MISTAKE MONDAY: PRESENT AND PAST PARTICIPLES
27 / 10 / 2014
MISTAKE MONDAY: PRESENT AND PAST PARTICIPLES: meaning and examples
Hello everyone. I hope you had a good weekend.
Today is Mistake Monday and we are looking at a sentence which is grammatically correct, but often used incorrectly.
Sentence 1: I am boring.
This sentence means that the speaker is a boring person. In most contexts a speaker would want to say that something is making him or her feel bored. The sentence would be:
Sentence 2: I am bored.
Students often confuse the -ED adjectives with the -ING adjectives. What is the difference? Bored is a past participle and boring is a present participle. We use past participles (-ED) to describe how we feel, and we use present participles (-ING) to talk about the characteristics of a person or thing. We looked at this idea for the first time in 2004 (and again in 2010). Click on the link below to review that lesson.
https://www.ziggurat.es/es/lecciones_ingles/index.asp?id=129
Here are some examples that demonstrate the difference.
Example 1: I was bored in class. Class was so boring.
Example 2: The movie was boring. The audience looked bored.
The good news is that if you remember that -ED is feeling and -ING is characteristics, you will get it right with other words that students often have problems with (exciting/excited, interesting/interested, etc.).
That's it for today. I hope you have a great beginning to the week.
Thanks for reading!
Today is Mistake Monday and we are looking at a sentence which is grammatically correct, but often used incorrectly.
Sentence 1: I am boring.
This sentence means that the speaker is a boring person. In most contexts a speaker would want to say that something is making him or her feel bored. The sentence would be:
Sentence 2: I am bored.
Students often confuse the -ED adjectives with the -ING adjectives. What is the difference? Bored is a past participle and boring is a present participle. We use past participles (-ED) to describe how we feel, and we use present participles (-ING) to talk about the characteristics of a person or thing. We looked at this idea for the first time in 2004 (and again in 2010). Click on the link below to review that lesson.
https://www.ziggurat.es/es/lecciones_ingles/index.asp?id=129
Here are some examples that demonstrate the difference.
Example 1: I was bored in class. Class was so boring.
Example 2: The movie was boring. The audience looked bored.
The good news is that if you remember that -ED is feeling and -ING is characteristics, you will get it right with other words that students often have problems with (exciting/excited, interesting/interested, etc.).
That's it for today. I hope you have a great beginning to the week.
Thanks for reading!
