future tense (eg I will go to London tomorrow) is less common for expressing the future in informal conversation than using the Simple Present with a future time marker (eg I am going to London tomorrow). I imagine trying to explain to a group of students that, although I will go is technically correct, it sounds much more normal in everyday conversation to use the present tense to describe what’s going to happen in the future. Hm. No wonder people think English is confusing.
