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For example – Why are you bringing up my failed marriage? That is a low blow. Par for the course – What was expected. This idiom comes from golf. When you shoot the required number of shots on a particular hole, you are said to have made par. If you make the required number of …

We form the passive voice by using the verb ‘to be’ and the past participle of a verb. We usually follow this structure with the word ‘by’ to indicate who does the action, however we don’t always say who does the actiona nd in this case we would not use the word ‘by’. The verb …

En este espacio gramatical que nos ocupa, trataremos un tipo de locuciones muy concreto: los somatismos, o lo que es lo mismo, fraseologías que contienen un lexema referido a una parte del cuerpo humano. Son muchos —precisamente por su alta presencia en el lenguaje común— los somatismos que encontramos en castellano: “hablar por los codos”, …

We are going to take a look at a verb tense, a perfect tense: the Past Perfect. We’ve introduced this tense in class this week, so we thought it would be helpful to go over it again and in greater detail. We use the Past Perfect when there are two actions in the past, one …

A big problem in English can be caused by either the location of the speaker or the listener. If I am at the top of a set of stairs, do I go down the stairs or come down the stairs? If I am in a room, do I tell a person to come in or …

There are many idioms in English that are in common use every day. So much so that a lot of people may not even realise what they are saying or the real meaning behind them. They have become so common place that they have lost some of their original meanings. Here are some of the …

One of the most important steps in learning to speak English as well as a native speaker is mastering two things: phrasal verbs and idioms. Because the list of phrasal verbs is so long, we’re going to leave that for another day, and focus on idioms this week. Specifically, we’ll be looking at American idioms. …

The British have a reputation for repressing their emotions. The expression ‘one swallow doesn’t make a summer’ is a handy encapsulation of the national tendency to not get too carried away when something happens, i.e. to stop one’s emotions from overriding one’s plain common sense. This phrase (‘one swallow…’) means that just because one good …

Many of us have experienced situations where we have tried to do something without success – meaning we ended up where we originally started. There is an expression in English for this scenario: that we have ‘gone back to square one’. This means you have to start a process all over again, e.g. ‘Joan was …

We use the words ‘who’, ‘which’ and ‘that’ at the beginning of a relative clause. These words are called relative pronouns. We use ‘who’ for people, we use ‘which’ for things and animals and we use ‘that’ for people, things and animals. For example we say “I know a man, who lives on a boat”, …