Eight sentences, eight different events
These eight sentences look like small variations on each other. They describe eight genuinely different events, involving different people doing different things.
Eight sentences. Match each to who actually did the work.
The error nothing catches
Correct, and about somebody else
Most mistakes announce themselves. They sound wrong, a listener hesitates, somebody eventually corrects you, and over enough years the sentence gets repaired. That is the ordinary mechanism by which a language gets learned, and it works.
This one is outside it. Cortei o cabelo is the ordinary Portuguese for going to a salon. Translated straight, it comes out as I cut my hair — a completely well-formed English sentence, spelled correctly, grammatically flawless, and describing a person standing at a bathroom mirror with scissors. Nothing underlines it. Nobody interrupts. The listener simply forms a picture of the wrong event and the conversation moves on.
So there is no feedback, and where there is no feedback there is no repair. This is one of the very few errors a learner can carry all the way through C1 without ever finding out about it, and it is not caused by ignorance: everybody in this room can form have something done if asked to. The problem is that nothing in the moment of speaking asks.
Look again at the eight sentences you just matched. English forces a choice there that Portuguese does not force. Mandar, fazer, deixar and a plain transitive verb between them cover the same ground without ever making the speaker decide who held the scissors — so the decision never gets made, and English defaults to the reading where you did the work yourself.
One more thing, and it is the strangest part. We had the flat rewired and She had her bag stolen are the same construction, and nobody commissioned a theft. Whatever this grammar means, it is not "I caused it". Hold that; it is what the rest of the unit turns on.
Four questions.
1. What is wrong with I cut my hair on Saturday if you went to a salon?
2. Why does this error survive so long?
3. What is the actual gap, if everybody can form the construction on request?
4. What do we had the flat rewired and she had her bag stolen share?
The frame, and six sentences that are true of the wrong person
The frame, in one line. have or get · the thing · the past participle.
We had the flat rewired. She got her passport renewed. I am having the car serviced on Thursday.
Two more shapes, for when you do want to name the person: have + person + bare infinitive (we had the electrician check it) and get + person + to-infinitive (we got the landlord to check it). Lesson 3 takes these apart properly.
Six sentences. Four are perfectly grammatical and describe the wrong person; two have a form error. The note after each one tells you what actually happened.
1. I cut my hair on Saturday. — you went to a salon
2. We painted the flat before we moved in. — decorators did it
3. I fixed my car last week. — a garage did it
4. She stole her bag at the station. — she was the victim
5. I made the dentist to look at it.
6. We had the plumber to replace the tank.
Six weeks of arranging things
Six gaps. In several of them more than one option is grammatical — choose the one that describes what actually happened.
Last spring we moved, which meant six weeks of arranging things I have never done myself. We before the survey, because the report said the wiring was thirty years old. Then we — two men, one morning, and a bill I still think about. The bathroom by the previous owners, badly, so we from scratch. In the middle of all this I on the bus, which had nothing to do with the flat and delayed everything by a fortnight. By June we and the place was finally ours.
One word per gap. Eight arrangements, none of which the speaker carried out personally.
We are the kitchen done in March, so the flat will be unusable for a fortnight.
She her passport renewed last week and it came back in four days.
I need to this suit cleaned before Friday.
They had the roof after the storm took half the tiles off.
He got the landlord fix the boiler, which took three emails and a phone call.
We had the electrician the whole flat before we exchanged.
She her bike stolen outside the library on Tuesday.
By the time we moved in, we had almost everything replaced.
Ten things that happened to your life
Task card · Speaking · Pairs · 15 minutes
Your home, your body, your documents, your car, your teeth. Ten things that got done in the last twelve months — and an honest account of which of them you did yourself.
Say each one twice. Your partner counts the difference, and the count is the baseline for the whole unit.
- 4 minutes alone: ten events. Haircuts, repairs, renewals, deliveries, appointments, the dentist, the mechanic, the landlord, the accountant.
- Then, in turns: say each one the way it comes out first, with no editing. Your partner writes it down exactly as spoken.
- Now say it again using have or get plus a past participle, and compare the two versions aloud.
- Count. How many of your first versions had you doing work you did not do? Write the number at the top of the page.
Expect a high number, and expect it not to feel like an error. That is the point of counting rather than correcting: every one of those first versions was a legal English sentence, which is precisely why nobody has ever mentioned them to you.
What the count showed
Three questions.
1. How many of your ten first versions described you doing the work?
2. Did any of those sentences feel like a mistake as you said it?
3. What changed when you said the second version?
The gap is reach, not knowledge
Two questions. Twenty seconds.
1. Why is this error invisible?
2. What is the frame?
Next. Four real arrangements — a renovation thread, a landlord, a passport and a car — and what the people in them say when they are not thinking about grammar.