Learn English – Difference between “focus” and “focus on” in “My main focus is Spanish.”

grammarsyntactic-analysis

This question is originally posted on WordReference forum. My friend suggested me to post here to get more opinions on this question. I don't know if I am allowed to link to other site, so I am going to rephrase the question.

The original sentence is: My main focus is Spanish.

Someone corrected it with:
My main focus is on Spanish.

Context:
The person is learning multiple languages, but he/she is focusing on learning Spanish.

Is there any difference between the two?

Thank you in advance.

I did search on the site first as well. I found this response but the examples given use "focus" as a verb instead of a noun.

Best Answer

Both sentences mean about the same thing, though I think they're using different senses of focus. In "My main focus is Spanish", the word focus refers to the thing that is being focused on; in "My main focus is on Spanish", the word focus refers to the relationship of the person to the thing that they are focusing on. Using the definitions from the Free Merriam-Webster Dictionary, "My main focus is Spanish" is using sense 5a, "a center of activity, attraction, or attention", whereas "My main focus is on Spanish" is using sense 7, "directed attention".

Either way, the sentence ends up with roughly the same meaning. However, depending on the context and exact meaning, I think one could be preferable to the other. For example, I think "My main focus is Spanish" tends to preclude "My main focus is subject–verb agreement", whereas a person whose field of interest is already known to be subject–verb agreement could well say "My main focus is on Spanish" to indicate that their main focus is on subject–verb agreement in Spanish. But this is a very minor difference.

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