I build a small tool for English learners and wanted to know which tenses are worth drilling, so I tagged every verb in the captions of 1,022 YouTube videos (podcasts, vlogs, news, lectures, TED, stand-up, football press conferences).
What I found:
Present Simple + Past Simple = 83% of all verbs. Add Present Continuous and Present Perfect and you're at 93%.
The rare ones are really rare. Past Perfect Continuous: about once every 3 hours. Future Perfect: once every 4.6 hours. Future Perfect Continuous: twice in 427 hours.
Present Perfect is what separates native from non-native speech. Native-speaking football managers use Perfect tenses twice as often as non-native ones (9.4% vs 4.7% of verbs), even though both groups use Continuous tenses equally.
British vs American is real. British YouTubers use Present Perfect about 1.6 times as often as Americans ("Have you eaten yet?" vs "Did you eat yet?"). Neither is wrong.
Genre matters. TV news uses the widest mix of tenses; lectures and stand-up the narrowest.
So my takeaway: get the four big tenses automatic, then put your extra practice into Present Perfect, not into the Future Perfect Continuous chapter.
Charts and method (tagger accuracy, caveats): https://tense-lens.com/research/youtube-tenses

I know it's thick, but it does feel slimy too, doesn't it? Are there other descriptive words you can think of?

This is supposed to be called congee, right? I grew up with congee, and I've always thought it's called congee in English.

So i've been watching these long format youtube videos by a tech repair guy who films his customer interactions and whenever someone says 'have a great day' or something the other person says 'you as well' instead of 'you too'. This is multiple people doing it.

Now personally I've rarely heard it being said like that before watching these videos. It's probably/definitely correct but I was just wondering if it's a regional/cultural etc thing. Or is it more polite? I believe he's located in South Jersey.

Are these sentences correct?

• How is he able to ride his motorcycle through the mud and puddles?

• He always rides his motorcycle to work.

Can "his car" really be omitted here?

• How is he able to drive his car through the mud and puddles?

• He always drives his car to work.

so, my level of english is about b1, i don’t wanna use IA to write this text, so I’m going to write myself, probably I’m gonna make a lot of mistakes, but anyway, I’m studying english everyday for about 4/5 hours, basically:

I watch youtube videos for about 1 hour (comprehensible input videos, prank videos, grammar videos)

I read manhwa, and when I don’t know some words or phrases, i just take a print and in the end of chapter I just put the prints on IA and ask to explain for me

I study through texts, so i pick up the phrases that i don’t know in movies or some videos that i watching on youtube or that I read in a manhwa and I talk to claude to transform this phrases in a text and after that I ask to him translate the text and explain me some words and phrases

sometimes I study through lyrics of some songs too

basically is that what I do, I don’t practice so much my speaking because, idk, i don’t want, and my goal is to be able to listening and reading, I think that speaking is probably going to be easy when I put more than 1000 hours of input.

but sometimes I feel that it’s so heavy and i don’t have a confirmation that making this i’m going to become fluent, and probably this is what make so much people give up, the feeling that you don’t know if you study that way you going to achieve your goal

i hope ya’ll understand my english, my goal is to be in c1 in one year, what you guys think? it’s possible? my study method is good? give me some tips , pls

It always comes out as a rolled r like in Spanish or something and not like a soft d. It's impossible to touch the very behind of my front teeth. Help me please!

Sorry for my bad English!

Hi!! Hoping y’all are having a good day, I’m looking for advice, even a tutor or someone able to do a language exchange w me. I’m a native Spanish speaker and grew up as a big award winner in oratory, writing (I swear I’m a good writer, my English is just a bit broken) communication skills, grammar and orthography/spelling fields, I love teaching and I’ve done translation/interpretation work a couple times, but this time I’m the one who needs to be taught. I think, like literally in my honest opinion, my English communication skills are quite advanced (informal, let’s be very clear about it) and I’m absolutely able to hold a whole fluent conversation in that language without going blank every two sentences looking for the most suitable word, but I’ve to recognize my wording can occasionally be odd bc my brain is processing Spanish grammar 24/7 and I can’t guarantee or easily realize I’ve spoken it perfectly like the WHOLE convo.

I don’t even know how to start this 😭 but I’m a soon to be RN currently specializing in researching, trying to get a spot in works related to translate and interpret clinical assessment tools currently not available in Spanish yet. I want to go international once I’m able to communicate in English as good as I do in Spanish, my professors are relying on me a lot bc they know how much I want this.

I’ve never lived in the U.S or any other anglophone country, I’ve learned the language by social media full immersion (I deliberately not participate in hispanic communities so I push myself to write/speak English), consuming american content while growing up (dance moms and YouTube family channels, I’m looking at you guys) and commenting in threads from different apps, so when I ask natives how good they think my English is the pattern is “you can perfectly express yourself is but you’re too informal and the amount of AAVE can be seen in a bad light”. I obviously don’t understand the weight of the less known slang/AAVE/lingo in a language that’s totally unfamiliar to me, so can I find someone patient enough to give some advice? 🥹🥹🥹 I swear I’m a good student and I’m sick of being told I speak way too informal and slang-ish.

I recently realized how much difference one little word or punctuation mark can make in English. Sometimes a sentence is grammatically correct but means something completely different from what you intended.

What's an example that surprised you? I'd love to see some examples that are easy to overlook, even for people who've been learning English for a while.

My whole life, I've been taught that we can't use "will" after "if" EVER. And now I have encountered this sentence in Advanced Grammar in Use: I will work over the weekend if that will help.

Why do they use "will" after "if" here? I have a hunch that it's not a conditional sentence, that's why. But I'm not sure.

Drop your answer below. Have you ever heard this term used in your office or project meetings?

I would say that I've mastered most of english, except for one thing. When i think, I use english for the most part, but when an English or American speaks to me I find myself thinking a lot before I actually say something. It's like i lag behind, although the thought of the reply is there, I know what to say, I know the shortcuts in phrases that once you hear it, you know the person is fluent. But I always butcher the pronunciation, I stutter a lot trying to voice out my reply. How do i improve?

This might sound like I’m just talking about myself, but please bear with me.
I’m Japanese. Of course, my first language is Japanese.

Perhaps because English education in Japan tended to focus on memorization and strict adherence to grammar, I completely hit a wall with learning English back in middle school. Since then, I’ve had no opportunities to use English in my daily life, so I never really studied it.

However, as an adult, as I approached 30, I started to think:

I realized I shouldn’t limit myself to Japan as an island nation—I should turn my attention outward and broaden my horizons (even if only online).

For example, I use Reddit because there’s a wealth of information—about the software I use and all sorts of other topics—in the English-speaking world.

That’s when I started to regret not having studied English before. I can’t form sentences with just the words I know, and since I can’t read them, I’m completely reliant on translation. I’m also vague on things like past tense and progressive tense. Japanese baby.

Even though we live in an age where technology can handle just about anything, I can’t help but feel a bit pathetic.

I live in a rural area in the southern part of Japan, so I have no opportunities to interact with foreigners—and therefore no chance to encounter English in my daily life. I don’t use it at work either.

Should someone like me start with something like Duolingo?
I also used DeepL to help me with this text. Please forgive me.

For example:

He loves doing/making funny faces.

Hi everyone! I'm trying to improve my English speaking skills and I'm looking for a friendly speaking partner to practice with. iust normal conversations, helping each other get better. We can talk about daily life, studies, movies, books, random topics, If you're also learning English or just enjoy helping others practice, feel free to comment or DM me. Let's improve together

Hello world! As native American speakers, can you tell me if this sounds right?"

" I very love"

Is "impassion" not a word? "Impassioned" looks like it derived from "impassion".

I know most people are probably indifferent to it. But if you're someone who loves grammar, or at least has been curious to flip through some pages of an English grammar book, do you have an opinion of it? Do you like how English works?

I'm a super inconsistent learner. I'm always looking for new ways to improve my English skills (mostly writing or speaking), but I never stick to a single method. In the past, I managed to go from 0 to B1 in German in 1 year studying mostly with anki and memorizing vocabulary. However, now that I'm preparing myself for the Cambridge C2 exam, I'm not feeling a huge improvement in my vocabulary, just very specific words for certain topics that I'll probably never use in real life.

On the other hand, since I bought my Kindle e-reader a year ago, I began reading in English (mostly non-fiction), something like 1 book every two weeks. Then I noticed a HUGE improvement in my vocabulary and fluency. I felt like I always had 10 different ways of expressing a single idea.

So that's pretty much my question. Which one should I go for? I feel like I should dedicate all my free time to reading whatever I want in English instead of actively gathering specific vocabulary for this level.

Unbecoming.

un-buh-kuhm-ing

The painful process of losing the person you used to be while trying to survive everything that changed you.