Learning English Online-1

Dear Folks,

This is the first post in a series of posts where I'll point out wonderful and helpful online materials which would be beneficial to learners of English.

The Guardian Weekly has a very interesting section called Learning English, where you can find a number of excellent materials to improve the way you communicate with the English language.

In the next few weeks, I plan to post a number of such links and details about online materials to improve your English. My aim is to create the best possible repository of materials for English learners on my blog.

Hope you enjoy this link. Please feel free to pass it to your friends and do visit my blog for additional and delightful information.

Example of Noun-Number accord

Most Indian students, and some fellow Indian professors [including some professors of English] do face a problem with the noun-number accord in grammar. Now, this may sound preposterous! And it might sound insulting to few.

But I would like to illustrate with an example. If you look at this recent story on the plight of students in Gaza not being allowed Fulbright scholarships at The New York Times, if you go to the last paragraph, you could read the sentence "She, like her six colleagues, was in disbelief." Now, I know people, including students and some academics who would probably write "She, like her six colleagues, were in disbelief", where they would write 'were' in the same linguistic context thinking that it should be 'were' because it was 'like her six colleagues' preceding the verb.

This is a common error that many people make. Here, the noun 'she' has to be taken as one unit along with what appears in the parenthesis, 'like her six colleagues', and so, the 'meaning unit' is still singular and not plural.

I hope you liked this little snippet.