Have you made these errors?
Let me share with you what I have learned from my years of teaching English. I came across the following expressions which may help students in correcting their grammar mistakes which have fossilized in their system.
Student’s Sentence: When was the last time you cooked yourself?
Question: Is the use of the reflexive pronoun “yourself” correct in this sentence?
Answer: No! It’s syntactically or grammatically well-formed but semantically anomalous. In the real world you don’t cook yourself. If you use an intensive pronoun after you, (When was the last time you yourself cooked?) the sentence sounds better.
This is based on the answer of my professor in grad school who majored in Corpus Linguistics.
Student: And last but not the least, here is my son.
Question: Is there really “the” in that expression?
Answer: No! It’s an idiomatic expression which correct form is last but not least.
Student:I was caught unawares.
Question: Does unaware really have s?
Answer: It’s optional. It’s an idiomatic expression. You can use caught unaware or caught unawares = caught unaware(s)
Student: Everything has been taken care of.
Question: Isn’t it taken cared of?
Answer: The correct expression is taken care of. Care in that sentence is a noun and not a verb. Try to put the adjective good before care “good care”. This makes the word care a noun. You can put an adjective before a noun but not before a verb.
Student: batchmate
Question: Is batchmate a Filipino English?
Answer: No, according to Oxford and Macmillan dictionaries it came from India. It’s Indian English.
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