Thursday 20 December 2007

Brainstorming

In this post I want to look at how to use the phrase brainstorming correctly, for my YouTube video lesson on the subject click here.

For more lessons click here to go to my website.

Brainstorming is used, usually in business situations, to describe when a group of people come together to solve a problem.

Normally a problem is identified and then a group of people come together and think about the problem and express their ideas to fix the problem. How good or how bad the ideas are, is not important. A list is made of all the ideas and then best ideas are the ones chosen one to be used to solve the problem.

BECAREFUL some people think that the phrase brainstorming is offensive to people who suffer from epilepsy, however in a 2005 UK survey of epilepsy sufferers 95% said they did not find the word offensive.

Click here to go to my website for more:
www.smartlanguagesolutions.com

Tuesday 18 December 2007

Question Tags

Question Tags.

In this post I want to talk about using question tags. To see my YouTube video on the subject, click here or click here to check out my website.

In English we use question tags as a way of moving a conversation on (i.e. keeping it going).

To use a question tag, we make a statement then we put a two word tag at the end of the statement, which we hope will make the other person or people in conversation with us continue the conversation.

For example:

Statement:
“It’s a beautiful day”

Question tag:
“Isn’t it?”

Answer:
“Yes it is. (or no it’s not)”

Q: “It’s a beautiful day, isn’t it?”
A: “Yes it is”

Statement:
You’ve been to Spain

Question tag:
Haven’t you?

Answer:
Yes I have. (or no I haven’t)

Q: “You’ve been to Spain, haven’t you?”
A: Yes I have.

How to make a question tag.

The first part of the any sentence using question tags is a statement, and it is the statement that is the key to the question tag.
In our example statement, “It’s a beautiful day”, we can see that the first part of the statement are the words “It is”.
To make the question tag, we use these two words and do two actions to them!

The first action is to reverse the word order:
“It is” = “is it”

The second action is to change the verb from positive to negative, if the verb is positive, or from negative to positive if the verb is negative.
In this example the verb is positive so we change it to negative.
“Is” = “isn’t”

This then gives us the question tag; “isn’t it?”

“It’s a nice day, isn’t it?”


In our second example, the statement is:
“You’ve been to Spain”

So to make the question tag we take the first two words in the statement; “You have”, reverse the order, “have you” and make the verb negative “haven’t” which makes the question tag “haven’t you”

“You’ve been to Spain, haven’t you?”


If the sentence is negative, the same rule applies:

Example:
“You don’t like wet weather, do you?”

The first two words in the sentence are “You don’t”.
Applying the rule we reverse the order, “You don’t” = “don’t you”, now we make the negative verb positive, “don’t = do”, this gives us the question tag “do you”

Remember English is Easy, especially if your teacher is good!

If you would like to know more then click here to check out my website:
www.smartlanguagesolutions.com

Wednesday 12 December 2007

How to use So and Neither

In this post I would like to look how to use “so” and “neither” to express agreement with someone.
If you want to see my YouTube video on the subject, click here.

For more lessons click here to go to my website

When someone makes a statement, you might want to agree or disagree with them. If the statement is a positive statement, and you want to agree with the statement then you use so, if the statement is negative, and you want to agree with it then you neither.

The positive statement:
I’ve got a new car.

You agree with it:
So have I

The negative statement:
I don’t have a TV

You agree with it:
Neither do I.

When we use so and neither, our answer must use a positive auxiliary verb.

So have I NOT So haven’t I
Neither do I NOT Neither don’t I

If we want to disagree with a statement then we use the opposite auxiliary verb from the original statement:

The positive statement:
I’ve got a new car

You don’t agree with it:
I haven’t

The negative statement:
I don’t have a TV

You don’t agree
I have

If you want to more lessons click here to go to my website:
www.smartlangaugesolutions.com