Hi everyone and welcome back to the Art of Business English. This week we have the first episode in a 3-part series on prepositions. Just the other day one of my students was complaining that they didn’t really understand prepositions in English, even though she has an advanced English level. So, I thought I would put together this three-part series to help everyone better understand how prepositions work and some of the fixed forms that they have.

The first thing to note is that this episode does not look at things like prepositions for movement, place or time. We are going to focus on more advanced structures which have a fixed form. The best thing about learning dependent prepositions or structures with a fixed form is that they are just that, fixed meaning, once you know them then you know them forever as they don’t change.

Today’s episode is divided into three parts. Firstly, we are going to look at what dependent prepositions are, then we are going to look at a common list of dependent prepositions with their translation and finally I will give you some example sentences to put them into context.

Before we start, you may be asking, how will this help my business English. Well, it’s simple really, many of these dependent prepositions after verbs are used on a daily basis in many areas of business. You will see from the example sentences how that are used in a business context.