Word forms

Merry Christmas to those of you who have been celebrating it and Happy New Year to everyone! My family and I have just got home after a tour of relatives during the Christmas period – of course we are exhausted and need a holiday!!

Congratulations to Ifar from Malaysia studying at the University of Auckland for winning the December draw. Ifar will be able to access the Macmillan online course materials for a year. If you have registered for the draw you will automatically be entered again for the January draw – so you don’t need to e mail me again. If you are a new reader read about this here.

Some of you are still working hard over the holiday period so here’s a link to an exercise on word forms from English Corner. Take a look at the useful WORD FAMILIES exercises 1 – 6 in which you have to type in the different form of the word and check it online. It’s here.

Word forms

It is the time of year in the UK when on some days it never really gets very light at all. I learnt a new word the other day – ‘dimpsy’ – to describe the time of day when it starts to get dark (an old local word used in Devon, UK) but it seems to be dimpsy all the time these days.

To read about Macmillan’s offer of a free place on an online Advanced Academic English and IELTS course and how you can enter my draw to win this place click here.

I see the same old mistakes all the time in my students’ writing and I tell them that with a little more awareness they can dramatically improve their accuracy. Here are some examples of  mistakes which I have come across recently:

1. The UK is a high population country.

2.  France is a develop country.

3. European countries students generally have fewer problems in UK universities than students from other parts of the world.

The students have generally used the correct words but they have not put them into the correct form. The correct sentences are:

1. The UK is a highly (densely) populated country.

2.  France is a developed country.

3. European students / Students from Europe / Students from European countries generally have fewer problems in UK universities than students from other parts of the world.

Let’s take a look at a couple of simple sentences:

The word which comes before the final noun, describing that noun, must be an adjective. If we go back to sentence 1 and look up the word ‘population’ in an advanced learner’s dictionary it says ‘population: noun’. So we can’t use it! The next word is ‘populated: adj’. Ah ha! That’s the one we want. The word before ‘populated’, to say if that adjective is strong or weak should be an adverb. If we look up ‘high’ in our dictionary we can see it is an adjective. So look further to see ‘highly: adv’ – great we can use that. So now we have:

The UK is a highly (densely) populated country.

and in this example we can use ‘densely’ which is an even better adverb to describe population.

This system of checking will prevent uncomfortable phrases like: European countries students. The noun is ’students’ so we need an adjective before it to describe what sort of students we are talking about. ‘Countries’ is a noun so it isn’t going to work. Find a suitable adjective instead.

Here’s a useful page from Birmingham City University with information about word types and an accompanying exercise complete with answers to check your work.