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Grammar

Welcome to the remedial Grammar course for Dutch students. In this module we will guide you through the most common grammar problems for Dutch Bachelor students. If you work your way through the exercises, you should feel more confident the next time you need to make decisions on the use of grammar.

The goal of this course is to help you improve your grammar so that you are prepared for English-medium education. Please remember that the module is a crash course: we do not aspire to discuss all grammar aspects in depth, but will only discuss those topics that experience has shown are the most difficult.

Apart from the most common problem areas there may be parts of the grammar that are especially difficult for you individually. You can find out which those areas are when you do the exercises in the Study guide in the book. See the Readings section for more information on the book.

To begin this module, please do the exercises in the Study guide on pages 326 – 335 of English Grammar in Use. As mentioned above, we will not discuss all aspects of the book, but please do all the questions, as the answers will be an indication of your weak and strong points.

The Study guide is a method to determine which parts of the grammar you need to work on. It is NOT a test, so do not look up answers to questions you do not know. Do not guess the answer either.

 

Present and Past

“What do you do?” “I am reading a book.”

Is this something you would say? Or do you not know why this example is given here? Then you should read the information in this section.

Present Perfect and Past

Look at a few mistakes fellow students have made in their work:

  1. The Bergkvist family has developed the Prism Lens in Ornskoldsvik.
  2. They mention a girl who was in Holland for three weeks and speaks Dutch without an accent.
  3. I am an exchange student from Germany and as the borders between the Netherlands and Germany were open for a long time, it was very easy to travel here.

Although most people will understand what is meant, it is not correct English. In this section the problems that occurred in these sentences will be discussed. By the way: here are the correct sentences:

  1. The Bergkvist family developed the Prism Lens in Ornskoldsvik.
  2. They mention a girl who had been in Holland for three weeks and spoke Dutch without an accent.
  3. I am an exchange student from Germany and as the borders between the Netherlands and Germany have been open for a long time, it was very easy to travel to the Netherlands.

Adjective or Adverb

“I feel good.”  – James Brown

What does James Brown mean? He has used a verb, “feel,” but he has modified it with an adjective, “good”. Don’t adjectives modify nouns? Brown means that he has a good feeling all over. Had he sung “I feel well,” his lyrics would convey the idea that he isn’t sick. Confused yet? You need some adverb knowledge to bail you out of this one. (From: http://www.beyondbooks.com/law81/1d.asp?pf=on)

Word Order

This section goes to show that you should never, ever trust an online translation site without checking what happened to the original text. Apart from the fact that the program does not recognize all of the words in the context they are used, it cannot always handle the difference in the order of words in Dutch and English. (From: http://babelfish.altavista.com/tr).

Assignments

As a final test to check if you really master the grammar module of this course, you can do the assignments in the Exercises section.

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