Warm-Up 4 Apologising and Complaining

Warm-Up 4 doesn't give you any marks … but we hope you feel that you'd like to contribute anyway. It's a sort of practice for the In-Tray Exam which will be made available next Friday, 17th November, since two out of the four exercises in that exam are about complaining and apologising.

Warm-Up 4 simply asks you to share any experiences you've had with apologising and complaining in English, either in speech or in writing. Which strategies worked well? Which ones were a complete disaster?

I'll mark any specific sentences which need marking from your Warm-Up 4s, and make a general comment about them all here on the blog.

Feedback on Warm-Up 3: False Friends

'False friends' are words which look like one word, but actually mean another one in a foreign language. You can read more about them in general in Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_friend

You'll find a list of Swedish-English false friends here:

http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lista_över_falska_vänner_mellan_svenska_och_engelska

This list isn't exhaustive, though. The false friend which made its appearance again and again in Warm-Up 3 was 'kontrollera'. The problem with this false friend is that one meaning of 'kontrollera' is 'control', that is, when 'kontrollera' means 'styra' (e.g. "He had problems controlling the car on the icy road."). However, when you're thinking of the French root word, which made its way into Swedish, contrôller, the English word is 'check'.

Here are three more 'formal English' words you need to be careful of:

actual, eventual, consequent

These are English words - what problems do they cause in Swedish?

If you check out my comment on this post, you'll find my answer.