Sentence Method question... (Questions About Your Target Languages) Language Learning Forum

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Language Learning Forum : Questions About Your Target Languages

27 messages over 4 pages: 1 2 3 4

Cainntear
Pentaglot
Senior Member
Scotland
linguafrankly.blogsp
Joined 6014 days ago
4399 posts - 7687 votes

Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic
Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh

Message 25 of 27

18 April 2009 at 9:28pm | IP Logged

Volte wrote:

Anyhow, I simply wouldn't use 'used' in a negative form of the sort posited above - not with "never" and not with "didn't". The whole idea of negating something with a repeated aspect in English strikes me as weird: either you never did it (and hence don't use 'used to'), or you only did it sometimes, and so you say "I occasionally/I sometimes/I rarely/I didn't often..." ...

Well that's exactly it.

The only circumstance I would ever think of using the negative of "used to" in is as follows

A: I didn't think you liked eggs
B: Well, I never used to, but I like them now.

as opposed to
A: I thought you liked eggs
B: Well, I used to, but not any more.

I mentioned "didn't used to" as it specifically came up in a grammar course for natives that I took, and then it was mentioned in a book I was teaching English from. I checked it out in the British National Corpus and it was only in the spoken corpus once, but loads of times in the written, hence why I saw it as a valid example of simplified "educated native" English.
1 person has voted this message useful

charlmartell
Super Polyglot
Senior Member
Portugal
Joined 6247 days ago
286 posts - 298 votes

Speaks: French, English, German, Luxembourgish*, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Dutch, Italian, Latin, Ancient Greek
Studies: Mandarin, Japanese

Message 26 of 27

19 April 2009 at 12:35am | IP Logged

icing_death wrote:

Depending on context, I think another valid "opposite" of used to is will. (Three years ago, I used to go to the
library every day. Three years from now, I will go to the library every day.)

What on earth do you mean?
1 person has voted this message useful

Monox D. I-Fly
Senior Member
Indonesia
monoxdifly.iopc.us
Joined 5138 days ago
762 posts - 664 votes

Speaks: Indonesian*

Message 27 of 27

23 September 2017 at 4:02pm | IP Logged

charlmartell wrote:

icing_death wrote:

Depending on context, I think another valid "opposite" of used to is will. (Three years ago, I used to go to the
library every day. Three years from now, I will go to the library every day.)

What on earth do you mean?

My guess is that both of them don't change the succeeding verb, yet "used to" indicates the past and "will" indicates the future, thus they are valid opposites.

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