In the following sentences, the italic ones do not sound idiomatic to me. Please have a look on them and let me know if I was not right:
1a - I don’t like basketball. I prefer playing football.
2a - I don’t like basketball. I prefer to play football.
3a - I don’t like basketball, I’d prefer playing football. ==> Here we are talking a bout something in general, while the implication of this sentence is a specific occasion.
4a - I don’t like basketball, I’d prefer to play football. ==> (The same reason goes here)
5a - I don’t like basketball, I’d rather play football. ==> (The same reason goes here)
1b - I like football, but I prefer playing basketball today. ===> (Contrary to '1a', here we are talking about particular preference and whereas 'prefer' is used for general topics, then this sentence has a syntactic problem and sounds incorrect to me.)
2b - I like football, but I prefer to play basketball today. ===> (The same reason goes here)
3b - I like football, but I’d prefer playing basketball today.
4b - I like football, but I’d prefer to play basketball today.
5b - I like football, but I’d rather play basketball today.
PS. I would be grateful if the honorable AmE members could tell me if these are common in AE speech / written language. If yes, then which ones are the commonest ways?
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