Sunday, February 27, 2011

"To be" in the simple past - Exercises

I hear excellent speakers of English make this mistake in basic grammar too often, where they incorrectly conjugate the verb "to be" in the simple past, confusing "was" for "were" and vice versa.

Even though they know the difference if they think about it, they haven't made this frequently needed part of the language automatic yet.  So I put together a few exercises for some practice...

Exercises: one, two, three, four, five (try to do this last one in 10 seconds or less.  Don't think, let your "good ear" answer).

2 comments:

  1. LOL..... the last task was funny.....And I got all of them correct, yjei!!!
    To be serious, I did not get to many errors in theese tasks.......c",)It is useful to test yourself like this, I think.

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  2. Yeah, it's good to test yourself. I don't think it is that hard to answer correctly when you have time to think it out. It's in real life, when you don't have the time and you're concentrating on other things - the person standing in front of you, the ideas you are trying to communicate, etc. - that it becomes more difficult to get all of these little details correct. So testing yourself will make it more automatic and you won't have to think about it so that you can concentrate on other things.

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