Even at my age I have the ability to climb trees. Many English language learners will make a sentence using ‘to be able to’ when there are much simpler ways of describing our abilities! Let’s pretend for a moment that one of my skills is tree climbing.  Therefore I have the ability to climb trees  (or I am able to climb trees).  But in conversation it is much easier to use the word ‘can’ in sentences to describe abilities.  Try to use ‘I can’ do something rather than ‘I have the ability to’ do something and the sentence becomes much easier. I can climb trees.    (present tense)When I was younger…

It had been a difficult time for drinkers during COVID. They had been drinking with masks on! How do we use the perfect tense to indicate whether an action is still in progress? There are two ‘perfect’ tenses in English, the past and the present.  With the present perfect we use the ‘have’ followed by a verb in the past form, e.g. I have walked, or I have been (or  ‘he/she/it has moved’ if using the 3rd-person singular).   With this form, we are usually describing something that happened in the past, but is connected with the present.   So it is an action that is probably still in progress, or only…