Episode 14 – St. Patrick’s Day SPECIAL

Dan ‘The Man’ is BACK in this St. Patrick’s Day SPECIAL! Listen to us talk about snakes, Barack Obama drinking Guinness and not being able to see colours. PLUS – like always, RnR Vocab such as:

There are many myths
He got rid of the snakes
The shamrock represents the Holy Trinity
Drink driving is very high on St. Patrick’s Day
They always run out of hats
If I were one of those, I’d be gutted
He’s always taking the limelight
You’re colour blind, aren’t you?

RnR Grammar

We have some serious RnR grammar today. Here it is:

“he’s always taking all the limelight”

In this sentence, why do we use the present continuous? It is a regular action and not an action in this moment, so why?

The answer to that question is because it is an ANNOYING habit, something irritating. When something happens often and irritates us, we often use the Present Continuous. Another example would be:

“my sister is always taking all of my clothes”

Do I like the fact that my sister is taking all my clothes? No. So we can use the present continuous in this example to express the fact that it irritates me.

“I’d been living abroad for about 15 years at the time”

If it were just 2 simple actions and the time was not important, we would just use the Past Perfect. For example:

“I’d lived abroad before I met you”