The English verb tenses are like a pyramid. You started at the bottom in Episodes 52 through 59, where you learned verbs like be, do, can and should. Then you climbed through the middle in Episodes 66 through 70, when you learned verbs like be, do and can to make questions and other sentence types.
You've worked hard, and now you're ready- in Episode 76, Tim talks about the most commonly used verb tense of all, looking at it from a fresh perspective.

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Competition is a big part of our lives, and business is competition. In Episode #75, Tim teaches you eleven words and expressions to talk about competition- in business, in love, and in the Olympic games.

Cover photo credit: Horse-racing-4 - Sport hippique — Wikipédia (wikipedia.org) The photo has been cropped to fit into a thumbnail.

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IELTS is a very popular English exam that is used by universities, employers and even immigration authorities to judge a person's level of English. IELTS includes a speaking test with three parts; the complete speaking test lasts around fifteen minutes. In this week's episode, Tim takes the IELTS to show you what a real test sounds like and how it is structured. Returning in the role of examiner is Tim's friend and colleague from Great Britain, Christian, whom you met in Episode 53: A Spot of British English.
IELTS and the IELTS logo see in this episode's thumbnail are trademarks of IELTS Partners: The British Council, IELTS Australia Pty. Ltd. and Cambridge English (part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment).

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The NGSL (which Tim first discussed in Episode 2) is a list of the 2809 most used words in English. If you know the words of the NGSL well, then you have a very solid start on learning English vocabulary. In Episode 73, Tim explains 26 meanings of 10 words from the NGSL, starting with word 1511 (BOND) and 1520 (DIVISION).

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In April of 2024, Tim spent one week in Singapore, where he walked through jungles, visited museums, and of course tried all kinds of local food- especially Hainan-style chicken rice. It was a fun and exciting trip, and one you can share in by listening!
Tim will update this post later in the week with photos and videos.

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There's an easy way to learn lots of verbs at the same time: by using the prefixes OVER and UNDER. Just add OVER to a verb to say that the action is done too much, or UNDER to say that the action is done too little. OVEREAT? Eat too much. UNDEREAT? Eat too little.
In Episode #71, Tim explains over a dozen more easy to use and remember verbs and adjectives using these simple prefixes.
Cover photo: Leichtathletik Gala Linz 2018 men´s 110m hurdles Okafor-6401 - Hurdling - Wikipedia. The photo is of Leon Okafor of Austria.

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Questions get all the attention, but you have to learn how to make sentences with NOT + VERB if you want to speak correctly and master the verb tenses. Doing this is harder than it sounds because there are two classes of verbs: auxiliary and action. In Episode #70, Tim explains how to negate sentences that have both auxiliary and action verbs, and supplies 100+ real-world examples so you remember better how to do it yourself.

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In Episode 69, Tim explains wh- questions using two complementary methods.
The first method is the old-fashioned one, using the rules of grammar. A wh- question is one that starts with a question word such as who, what, where or why. Wh- questions all use the same construction QU + A + S- question word, then auxiliary verb, then subject.
The other method is what Tim calls brute force empiricism, in other words, learning from lots of examples. In Episode 69, Tim reads over 200 examples of wh-questions, starting with shorter questions and moving on to longer ones so you are never challenged.

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