He learning English
A man holding a large book titled “Learn English” sits down next to me on the subway tonight. There is something endearing about people who are making the effort to learn your language. I look over at the page he has open, which contains a series of exercises involving the present progressive. It’s one of those “Follow the model” things where you conjugate the verb according to the sample sentence. Thing is, for some reason the example includes the “to be” verb as a contraction prior to the blank line. It was:
“We’re _______ to the store” (go). This was filled out as “going” which is easy enough. But the next one was
“She ________ a dress” (buy). According to the construction of the example, the correct word would be “buying,” right? Go is to going as buy is to buying.
Proper use of “to be” in English is fairly difficult to learn. Why exacerbate the problem by using illustrations with inconsistent construction? Every single one of this man’s answers on the page was incorrect, because he correctly followed a poor model. It’s not your fault, subway guy. They doing a bad job of teaching.
May 11th, 2007 at 6:15 pm
This is such a sad story….
May 12th, 2007 at 7:34 am
Maybe it was supposed to be, “She buys a dress.”