Prepositions, in general, are pretty easy to confuse. For some of you, part of the problem is that with these prepositions, you’re thinking about the way that you use them in your own language not how they’re used in English and it can be different. For example, Spanish and Portuguese speakers often use the preposition ‘en’ where in English we use both ‘on’ and ‘in’. Two separate words with very different uses in English. So part of the challenge when you’re learning is understanding how to use them separately in English and what the difference is, when to use one or the other.
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Some languages don’t really rely on prepositions much at all. I mean sometimes English prepositions don’t have a lot of logic to them. They don’t always make sense. And for all of these reasons, English prepositions must be learned and practised in context with other words. So we won’t focus too much on each individual preposition in this lesson. We’ll look at words that they’re often used with.
Second are the aural learners – these are people who find they absorb information best listening. Usually, for aural learners, it helps to listen to lectures, and luckily plenty of courses now make their audio content available online; this can be a very beneficial tool for aural learners. Alternatively, if you learn best this way, you can search the web for relevant videos or podcasts to listen to on the go. If you have an important exam coming up, why not record yourself reading out lecture notes and listen to them regularly.
If you can learn and remember some of those collocations that we just talked about, they’re really common. They occur all the time. Well, then you’ll be so much closer to using the prepositions ‘to’ and ‘for’ like a total pro! Actually, why don’t you give that a go right now? Right now! Practice makes perfect, right?
