A common mistake among English learners is using “fastly” to mean “quickly”, which seems logical because adverbs are commonly formed in English by adding -ly to the end of an adjective. For example, if something is slow, we can say that it moves slowly: it moves slowly. Unfortunately, languages don’t always develop in a completely […]

In English, the word “money” is uncountable, just like “water”. Just as we would say “that water”, not “those water” (and we probably all feel that “those water” doesn’t make sense), we must say “that money” in English (when you say “those money” or “these money”, it pulls on the ears just as much as […]

One of the constructions that English learners learn very early is “used to do”. We can say, for example I used to go there. I used to play the guitar. So it would seem logical that “use to do” (in the present tense) should correspond to the English verb “do”, but it doesn’t. The phrase […]

In English, the second degree of adjectives is formed by adding the suffix -er (except for a few irregular adjectives like good/better). Therefore, students (and native speakers) sometimes think that if something is “looser”, it should be “freer”. The fact is, however, that there is no word with three “e “s in a row in […]