December’s intuition post took me on a long and unintended trip down my own language-learning memory lane and brought back all sorts of recollections of the processes I went through as a language learner. Here’s a thought that’s been nagging at me over the past month:
How do I know the English I know today? How did I build up my own linguistic knowledge / competence / intuition?
Here’s another post in the test your English series. This one focuses on the use of the gerund or infinitive after the word to.
Look at the sentences below. Would you use go or going to complete each one?
1. No, you didn’t wake me up. I am used to _____ to bed late. Don’t worry.
2. I attempted to _____ from my existing diet to one containing no carbs and nearly died.
3. I need to find something (or someone!) that will help me stay committed to _____ to the gym.
4. I like Starbucks, but I wouldn’t like to limit myself to _____ there only.
5. A certain celebrity, who shall remain nameless, recently admitted to _____ under the knife. Who could it be?
6. I am so looking forward to _____ on vacation.
7. Quote of the day: “In order to _____ up, one must go down, first.” Yeah, whatever.
8. I was offered an initial short-term contract with a view to _____ permanent.
9. When I was younger, I didn’t object to _____ to church. Now I kind of wish I had.
10. I am slowly getting accustomed to _____ to work on foot. It will take a little getting used, though.
11. My father’s company came dangerously close to _____ out of business.
Ready for the answers?
Which of these sentences are grammatically correct?
1. My boss gave me a very useful feedback the other day.
2. Supermarkets have aisles for different foods.
3. I have loads of homeworks to do.
Easy, huh? Well, carry on.
Last week I attended an interesting talk on the role of corpora in language teaching and it reminded me a small-scale, corpus-based study I carried out in the late 90s as part of my coursework at Lancaster university. Here are some of the questions I sent out to investigate using the British National Corpus: 1. … Read more