PLEASE help me with the following:

1. How do you use the word “actually”? Should it be at the beginning of the sentence or at the end?

2. Should the plural or singular form come after the word “who”? For example: “So, for those who study/studies mechanical engineering, please make sure you score A for hydraulics subject.”

3. Please explain how to use “instead of” and “rather” in a sentence.

4. I know there is the present tense and past tense. But I’m confused about the present continuous tense, present perfect tense, simple present tenses and so on. I don’t know when to use them. (Perhaps some explanation in Malay will help me understand.)

5. When do we use “I had had ...”? – MOE reader

1. You can use “actually” at the beginning of a sentence, in the middle of a sentence, or at the end of a sentence. If you look up the word in the online Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, you’ll see explanations of its meanings, and also examples of its use in different positions in a sentence. This is the url: http://ldoceonline.com/

2. The first sentence is correct in its choice of the plural verb “study”, because “who” there refers to “those”, which is a plural pronoun. The sentence can be corrected further to read:

“So, those of you who are studying mechanical engineering, please make sure you score an A in hydraulics.” (You shouldn’t write “subject” after the name of a subject studied in school or university. In Malay, you may write “matapelajaran Sejarah” for instance, but you don’t do this in English.)

“Who” is regarded as singular when it stands for a singular noun, and plural when it stands for a plural noun. For example, we say: “There’s the boy who likes to tease the girls in his class.” and “Those are the boys who are going camping.”

3. You can look up “instead”, “instead of”, “rather” and “rather than” in the dictionary I gave you the link to earlier and also in the online Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary at http://oxfordadvancedlearnersdictionary.com/

There are explanations and examples of usage given in these two dictionaries.

4. Explaining all the English tenses to you would take at least a chapter of a book, if not a whole book. Why don’t you buy a grammar book that explains all these tenses to you? Betty Azar’s Fundamentals of English Grammar would give you a good start. There is no point explaining these tenses in Malay, because there are no equivalents in Malay of most of the English tenses.

5. “I had had ...” is an example of a verb in the past perfect tense. A verb in that tense consists of “had + past participle of main verb”. When the main verb is “have”, whose past participle is “had”, you have the verb “had had”. Here is an example:

“I had had my breakfast when my mother came.”

The two “had”s there may look the same, but their functions are different. The first one is the “had” that we must have in a past perfect tense verb. The second “had” is the past participle of the main verb “have”.

Advice and advise

1. Could you please explain the use of “advice” and “advise” in these sentences?

a) My mum advice/advise me not to travel in Cambodia now because the weather there is very hot.

b) My advice/advise is try to arrange our London trip on next near June.

2. Which is correct?

Chinese char koay teow and Malay’s nasi lemak is/are my Korean’s friend Kim’s favourite foods/dishes. – MOE Chinese reader

“Advice” is a noun and “advise” is a verb. The sentences should read:

a) My mum advised me not to travel in Cambodia now because the weather there is very hot.

b) My advice is to try and arrange our London trip around next June.

You should use the verb form in sentence (a) and the noun form in sentence (b). The verb in sentence (a) should be in the simple past tense, since you are reporting what someone has advised you to do in the recent past.

In (b), you wrote “on next near June” which is ungrammatical and unidiomatic. It should be written “around next June”, which means “next June or a time near it”.

2. It is best to write: “Chinese char koay teow and Malay (not “Malay’s”) nasi lemak are my Korean (not Korean’s) friend Kim’s favourite food.”

The sentence has two subjects, and so the plural verb “are” is used to agree with them. As for the last word, “food” is better than “dishes”, because “dishes” usually mean the different food eaten at the same meal, e.g. rice, fish curry, prawn sambal and spinach. The word “food” can be countable or uncountable, and it won’t be wrong to use “foods” here, but “food” sounds better.

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