Well, in my grammar book , “All” is one of the expressions of quantity that sometimes contains OF of not and OF is used in :
my, john’s ( or any possessive ) ex , all of my books…
this/that/those/these… ex: all of that books…
the ( all of the books…)
In fact , sometimes , i come across "all my friends " in my exercises , this really confused me (???) … Which is right?
Please tell me the true answer …!
Best wishes
P/s : My English is so poor so , perhaps , I have some mistakes in writing , I’m so sorry .
I haven’t thought the grammar through on this, but as a native speaker I can tell you that I hear no difference between “all my friends” and “all of my friends”. Either sounds fine to me.
My name is Dorothy and I am learning German with LingQ. My mother tongue is English. I live in East Africa where I teach chemistry to senior school students. I am learning German in order to be able to speak with my son’s future in-laws and my future grandchildren.
I congratulate everyone connected with LinQ on this amazing program for learning languages. I have studied applied linguistics in University. My lecturers/tutors always emphasised that comprehensible input is the best way to learn. I would love to have LinQ in Amharic as the available material for learning this language is sparse and confusing.
As far as “all” versus “all of” is concerned, I agree with Jingle that in most cases there is no difference.
In some contexts, however, “all” is preferential to “all of”. For example: “all the time” sounds to me more native-speaker-like than “all of the time”. Also, when you are using “all” in a general sense, such as “All German people love their country”, the article “the” is best omitted as well as “of”.
Compare the previous example with “All the Germans speakers in the choir want to help me learn German”. In the second example I am referring to particular German speakers. Here we need the article “the” before “Germans”.
On thinking further about this it becomes clear to me that “of” can always be omitted after “all” without affecting the meaning.
Just one more thing. I congratulate Cold onl on thinking about the use of particular constructions in English. however, I would like to point out that “that” cannot be used before “books” because “that” can only refer to one thing, or something like “food” (all of that food is for you) which can be measure, dbut not counted. We can also use “all that” (always with no “of”) before a verb. A good example is: All that glisters (old-fashioned English for “glistens”) is not gold.
I hope that what I have written is helpful to others.
