Start here to learn about prepositions.

Hello and welcome to this section on prepositions.

Prepositions are these kind of small words that go before nouns and show the relationship between the noun and the rest of the sentence.

There are

about 70 commonly used prepositions in English and it really would be a mistake to kind of say what here all the prepositions.

And here’s how we use them all.

That would be really difficult to learn.

So what we’ve done here is we’ve broken them down into groups and they’ve been grouped by sort of function.

So we’ve got prepositions of time and place, direction, reason, connection, device, agency and origin.

And in each of these individual lessons we’ve said for instance, here’s all the prepositions of time.

And for each preposition there is a description of when it’s used and plenty of examples to illustrate the point.

Now one of the confusing things about prepositions is that many of them are used in different ways and in different sort of functions.

So for instance, the three most common prepositions of time are ‘in’, ‘on’ and ‘at’.

And the three most common prepositions of place are ‘in’, ‘on’ and ‘at’.

And this is a source of confusion simply because you need to be sure how it’s being used and in which way it’s being used.

And by grouping them as we have, by how they’re used, I think this will be a lot clearer for you to understand when you come to learn about these.

The other thing that causes confusion is these very same words that are prepositions can also be used as adverbs and it’s sometimes not clear which is which.

So the last lesson is on how to tell the difference between prepositions and adverbs.

I hope you find the lessons informative.