Ron's ESL Blogs

Interjections are sounds, words or phrases that express the speaker’s emotion.

Here are some examples:
Ouch! It hurts!
Hmm… That’s an interesting question.
Hey! What are you doing?
Wow, that’s wonderful!
My goodness, what happened?

What is special about interjections is that they remain unaffected by the rest of the sentence. They do not change their form. They do not have singular/plural form, different tenses etc. Also, a single interjection can be considered as an Entire sentence!

Example:
Goodbye!
(That’s the whole sentence…)

Sometimes regular words in the language function as interjections.

Examples:
Yes!
Sorry!
Ok.

How to use interjections?
You can use them to express emotions such as surprise (e.g. oh!), annoyance (e.g. damn!), joy (e.g. Hurray!), etc. They are also used to greet (e.g. hi!), pause your speech (e.g. um…) and so forth.

Writing tip: When combining the interjection with the rest of the sentence you should usually use an exclamation mark (!) or a comma (,) depending on the strength of the statement.

Examples:
Wow, this is awesome!
Ah, that’s nice.

Interjection is a part of speech. Click here for more data on the English parts of speech.

The following is an important thing to keep in mind when learning English verb tenses.

It is known that the Present Progressive tense is used for actions that are taking place now, or for actions that are temporary.

For example:
“We are having dinner at the moment.”
(This happens right now.)

“He is renovating the house these days.”
(This is a temporary action.)

However, the Present Progressive can also be used for planned future actions.

For example:
“We are celebrating tonight.”
“She is starting a new job tomorrow.”

So how can we distinguish between the present and the future? Time expressions are used exactly for this purpose.

Future words, like “tomorrow”, “next week”, etc, indicate future actions.
Words like “now”, “at this moment”, “these days”, etc, indicate actions in the present.

– Ola Zur, www.really-learn-english.com.

The prepositions “at”, “in” and “on” can be confusing for English learners. Their meaning is so close that it is sometimes hard to tell when to use each word.

Here are some guidelines that will help you decide on the correct preposition to use:

1) When you want to speak about a precise time, use “at“.

Examples:
The movie starts at nine o’clock.
They arrived at 6 PM.
The meeting is at 4:30 this afternoon.

2) When you want to speak about long periods of time (such as months, seasons, years, etc), use “in“.

Examples:
I returned to Canada in 1998.
We first met in June.
The lake will unfreeze in the spring.

3) When you want to speak about a particular day, use “on“.

Examples:
She will be back on Thursday.
I was born on January 2nd.
They will join us on Thanksgiving.

Ola Zur is the editor of Really Learn English Vocabulary and Easy English Grammar.

English plural forms tend to be pretty simple, in most cases. You usually add s/es/ies in the end of the word and your job is done.

Examples:

kid -> kids

box -> boxes

baby -> babies

However, some words change differently.

Examples:

child -> children

man -> men

woman -> women

person -> people

mouse -> mice

foot -> feet

fish -> fish

sheep -> sheep

datum -> data

bacterium -> bacteria

How can you know the plural form of each word? You can always check it in the dictionary.

Ola Zur is the editor of Really Learn English Vocabulary and Grammar with Illustrations, an illustrated guide to English.

One of the most frequent words in English is “run”, but did you know it had over 40 different meanings?

Well, it does. We won’t go over all of them in this post, but we’ll definitely cover the important ones for you to know.

So here are the meanings and examples of the word “run” (past tense: “ran”)

Meaning #1: to move very quickly.
Example: “He ran after the bus, but it didn’t help.”
“The children are running up and down the stairs.”
“He is too old to run.”

Meaning #3: to work or operate.
Examples: “This computer scan is running for over an hour.”
“Our new website is up and running.”
“Don’t leave the car when the engine is running.”

Meaning #3: to be in control of something.
Examples: “I am running this company.”
“This manager does not run his team very well.”
“Do you know how to run this machine?”
“Can you run a disk cleanup?”

Meaning #4: to try to win an election.
Examples: “Jonathan is running for president.”
“He doesn’t have much chances of winning, since Martha is running against him.”
“He wants to run for mayor, but he doesn’t have the funds.”

Meaning #5: to flow.
Examples: “Rhine River runs all the way through Europe.”
“Tears were running down her cheeks.”
“Cold water was running out of the tap.”

Ola Zur is the editor of Really Learn English with Illustrations, an illustrated guide to English.