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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.

Here are two ...See More
Chan It may be one of those regional things and I've never heard Americans or Canadians (who are native Anglophones) use the infinitive that way (I live on the American border with Canada). See if this helps: [link removed]

[link removed],

[link removed]

After you get done with those, it'll probably still be clear as mud. ...See More
Nov 8, 2011


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