Episode 13 – How to learn English and move abroad with Italiansinfuga

In today’s episode I speak to Aldo from the fantastic blog, Italiansinfuga. Aldo gives some great advice about how to learn English and also about moving abroad (remember, ‘abroad’ means ‘a different country’).

It’s a little bit different to the regular show, as there is no Dan ‘The Man’, but believe me, Aldo is much more interesting than Dan!

There’s still some RnR vocabulary, such as:

So I kept at it
It is a steep learning curve

To clearly explain what a ‘steep learning curve’ is, I have included here below:

‘Steep’ is a nice adjective, that is the opposite of the word ‘flat’. Let’s say that this is a flat line: __ and this is a steep line: / (#visuals).

For example, it’s difficult to walk up a mountain because it’s steep!

RnR Grammar

Aldo used some real RnR grammar early on in the podcast when he was talking about when he started his blog and he said:As I mention on the podcast, I made a grammatical mistake!

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

This is Past Perfect Continuous and is really sexy stuff. Why is it used it this situation? Read below….

Generally, we use the Past Perfect to talk about about 2 actions in the past, where one comes before the other. Or to talk about an action in the past that happened before a time in the past. Very similar to this situation, so why do we use the Past Perfect Continuous in this example?

The reason is that because the emphasis is on the duration of time in this example:

“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”

Now that’s some real RnR Grammar.