Grammar points (V) on Houses (I)

Hey guys!

I'm back with comments on some of the posts on the topic of houses. I can see you like this topic because you have written many things on it, thanks a lot! For this reason I haven't been able to comment on all posts  yet, but I'll try to do so over the following days. Thank you all!

Vocabulary: mistakes

Lifes – lives

Confortable – comfortable

Geranius – geraniums

A countryside – The countryside

Much flowers – many flowers

Vocabulary: cool words!

Retreat

Nosy

Cozy

Hey María José! Thank you for your lovely comments! Towards the end there is a mistake that deserves mentioning. When you say “The most beautiful house I have ever visited it was a big house next to the beach,” you repeat the subject by adding “it” after the present perfect + superlative structure. There is no need to do that (in fact it’s a mistake) because “The most beautiful house I have ever visited” is already the subject. So the correct version would be “The most beautiful house I have ever visited is a big house next to the beach.” This is the same mistake I found in Noemí’s sentence “The most beautiful house I have ever visited, It was in Sevilla,” which should be “the most beautiful house I have ever visited is in Seville.” Also, because you are using the present perfect "is" seems to me a better choice than "was."

Hey Cristina! Very good grammar in general! There is one sentence where I find most mistakes, it is the one that goes “I have been to in another more humble houses and I feel very well, I want to say, that house are important but the people that live in there, they are really important because we can make that a humble house seems a palace.” First there is a confusion with prepositions at the beginning. You should say “I have been to other humbler houses” (remember that “other” is the form you should use with plural nouns and “humbler” is the comparative form of “humble,” although “more humble” is also in use). When you say “I want to say,” I understand what you mean but a native speaker would say “I mean.” Then there’s the slight problem with relative clauses I have pointed out to you elsewhere, you tend to repeat the subject when you work with this type of sentences (which of course is a logical mistake, but you have to try to avoid making it ;-D), remember that you should say “the people who live there are really important.” And then “make” is a special verb in the sense that it works with bare infinitives, you should say “make a house seem a palace” and not “make it seems.”

-Hey Noemí! Your use of the words “retreat”and “nosy” is excellent! Well done! Remember that when you speak in general you tend not to use articles, so you should say “I like big houses” instead of “the big house” and “Life in a flat is very comfortable” instead of “The life.”

-Hey Fátima! Remember that you use “will” for specific cases only. If you speak about things in general, you tend to use the present, particularly at this point when you haven’t seen conditionals yet (you will see them soon ;-D). So I suggest starting those sentences in your post which start with “will” with verbs in present simple instead (“I want to wake up...,” “I want to find...”). And avoid very complicated sentences when possible. When you say “I’ll like don’t very big,” I think you mean “I like not very big houses,” which in Spanish means “me gustan las casas no muy grandes” and not “no me gustan las casas grandes” which in English is “I don’t like very big houses.” Of course you can say this better by using conditionals ("I would like it to be not very big” or “I wouldn’t like it to be very big,” respectively) but that’s far too complicated for the time being.

- Hey Ángeles! Thanks for your post, it is very good! Just a couple of points: You should say “I don’t have my own house” instead of “I haven’t a own house,” remember that you should use the verb “have” as a normal verb, and use the auxiliary “do” when you want to make a negative sentence with it. Remember also that the order of adjectives is not affected by the fact that you use them in their comparative or superlative forms; this means that you should say “I haven’t seen the most comfortable house I can think of” instead of “I haven’t seen the house more comfortable.” Also, “houses in the countryside seem very beautiful to me” is the correct version of “The houses in the countryside I seem very beautiful.”

Thank you all, I'll be back with more comments soon!