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I am trying to help non native speakers understand the [make(s)/made+ pronoun+adjective] sentence structure. They are struggling with picking the right adjectives. I am getting sentence such as

Badminton makes me busy. He makes me fun. Rain makes plants fine.

I am aiming not just for grammatically correct, but also naturalness. Are there rules to improve their adjective choices? Please help

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  • Unfortunately, no. In cases like this, it comes down to what's idiomatic and what people normally use. All of those sentences are grammatical—but none of them are natural. – Jason Bassford May 10 '19 at 15:30
  • To improve language, you need to be exposed to it, i.e. reading and listening to proper and idiomatic English. That is basically the only way you can get better. – infinitezero May 13 '19 at 14:59
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The examples you have given are all written in the simple present tense.

The types of English present tense and their uses are discussed in this article: https://magoosh.com/toefl/2014/the-four-present-tenses-and-their-ten-uses/

In particular, your examples are what the article describes as "General, timeless facts".

An idiomatic observation I can make is that when you use the simple present in X makes Y Z, Z should represent a timeless state, such as emotion. People are not perpetually busy, but they could be perpetually happy. It would therefore be valid to say, "My wife makes me happy." It would also be fair to say that when Y is a person, X would usually be an emotional or sometimes physical state ("The smell of the market makes me hungry").

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  • Traffic jams make me late. – Colin Fine Nov 19 '20 at 22:32

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