BUSINESS ENGLISH PARIS: PRESENT PERFECT VS SIMPLE PAST

BUSINESS ENGLISH PARIS: PRESENT PERFECT VS SIMPLE PAST

Teaching Business English has its challenges and one of the biggest challenges I have had as a Business English coach is explaining to my students when to use the Simple Past and when to use the Present Perfect. I think the problem is that for native speakers, we often don’t care about the grammatical rules and we conflate these two tenses quite a lot, and we never really think about what differentiates them. So, when it is time to explain to an English learner how to choose between the two, I often feel like a deer in headlights.

BUSINESS ENGLISH PARIS: How ANALYTICAL do you need to be for your job?

BUSINESS ENGLISH PARIS word for discussion: ANALYTICAL

French translation: analytique.

So, as I said, with Business English Paris, the whole point is the get French speaking professionals to just relax and speak in English without being intimidated and being obsessed with speaking perfectly on day one. I have found that french learners love new vocabulary words and the love to talk using their newly discovered words rather than sitting there doing vocabulary drills and grammar drills. It makes sense. Right? They are not trying to master English Grammar. They want to know how to speak!