THREE MAIN ISSUES OF SIMPLE PREPOSITIONS IN ENGLISH Barli Bram barli@usd.ac.id English Language Education Study Programme Sanata Dharma University Yogyakarta Abstract This paper explores the three main challenges or issues involving simple English prepositions, namely single word prepositions, such as about, on, to and with. Even though there exist approximately 50 commonly used simple prepositions, learners of the English language who attempt to speak and write grammatically and semantically face numerous prepositional issues constantly. Categorically, the three main issues are incorrect, unnecessary and omitted prepositions. The data, consisting of mistakes in using simple prepositions, were collected from written products, for example, compositions in paragraph writing and seminar papers, of the students of the English Language Education Study Programme of Sanata Dharma University, Yogyakarta. Presumably, the collected mistakes are also commonly made by other learners of English at different proficient levels, including high school students and even teachers as well as lecturers. Accordingly, it is essential to (re-)examine the prepositional issues, particularly factors causing problems for learners to use simple prepositions correctly. One of the roots of the prepositional problems is the tendency of learners to use their first language to translate prepositions (from Indonesian, for instance) into English, as in diskusi tentang … *discuss about … (which is ungrammatical because the verb discuss must not be followed by the preposition about). It is expected that this paper can assist learners of English, including teachers and lecturers, to be more aware of simple preposition challenges and afterwards be capable of using the simple prepositions grammatically and semantically. Keywords: simple preposition, omitted preposition, mistake Introduction Let us observe this sentence: In this paper, the focus of attention is on three main issues re simple prepositions used by English learners at various levels when trying to express their opinions about different topics. Now, the question is how many simple prepositions exist in the sentence above. Is the correct answer: four, five, six or seven prepositions? Well, the correct answer is that there are seven simple prepositions, namely in, of, on, re, by, at, and about. As a lecturer -- and at the same time as a learner of the English language, the current writer has also found it hard to master, or more precisely, to use simple prepositions grammatically and semantically based on a given context (Bram: 2002, 2012). For example, what preposition should be used in the following; are these grammatical English: in May? on 10 May? in 2018? replies to questions? reasons for asking? Note that all the phrases above are good, grammatical (selected) examples. In practice, it is common for us to come across, for instance, the use of *same with ... instead of similar to ... (wrong preposition) and the use of *discuss about …, which is ungrammatical because the verb discuss must not be followed by the preposition about. Why are prepositions difficult for learners of English to master? One fundamental reason, as Swan (2006: 425) says, is that “many nouns, verbs and adjectives are normally used with particular prepositions: we say the reason for, arrive at, angry with somebody, on a bus”. If this is the case, is it all right for learners to guess? Surely, it is fine for them to do so, but “often the correct preposition cannot be guessed, and one has to learn the expression as a