Tait English Page

30/07/2025

🇬🇧 Here’s a bit of British slang 🇬🇧

Chuffed - Pleased or happy
Knackered - Exhausted/Broken
Loo - Bathroom
Gobsmacked - Amazed/shocked
Skint - Broke, no money
Cheeky - Slightly rude or playful
Brolly - Umbrella
Taking the mick(ey) - Making fun of someone
Bloke - Man
Fit - Attractive

29/07/2025

We are now taking applications for courses starting from September onwards.

If you or someone you know would like more information on our courses, prices or packet info, please complete our short application below and we will contact you.

In order to speed up your application process, please provide as much information as possible. Per velocizzare la procedura di candidatura, ti preghiamo di fornire quante più informazioni possibili.

27/07/2025

Self-study.

Firstly, think about how much time you have each day (minimum 40 minutes, maximum 2 hours) and split that time into 4 parts:

READING - Read and article
WRITING - Write a summary + your personal thoughts about the article
LISTENING - Find and watch a video related to the article topic (YouTube)
SPEAKING - Record yourself summarizing the video (2-3 minutes)

More time to study? Let’s extend the previous activities

READING - now focus on any vocabulary that you don’t know. Find definitions and synonyms
WRITING - Check your work with an ai tool or try and find your own mistakes (if any)
LISTENING - hit video settings and speed up the playback a little to test your comprehension
SPEAKING - try and summarize again 25% more quickly than you did before

Good luck!!!

26/07/2025

24/07/2025

WE NEED YOUR HELP!

STUDENTS or NON-STUDENTS, please take 3-5 minutes of your time to take the basic level test (A1) via the following link -

https://forms.gle/gTRVgh1C6hKgACyP8

Tait English is working on its biggest EVER upgrade - making all homework sections and tests web-based.

Why?

• cleaner service
• quality of service control
• your funder/parent/manager receives instant feedback
• more eco friendly
• a more user-friendly interface
• you can do your homework anywhere, anytime and on any device

By completing the test, we can monitor possible bugs, irregularities and fix the issues ready for launch.

We protect your privacy. Emails will not be shared with anyone outside of Tait English

Minimum pass rate - 75% (15/20)

24/07/2025

Language tip (B1.2 minimum)

You have probably spent most of your lessons in quiet environments.

At an international level and higher, it could be a good time for you to start communicating around distractions, noises, background music and so on.

You won’t always have the perfect setting when communicating in your second language so it could be a good idea to get prepared.

23/07/2025

1 photo, hundreds of possible words. How many can you think of?

22/07/2025

We know that one of the hardest concepts to grasp in English is the gerund.

As I always tell my students, you will find gerunds functioning as continuous verbs but most of the time, they are nouns or occasionally adjectives.

Read on for the full breakdown:

A gerund is the -ing form of a verb that functions as a noun in a sentence.

✅ Gerund Grammar Rules
1. Forming a Gerund

Add -ing to the base form of a verb:
walk → walking
read → reading
swim → swimming
study → studying

2. Function of a Gerund

Since a gerund acts as a noun, it can appear in any place a noun can:

Function Example
Subject Swimming is fun.
Object She enjoys reading.
Object of a preposition He is good at drawing.
Subject complement Her passion is writing.

3. Gerunds After Certain Verbs

Some verbs are typically followed by a gerund, not an infinitive. Examples:

enjoy, avoid, consider, suggest, mind, finish, admit
✅ I enjoy reading.
❌ I enjoy to read.
4. Gerunds After Prepositions

Always use a gerund after a preposition:

She’s interested in learning Spanish.
They left without saying goodbye.
5. Possessive with Gerunds (Formal)

Sometimes a noun or pronoun before a gerund is made possessive:

I appreciate your helping me. (more formal)
I appreciate you helping me. (common in speech)
🚫 Common Mistakes
❌ I’m good at to cook.
✅ I’m good at cooking.
❌ She suggested to go to the park.
✅ She suggested going to the park.

21/07/2025

Inversions (positive/negative)

Only after I arrived did he ask me what happened.

Here, we can see ‘did he’.
This is not an interrogative form but an inversion.
We use these to put attention on the order, time, purpose or manner in which something happen.

You can see that ‘only after’ is an adverbial clause.
This is one of the most intense uses of adverbs.
Here are a few more:

Only after
No sooner
Only when
Only if

Some are positive and others are negative depending on context.

20/07/2025

Double negatives.

Unlike other languages, the double negative is either grammatically incorrect or affirmative in English. ‘-‘ + ‘-‘ = ‘+’

‘Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone’ - there isn’t any sunshine when she’s gone.
This has a NEGATIVE meaning (grammatically incorrect)

‘I guess she said nothing to you’
‘Well, she didn’t say nothing to me, she said she was sorry.’
This sentence has an AFFIRMATIVE meaning (grammatically correct).

To summarize, the incorrect form is used more frequently in English but we recommend trying to avoid it.

19/07/2025

🏖️ Try this 10 minute vocabulary lesson.🏝️