deciding on preposition

As a native, when you decide on which preposion should be preceded to a word(possibly, a noun) that you are about to use now, especially when the phrase is a combination that you do not use to say or write, what is the natural process in your head to decide on which preposition would be proper?

I'm afraid my question is a bit awkward, or awkwardly expressed.
I hope it's not too unclear to be understood.

This is an interesting question. In fact, there is no conscious process that takes place.

As a language learner, you naturally stop and think before speaking, and this is a good thing for accuracy. However, as a native speaker, I just spit it out. Associations between words are neural connections in the brain, which are already reinforced in a native speaker, but which may be weak or incorrect in the brain of a learner.

Even when young kids speak, they don't stop to think first (although they do make mistakes)






my site: www.roadtogrammar.com

Emile,
I like your site. Good work.

English prepositions are probably more difficult than they are in other languages. French-speakers seem to find English prepositions difficult to learn, because the prepostions in English can greatly influence the sense of a sentence. For example:

He looks for his father. He looks like his father. He looks at his father. He looks after his father.

The four sentences above have different meanings, just by changing the preposition.

I agree with A J .As a none native speaker I face alot of difficulties that how can I use a proper prepositions .When I asked my teacher about ( of ) she said some sentences I couldn't understande them.In fact I don't know...??

The matter here is that in English, like in most other Germanic languages, often the meaning of a verb is very strongly tied to what prepositions or other (often preposition-like) particles are used with it, instead of having prepositions merely act as replacements for, say, case endings. One could very well say that in practice such prepositions or particles function like integral parts of the verb, except that they happen to be separated from such; for example, the use of various particles with verbs in English is directly equivalent to the use of separable prefixes in German, which in German are treated as fundamental parts of individual verbs.

I think that English as any other language uses prepositions as it likes.

For example we have:
to depend on - English
to depend of - Russian

We can see that in this particular case English has more logic, bcs depend is "to hang on smth or to base on smth"

I wonder why there is "have been to London" instead of "have been in...".

Emile your site is very useful, thanks ..I hope more clear about why I use this preposition .just a little bit ;)

"I wonder why there is "have been to London" instead of "have been in..."."

Either way cna be used, thogu their meanings differ slightly. "I've been to London.' implies that you visited with purpose, and "I've been in London." means that you just happened to have been there before.

SPELLING CORRECTION: Either way can be used, though their meanings differ slightly.

"I think that English as any other language uses prepositions as it likes.

For example we have:
to depend on - English
to depend of - Russian"

garans, in Spanish it's the same as well:

depender de = "to depend of" as opposed to English's "depend on". Hmm, I wonder if most other languages use "to depend of" in place of "to depend on" and that perhaps English is the oddball in this instance!