When I studied languages at school – foreign or my own – we mainly focused on grammar. Of course, learning how languages work doesn’t make you a fluent speaker. However, this list of rules and exceptions made sense to me, helping me unpack the structure of the language and understand how different elements fit together.
As an L1 Italian speaker, I was very familiar with the grammatical structure of the present perfect but, somehow, I never really grasped when to use it in English. But it was during one of my early lessons in my English teaching career – 15 years ago . . .
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