Distinguishing Prepositions in Conversation

Prepositions help to relate the location of one object to the next but when teaching the student will often just translate from his own language and not see any difference. One francophone student had some difficulty with on, which she assumed was over when talking about how an object rested on the surface of a table because of this misunderstanding. I went over the use of the prepositions but I also gave the student some graphic examples so that they could make distinctions between them. Naturally there were overlaps between the different prepositions but that was explained afterwards.

To is used to explain the movement of people from one place to another and the movement of words from one person to another. The “to” is also used to precede a second verb in a sentence that is unconjugated when directly following the first. So a person speaks to someone because his words move from a person’s mouth to another one’s ears.

In “I am going to go to New York on the weekend”, the infinitive of go follows the it’s conjugated continuous form,

From is the opposite of to but does not only take the mean of something movement in opposite direction to where it is going. From is also used to talk about a person’s birth origin as in “ I am from Montreal” meaning I was born and raised in that city.