Sunday, May 31, 2009

grammar book I recommend

Paulo from Italy wrote and asked which grammar book I recommend. My favorite advanced book is "Understanding and Using English Grammar." by Azar. When I taught at Santa Monica College I often had students buy that book. I love it. I have never found a better grammar book in all my years of teaching.

Go through all of the exercises in it. Make sure you know all the rules. It's a good review for those of you who have been out of school for a while.

As I said in a previous post, people will sometimes think they hear an accent when you are making grammar mistakes. Something about your speech will sound foreign to them.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

You've been very helpful, thank you.

By the way I just bought your book and I think it's great.

Paolo

Anonymous said...

Hello Lisa,

It's Alex here. I know we're supposed to talk about accent here but I just have this grammar question that really bugs me and would you pleeeease help me with this? Is there actually a rule about not using different types of tense in one sentence?

Is the following sentence correct?

"I chose to major in science because I think it is an interesting subject."

What if I still think science is an interesting subject now? Do I still have to say "I chose to major in science because I thought it was an interesting subject"?

Thanks very much!

Cheers
Alex

Lisa Mojsin said...

Hi Alex,

Yes, you can definitely say that sentence because "science is interesting" is a fact that does not change. Good question.

Just don't randomly change tenses within a sentence if there is no reason.

Lisa