"First time to read it" instead of "reading it"

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High School English Teachers Chatboard

"First time to read it" instead of "reading it"

by Daniel Hanson

Nov 5, 2011

I was chatting online today with a friend from the Philippines who works in Singapore. Anyway, we were looking at a certain blog and he made the comment: “First time to read it” after I asked him if he thought the blog site was any good. I quickly corrected his English, stating that he should have said: “First time reading it” and that it’s an elliptical sentence, coming from the sentence: “It’s my first time reading this blog”. He wants me to give him a grammar rule why the sentence is supposed to have the gerund and not the infinitive because he’s heard it both ways, from American, Canadian, and British speakers. He says that his original sentence was: “It was my first time to read the blog”. He thinks I’m just stating my personal preference by using the gerund in this sentence and not that one way is grammatically correct and the other isn’t. He doesn’t think that using the infinitive is wrong in English, per se, for this structure.

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British English and American English are both correct On 11/05/11, Daniel Hanson wrote:

but the Brits come off sounding so much better than we do.

There is no rule. Different languages tend to use different manners of expression. For example, in German the past tense is not used unless one is telling a story. In English, we use past tense often.

Your friend's English was n...See MoreOn 11/05/11, Daniel Hanson wrote:

but the Brits come off sounding so much better than we do.

There is no rule. Different languages tend to use different manners of expression. For example, in German the past tense is not used unless one is telling a story. In English, we use past tense often.

Your friend's English was not incorrect but he was not using the more commonly spoken form of English. For example, it is equally correct to say "I read the newspaper" as it is to say "I am reading the newspaper". Someone saying "I read the newspaper" is not incorrect but in American English we tend to use the continuous verb tense because we have one.

And particularly if your friend is hearing British, Canadian and American English - because those all are different forms of English. For yet another example, why is the UK do they say "I'm going to hospital" and in the States we say "I'm going to the hospital." Who's broken a rule there?

Neither. "It was my first time reading the blog" is American English. "It was my first time to read it" sounds more British.

He's right, you're wrong, he's not wrong but rather he's speaking British English and there's nothing wrong with that. On the whole, the Brits sound much better than we do.

> > Here are two examples he gave me: > ï¿½It's just recently finished. (that's very British) as in "It's just done!" (as in the roast on Christmas)

> ï¿½That was good. It's my first time to eat Turkish cuisine.ï¿½ï¿½ > ï¿½ï¿½This park is so soothing. It's my first time to visit this > park although I live across the streetï¿½ï¿½.

There's nothing wrong with the construction of those sentences. Your intuition as an American native speaker is telling your friend that he has to use American sentence construction instead of the British sentence that he's using.

The Brits tend to use 'actually' at the end of a sentence and Americans put it first. Which is correct?

Actually, both are correct. Both are correct actually.

> > > > Thanks for any help you can give me on this. (All I have to > go on right now is what my intuition as an American native > speaker is telling me.) > Daniel Hanson > High School Spanish Teacher > Atwater, California, USA

Nov 6, 2011

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