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One of the most difficult things to understand for my students is knowing when to use “it” and when to use “that” (or sometimes “this”). I have to admit that I found it difficult to explain this but I think I’ve managed to come up with a few rules about the usage of these pronouns.

First of all, it’s important to note that the pronouns “this” and “that” are stronger in nature than “it”. They are generally used to emphasize something. However, it is important to note that something is usually only emphasized once in a space of one or two sentences. We use “this” or “that” to emphasize it first and after that we use “it”. For example:

A: What is this?

B: It‘s a toy for children.

I don’t know what this is used for. Do you think it‘s used in the kitchen?

A: Is that a cat?

B: No, I think it‘s a rabbit.

I can’t understand why you did that. It was a really stupid thing to do.

We also use “that” to make reference to something a person has just said in the previous sentence or statement. This can be someone else the speaker is talking to, or it can be the speaker himself or herself. For example:

A: We should paint our house yellow.

B: I don’t think that is such a good idea.

I think it would be a good idea for you to eat more vegetables. That will help you lose weight.

We can sometimes use “this” instead of “that” when it’s the same person speaking, but this will make the explanation seem more intimate. It is often used when doing some kind of presentation or demonstration. For example:

You should cut up the onions very finely. This will allow them to cook more quickly.

It’s important to note that it makes a difference if the original noun is an object or an idea. If it’s an object, we often use “it” as the pronoun. However, if the original noun is an idea or something non-tangible, we often use “that” or “this” as the pronoun. For example:

Peter thinks we should get a bigger sign. He says it will help us increase sales.

Peter thinks we should move to a new location downtown. He says that will help us increase sales.

In the first sentence, the pronoun “it” refers to a physical object, the sign; however, in the second sentence the pronoun “that” refers to an idea, the plan to move to a new location.

I hope today’s blog entry helps people understand this complex feature of English a little better.

Today’s entry is a seemingly simple one, but it’s something that confuses the majority of my students. It is the difference in usage between the prepositions “at” and “in”.

There are several ways to use prepositions, but for the purposes of this blog entry, I’m going to focus on using them to talk about places.

When we are talking about places, we use “at” to talk about a location such as a school, store, hospital, etc. These locations exist within a wider, spread out area. We use “in” to talk about that wider area. For example:

Right now, I’m at a hospital in Brentwood.

When you called I was shopping at the department store.

A: Where do you live?

B: I live in Shinjuku in Tokyo.

We use “at” for ‘hospital’ and ‘department store’ because they are small locations, we use “in” for ‘Brentwood’, ‘Shinjuku’ and ‘Tokyo’ because they are wider areas. It doesn’t matter how big the wider area is; we always use “in” for these situations. Therefore, we could say “in New York”, “in the United States”, “in North America”, and “in the world”. However, if we talk about planets, such as Earth, Mars, or Jupiter, we use “on”.

It’s important to note that it is possible to say “in” for a location such as a school, store, hospital, etc. In these cases, we are talking about being physically inside the building. Therefore, if person A and person B are at a hospital and person A is inside the building and person B is outside the building, we can say that person A is “in the hospital” and “at the hospital”, but person B is only “at the hospital”. We CANNOT say person B is “in the hospital” because they are not inside the physical building.

Hello again. I’m back after a long break, and I have a complicated but important entry for you today. This one is about two verbs that have long confused even native English speakers: lie and lay.

The chief difference between these two verbs is about whether it’s about a person or a thing. If we’re talking about a person (or an animal) putting their own body on something, we use “lie”, and if we’re talking about a person setting a thing on a certain surface, we use “lay”. For example:

I want to lie down on my bed and take a nap.

The cat often tries to lie on my computer while I’m trying to work.

Please lay the package on the table.

I will lay my textbook next to my bed so I can study it easily.

As you can see from these example, the verb “lie” is intransitive, which means that it doesn’t have an object. The verb “lay”, on the other hand, is transitive, so it always has an object. Please note that we often use the word “down” after “lie”, as in my first example.

When we use these verbs in the past tense, it becomes a little confusing. This is because the past tense form of “lie” is “lay”, and the past tense form of “lay” is “laid”. For example:

I lay down on my bed and took a nap.

The cat lay on my computer while I was trying to work.

I laid the package on the table yesterday.

I laid my textbook next to my bed so I could study it easily.

It’s also important to note the -ing form of these verbs. For “lie” it is “lying”, and for “lay” it is “laying”. For example:

I was lying down on my bed when you called me.

The cat is lying on my computer now.

A: What are you doing?

B: I’m laying the package on the table.

The most important thing to remember about these verbs is that the past tense of the verb “lie” (“lay”) is the same as the present tense verb “lay”.

Also please note the past participle forms in red:

lie – lay – lain

lay – laid – laid

Sometimes my students get confused about when to use “study” and when to use “learn”. Therefore, I would like to write about that in today’s blog entry.

Both words are used to convey the idea of trying to intake information in order to become more knowledgeable or intelligent. When we put them in order, however, we have to place “study” first, and then “learn” after that. Therefore, when we “study” we are reading, watching or listening to something in order to keep it in our memories. If we do this successfully, we can say that we “learned” it. Let me give you some example sentences using these words.

I have to study fifty new words for my final exam in Spanish. I hope I can learn all of them.

I studied really hard in my history class, but I couldn’t learn all of the information.

I learned a lot in my economics class because I studied every day.

As I said before, learning is successful studying. Therefore, just because you study something doesn’t mean you will learn it. But if you never study at all, then you will never learn.

In addition, it’s possible for us to learn something and then over a period of time, forget it. I’m sure all of us have had this experience when we think about our high school or university days.

We can also “learn” something in ways that don’t involve studying. All of us learn things just from living our lives and making mistakes. Some people don’t learn from their mistakes, but I hope that most of us do.