Remember how to conduct small talk about summer vacation at the language school workshops Boutique Lingua in August.
In the first workshop, we will review which verb tenses we use to describe how we spent our summer vacation, and in the second and third, which verb tenses we use to express our intentions, predictions, and plans for the upcoming summer vacation.
Summer vacation 1: Describing our summer vacation
When describing how we spent our summer vacation, we will use Past simple and Present perfect. If our summer vacation has ended and we use time adverbials for the past (a month ago, a week ago, etc.), we also use Past simple: I went to Hvar last month. However, if we do not want to emphasize when exactly we were on vacation, but rather its result, we will use Present perfect: I have been to Hvar, I have had a great time. We can also use a combination of these two verb tenses, but we need to pay attention to the time adverbials, so we will say I have been to Hvar this summer. We arrived on 1 July and spent two weeks there. We went fishing, we swam and sunbathed a lot. In the first sentence, we can use Present perfect because this summer is still ongoing, but to describe completed actions with the appropriate time adverbials (on 1 July), we use Past simple.
Thus, small talk about summer vacation might sound like this:
- Hi! How are you? Have you been somewhere this summer?
- Hi! Yes, I have. I went to Brač a month ago. We stayed there for two weeks, it was great. What about you?
- I went to Split with my family two weeks ago. We had a great time.
Join us next week and review the verb tenses for expressing intentions and plans for the summer vacation we are about to take!
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