Fixing Common English Mistakes

1. Course Introduction: It's okay to make mistakes. Everybody makes mistakes. But if English is not your first language, mistakes can sometimes cause problems. Maybe something you've said doesn't sound natural or you caused a misunderstanding because you used the wrong word or phrase. Maybe you can't understand what people are saying all the time. Or maybe in a movie or a TV show, you can't quite catch what the characters are saying. It's very common. The good news is that you can use your mistakes as tools to improve your English to become a more confident, natural English speaker. Over the last ten years, I've helped hundreds of thousands of students around the world improve their English. Along the way, I've collected the most common English mistakes and I've put them in this course. Now throughout the course are going to be looking at the blackboard. Just like this. I'll be writing just like this, except words and not just lines. And we're gonna be talking about many different things. We'll be focusing on odd phrasing, on issues with verbs and different word forms. We'll be talking about redundancies and counting things and comparatives and superlatives, and some things that you may have never thought about before, that may be native English speakers will notice immediately and much, much more that I wasn't able to fit on the board here. So if that sounds good to you, if you're ready to use mistakes as tools to become a more natural, confident English speaker. Sign up for the course, and I will see you in the first lesson. 2. Course Overview: Hey there, welcome to the course. My name is Luke and I will be your teacher for this course, where we're going to be learning by looking at common mistakes that many English learners make. Now why would we do that? Well, think about it. Anything that you've learned, right? You try something, you try that new thing that you're learning. And something goes well and something maybe doesn't quite work. So then you tell yourself you make a little note. Okay, I won't do that next time. And I'll do more of the other thing next time. And then next time you do a little better. And you notice something else that you're not going to do the next time. And this is a process of improving. This is also the way to build better habits. So that's really why we're doing this course. Now. Not everything that we talk about in this course may be a mistake that you make, right? Of course, not every mistake is made by every English learner, but the idea of looking at common mistakes to build better habits, to improve English is a process that I think you're going to benefit from a lot. And I think probably a lot of the mistakes, the common mistakes that we look at are going to be at least useful for you to see and understand better how to use, for example, verbs really accurately, how to make really good descriptions and use adjectives and of course, many more things. But also I hope you develop a sense of awareness to start to notice things that you do as you're speaking, as you're writing even so that you can start to self-correct, so that you can start to learn better from your own mistakes and build better English habits. So we're going to pop over here to the blackboard. And this is where we're going to spend a lot of the course. I'll be over here. I'll be marking things down. That's not an S, That's just a random, a random shape. I'll be, I'll be writing things here. I'm quite famous for my perfectly straight and beautiful lines, right? We're going to be, we're gonna be looking at the mistake and then talking about what is the right way to do this or what is a more natural way to do this? Why is this not quite right? Why is this so common? And through that, you'll be able to understand it much better. I think mistakes are a great way to learn. I think mistakes can be used as tools. Think about it. Think about how you learn, the way that you learn. Well, there are many ways to learn, but one key is noticing what's wrong and then telling yourself, maybe I shouldn't do that next time. Mistakes are tools. Now, throughout the course, I hope you can remember to be very open, be very flexible. That means I hope you're not coming into this course with the idea that, oh, it's got to be this way and I learned it this way in middle school. Wow, this is a language we're talking about English. And because we're talking about English, it's not always so yes or no, not always so clear. Sometimes it's a bit fuzzy and you have to be okay with that. Be flexible, be okay with the idea that there may be several different natural ways to say something. Be okay with the idea that something is correct and still kind of a mistake. How could that be? Well, something could be correct, but nobody says it. It's really not common. So you said that correct thing. That sounds really strange when you say it. So in a way that's kind of a mistake, right? It could be incorrect in another way because nobody says it. So just be very open-minded, be very flexible, and I think you will get more from this course. Now, I also want to really highlight this. Knowing is not enough. So we're gonna go through a lot of different topics throughout this course, different categories of common mistakes. But that doesn't mean that as soon as you hear me say it suddenly it's in your brain and now you know it and now you never have to think about it. What I want you to do throughout the course is develop a way of thinking of, as I mentioned, noticing your own mistakes, right? Remembering, I learned that in that course. But then when you are speaking to actually always have this mindset of I can make a self-correction there. I could notice that what I just said, it didn't quite sound right, and I might try it a different way. That sounds better. Then if I do that a few times, it gets easier and easier. I can start to notice more mistakes. And I can start to self-correct better. And I start to sound more natural. So it's not just about the input, it's also about your attitude, your way of thinking about how you speak, even how you write. And it's about your output, right? It's about how you're using the language and what you're noticing about how you use it. So that's very important to input. Very important, yes. Output, also very important. Because only when you have output can you make a mistake that you could notice. That didn't sound right, That sounded weird, right? Then make a self-correction and then build better habits. So always try if you can to stop and correct yourself. Don't be afraid to do that and make that a habit. And the interesting thing that you'll find is, okay, first, you hear yourself as you're speaking. Make a little mistake. And you pause. Didn't sound right. And you try it again. And then oh, yeah, That sounded better. Okay. So then you're speaking again another time and you hear it again. This time you pause and you make a self-correction, but it feels a little easier. The next time. You didn't actually say it. You paused still, but you heard that little correction inside your head. So it didn't come out of your mouth right? The next time. You didn't even need to pause, it just comes out correctly the first time. This is how it goes. This is how you improve. That's kind of the process of building better habits. And I hope, I think through this course you're really going to improve your habits, are going to do this by looking at common mistakes. I think it's going to be fun. I think it's going to be interesting. So that's all I wanted to say at the start. Again, we're going to spend a lot of time here at the blackboard. Prepare yourself. Hope you're ready to learn. Hope you're excited to learn. I'm excited to jump into it. So let's start with our first set of mistakes. We're gonna be talking about word forms. 3. Review of Word Forms: I'm going to guess that you're very familiar with word forms. You probably learned in middle school or even earlier about nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions, right? Butt, and you might be thinking, okay, yeah, of course, yes. Why would we learn about that then? You may be surprised mixing up the forms, not using them correctly. That is one of the most common issues among English learners. So let's take a look now before we look at some common mistakes, let's just do a basic overview here. See if we can label. Don't I hope you don't have flashbacks about school. This is going to be it's good to be short and sweet. Okay? So let's, let's look at just a couple of interesting points about word forms. Then we're going to hop into some of the mistakes, okay? Now if you see this, you see that these are the same word, but different forms succeeds, success, successful and successfully. And you might be able to label these very easily. If I say six, What's that? You might say, Oh, well that's, that's a verb. Okay, I'm just going to mark it with a v. That's a verb. Succeed. I succeeded. Okay, good, that's a verb. Success. Success. That's something I can get. That's something I can have, right? Your success. So that's got to be probably a noun, right? This is easy, right? Successful. He's successful, she's successful. I want to be successful. That's about him, her and me. So that's probably, that's probably an adjective. Alright. Easy enough, successfully to do something successful, right? To handle it successfully. Well, that's about the action. Alright. That's an adverb. I know again, I know this is probably review I assume this is review for you. Okay. What's going on with this next one? Well, we're only looking at this because I want to highlight that. Yes. It's pretty simple. Especially in cases like this, where this word in different forms looks different every time. But what about what about this one? Huh? Well, what if I told you that this is also a verb? Alright? Close the door. Very good. Easy. Close the door. Alright? But what if I say then this one is also then a noun, just like this one. I opened at the close. Now that sounds a little weird, I know, but that's that's from Harry Potter. At that I don't know if you know Harry Potter, but in the last book, this is the exact phrase and there are other ways to use close as a noun. The close, okay. Now, close the door open at the close. Same pronunciation. Okay. Alright. Same pronunciation, same spelling, different forms. Okay. That was a close call. A close call. And what if I told you that this is now an adjective, just like above here, and that the pronunciation is different. It's not close anymore. It's close. That was a close call. It's about the call. Okay. We don't need to go into what call means here. I'm just trying to show you there are some interesting wrinkles here when we talk about word forms. That's why we're looking at this. Don't walk close to the edge. So this pronunciation is the same as this one. So if you're close, close, close, close. These two are the same, the first two are the same, and these two are the same. Don't walk close to the edge. And this one is an adverb. This is an adverb because it's about walking. It's about the walking. Okay. Alright. Okay. I get it. But when you're speaking, are you using it correctly every time? And not just about close and close, right? Not just about succeed and success. It's really about the fact that in English we have these forums. And sometimes they're the same, they look the same, they're spelled the same, they're pronounced the same, then sometimes not. And when you're speaking or even writing, and you have a lot of things to say and you're thinking about what you want to say, it can be difficult to get this right every time. Okay? So now that we've done this basic overview, just to highlight that it's not so simple. Let's look at some examples. Let's look at some common mistakes. 4. Confusing Nouns and Adjectives: Okay, so here we have four examples that show us four different common mistakes. And let's just go through them one-by-one and see if we can pick out pick out what the issue is. Buying stuff online is so convenience. Okay? Now, buying stuff online is an activity, right? So we're doing something. But are we talking about doing it? Or are we talking about that as an activity? If we're talking about a verb, right? Then it would be conveniently probably because that's the adverb form, right? Yes. But buying stuff online can be replaced by it. And because we can replace this whole thing by it, that means we're considering this activity as a thing. Okay? So if we're considering it as a thing, then we should use an adjective because adjectives are about things. Well, is this the form? No, this is not the form. Convenience is a noun. So we should make it the adjective form. Once the adjective form of convenience, It's convenient. Okay, So if we say buying stuff online is so convenient, that suddenly sounds better, right? Well, okay, great. Not so hard to learn that, but remember when you're speaking, it's easy to flip those two because they're actually very close and pronunciation. So step one, okay. Now I know it, step two, yeah. But makes sure that you use it correctly and that you're being very self-aware when you're speaking, that you're not mixing up convenient and convenience. It's easier if it's conveniently because that's very different, but convenient and convenience are very close in pronunciation. Oh my God. Did you hear that? I'm so scary. I'm so scary. Is that incorrect to say? Remember I said earlier that sometimes things are grammatically correct but still wrong. This is a pretty good example. It's not grammatically incorrect to say that you are scary. But what do you mean when you say it? Okay, What do you mean when you say you're scary? Is that you make other people feel scared. So if you say Did you hear that, maybe you saying that makes other people feel scared and that you made the noise. I don't know what what would have caused you to be the scary one. But the point there is we're talking about one thing that is the cause Of The other thing, which is the effect. In a way, think of it like that. And this one is, they're both adjectives. To be clear, we're not mixing up nouns and adjectives, both adjectives. This one is described as scary. The cause one is the scary one. The effect is the feeling of fear, right? I'm feel fear. Well, if I feel fear, then what do I say? I am scared. I'm scared. And this is describing my inside feeling caused by what? Well, it could be caused by a noise that I heard in the darkness. It could be caused by a movie. It could be caused by you. If you say, I'm scary and I say, I'm scared, that means you're the one who makes me feel scared. I don't see your face is very scary. You're scared. Your face is scary. Movie is scary. I'm scared. But that's probably not what this person meant when they said, Oh my God, did you hear that? I'm so scared because they're probably talking about the thing that they heard, the sound that they heard in the darkness. Oh my God. Did you hear that? I'm so scared. The sound caused them to feel that. Now we have another example which is similar, but in a way more common, because there are more examples of these. I am interesting in learning ballet dancing. I am interesting in learning ballet dancing. This is the same idea, but I want you to notice, very important. I want you to notice the I-N-G here. What's the issue? If I just say this statement, I'm interesting. It's the same idea as saying, I'm scary. If I say, I'm interesting, that has nothing to do with my inside feeling, right? It has to do with how other people feel or how I believe other people feel about me. I'm so interesting. Other people are interested in me. They think I am interesting, so I'm the cause of their feeling of being interested. You're so interesting. We might say that. Now is it normal to say, I'm interesting by itself? It's a little strange to say, right? It's kind of like, um. Extremely interesting. It's a little self-centered. I think. That's weird, not something people usually say. But if we add this in, now it is grammatically incorrect. So if we're talking about what we like, in this case, this activity, learning ballet dancing. Then we can say, I am interested, interested in learning ballet dancing. I'm interested in ballet dancing, this thing. So then what can we say about ballet dancing? Ballet dancing is interesting. So we could say ballet dancing is interesting. I am interested in ballet dancing. The important thing to remember here is that this is true for all of those adjectives with I-N-G, E-D versions, right? Boring, board, exciting, excited. All of those relaxing, relaxed. Those are about ING, being the cause or the one that's making it happen. The adjective about that thing that then makes, let's say a person feel that inside, I am relaxed, I am Board, I am excited. And the reason is because something is boring. Something is relaxing. What's relaxing? This massages. So relaxing. It is relaxing. I am so relaxed. I feel so relaxed after this massage. So that's something you can remember as a general pattern. That's very common as a mistake, very important to make sure you get right. Don't mix those up. Last one here. They are manufactured in european and European. Okay. Now this is a classic, but what's the issue? What do you think it is? This is a classic noun, adjective. I'm going to draw a double, double arrow because these often get just flipped around. This is a classic noun adjective problem, where we want it to say the noun. But we said the adjective form instead. You wanted to say the thing, But you said that the adjective of that instead. Or you want it to say the adjective and you said the noun form instead, and you just flip them around in your head. What's the cause of that? It may be as simple as speaking too quickly. You know, the difference between, what's the noun form. You know, the difference between Europe. You know the difference between Europe and European. European. That's the adjective it was made in. Should we use adjective or noun, Europe? It was made in the place which is a noun. Okay. Okay. So I know the difference, I know those two, but you're speaking very quickly and so you flip those around. Slow down. Listen to yourself. Did you just say European instead of Europe? Maybe. Now these are specific examples, but I want to make it very clear that there are specific examples meant to kind of highlight a more common thing. When you use the adjective instead of the noun by accident, or you use the noun instead of the adjective by accident. Or you do this ING ED thing where they're both adjectives but you mix up which ones should be used in which order, right? So these are just specific examples of a more common thing. Pay attention to this and try to notice if you're doing this at all when you're speaking or even, even when you're writing. Again, the key thing is to develop that self-awareness. Now we're going to go on and talk about a little more about word forms, how we can confuse adjectives and add verbs. So let's go on to that now. 5. Review of Adverb and Adjective Differences: So we've looked at a few noun adjective issues. Now I would like to take a look at adverb adjective issues. Just as a review. The adjective is about the noun and the verb is about the verb. Okay, that's definitely review for you. So let's just quickly look at this because I want to highlight one thing before we get into the examples. Now this is a verb run, and this is a verb stop, and this is a verb leave, and this is a verb jump. We often think of adverbs as words that modify or about the verb, the action that end in LY. You can probably think of ones like quickly and loudly and excitedly, right? You could probably think of a million different LY adverbs. But does that mean that all adverbs and an LY? No, absolutely not. Now that's nice to know. Then we can express things in more ways, right? That's convenient, useful, helpful. But in a way that can cause problems. Because it might be easy to confuse an adverb that's not an LY with an adjective. That's the same word, but in adjective form. Yeah, that could be confusing. Again, we'll look at examples in a second. So straight here, we could say a straight line. That's an adjective, right? Straight line. The line is a noun and it is straight. Okay, so this is an adjective, but we're saying run straight. Do this action like that. Well, that's not an adjective then, is it? It's an adverb. So it's fairly common in fact, to see things that are often used as adjectives, instead used as adverbs. Stop where, what kind of stopping here? Here. Stop. Now, now, stop here, stop now, stop there. These are being used as add verbs. Leave tomorrow. It's about leaving. There you go. It's an adverb, jump across, jump across. Now, a cross can be a preposition. Across can also be and adverb. This is another point of confusion. Adjectives. What we might think of as an adjective, can be used as an adverb if it's about the verb. Prepositions in exactly the same way can be used as adverbs if they're about the verb. So I can get a little confusing. Okay. What about this one? We are close. Stay close. What's going on here? Well, I just wanted to highlight here, we talked about talked about close and close before. I just wanted to highlight this very quickly. We are close. That is describing us. What is the description of us? People, nouns, close, okay, So that's an adjective. Stay close, do this thing, staying in this way, close. So that's an adverb. Again, same word, okay, so hopefully that's clear. Words that we can use as prepositions can often be used as adverbs. Words that can be used as adjectives can often not always be used as adverbs. That's how it goes. Let's look at our examples. 6. Adjective or Adverb: Okay, So here we go. The music is a little too loudly. Please turn it down. Okay. Music is loudly. Well, if we play music, we can do it loudly. I like to play music loudly. I like to play music loudly. Lay music. In what way? Loudly. I like to play loud music. What's the difference between these two? If I play loud music, I'm not producing the music. I'm not making the music. I have a thing that plays music, record player or an MP3 player, or I'm just playing it on my phone or wherever, right? And I like it to be this kind of music. This is the type of music, loud music. I like to play. Loud music. That's the type of music. Okay. Interesting question would be, can you play loud music quietly? And the answer is maybe yes. There's, for example, heavy metal music, which is just loud music. And you could listen to it quietly. I could say, I play loud music quietly. I think that would actually work if we said that. If it's a type of music that people say is loud, but usually people will understand this as the music that you listen to is loud. And when it's playing it is loud. That's the description of the music. So that means it's making a lot of noise. Play music loudly though, means that I'm making music. Maybe I'm a musician, perhaps. And this is the way that I'm playing it. So I like to play guitar, I like to play drums. I play music not quietly, but loudly. Okay, so now that takes us back to our example. The music is a little too much One loud. I'm describing the music. It's more like this one, right? It is very loud. It is not quiet. It is loud. Now, I could say you are playing the music too loudly. And that would maybe not be about me actually making the music myself, right? May actually playing the drums, may actually playing the guitar. So that would be okay. Except I don't think it's nearly as common as this one. Usually, this is not a correct, incorrect thing. Usually, if we phrase it this way, using it as an adjective, it's going to be about the volume of the music that I'm listening to. And if we play it, like, if we play it, say it like this, that it's going to be about making the music doesn't have to be that way. But that's the most, that's the most common way to say it. So this would be the music is a little too loud. Please turn it down. I beat that game easy. I beat that game easy. Now the interesting thing about this one is that you will hear people say, I beat that game easy. But that's a case of, It's not technically correct. So I wouldn't recommend learning it. But you do hear people casually saying that very casually. It's kind of a slang way to say it. But actually what they're saying is, I beat that game and then they're making a comment about the game, period. It's almost like they're saying, I beat that game period. Easy. As, as though they are describing the game. So it's an adjective there, but it doesn't sound like that when they say it quickly, I beat that game easy. I beat the game easy. So it can easily be confused with the correct way, which would be, I beat that game easily. To confuse it easily. It's easily confused. I beat that game easily. It's about my action, that's about the verb. Right? Now. There's nothing wrong with saying that the game is easy. There's nothing wrong with saying, I beat that game. Pausing and then saying easy, the adjective easiest, describing that whole thing, that whole experience. But I would recommend just to avoid any chance of confusion. Do it like this. Use easily if you're talking about the action and use easy for the adjective when you're talking about the thing. The game is easy. It's an easy game and easy game. Okay? So then the next one, this one which is a variation of it, is also wrong. But why is it wrong? This is grammatically incorrect. That game was so easily to be. 7. Review of Comparatives and Superlatives: As we get deeper into our exploration of issues around word forms, I want to just remind you of something. Sometimes two things can be right at the same time. May 1 be slightly more common than another? But both are fine. And we have to be comfortable with that. It can be a little uncomfortable to feel like I just want to know the correct answer. Just correct this for me, please. Right. That's reasonable. That's a reasonable thing to feel. But it's not always that simple. Again, we're talking about language here which is fuzzy and messy. We're going to explore comparatives and superlatives. These are adjectives we use to compare things. And you're familiar with faster and slower and older and younger, right? But also superlatives, adjectives that tell us about the most of something or the least of something, fastest, slowest. And you might say to yourself, Okay, Very simple. I know that again, I wouldn't bring it up unless it weren't quite that simple. There are a few wrinkles we need to explore and of course we're going to look at some common issues. Let's just do a bit of recap. Hop over to the blackboard here. And I want you to notice a few things faster, older, smooth, or cooler. More interesting, less interesting. Funnier, more funny. Not as cool as, not as interesting as, as cool as, as interesting as. I want you to note here, that fast as an adjective by itself, old as an adjective by itself, smooth and cool are all one syllable, words. Syllable is a beat in a word. Cool, old, fast, fun. One syllable. My name is Luke, right? But banana is not one syllable. Banana, banana, banana as three syllables, right? So the interesting thing here, maybe it's not interesting, maybe it's frustrating. The ridiculous thing here is that the syllables matter. If you have a one syllable word, you don't need to think about it. Usually. You don't need to think about it. Just put ER after the simple adjective form, the additive form. Fast. Put an ER after it. I'm faster than you. She's faster than her. Okay. Easy enough. But when we get into two syllables, three syllables and more, then it gets a little fuzzier. But with three syllables, four syllables, five syllables, right? Like exciting. Well, we can't add ER, too exciting, exciting. That's a three syllable word. There. We do more and less. Okay, so if it's three syllables, do more in less when you're comparing. More exciting, less interesting, less exciting, more interesting. If it's one syllable, then do ER, faster, slower. We can't say exciting. Gr, we can't say Interesting are, okay. But now if it's two syllables, then you have to just be aware because sometimes it's very common to use one, so common that you should use that one, right? And sometimes it's okay to use either. In the case of funny. If you want to say more funny, that's okay. If you want to say funnier, that's okay. Okay. Now, for example, boring and ends in I-N-G. It doesn't sound right to say, even though that's a two syllable word, Boehringer. So we would say they're more boring, more boring. So part of it has to do with the sound. If it's an I-N-G, you're not going to add her. And part of it has to do with just the common usage. Why is one always like this? Always, always ER, or always more or less. And Y is one kind okay to use both. You just have to be aware of it and pay attention. However, it gets more interesting with not as and as, as, not as cool as well. That's a one syllable word. Not as interesting as well. That's not a one syllable word, that's a three syllable word. So for that one, syllables, don't matter. You are not as cool as me. You're not as interesting as me. Okay? Either one. You are as cool as him. She is as cool as her. Doesn't matter. Syllables don't matter for those. Okay? So you can use either one. Just be aware that these are kind of operating differently from these kind of following different rules. Okay. And I would say these Our don't know if I can say it is not as common as these. That's just my sense. Generally. Generally speaking, I wouldn't want to make that a hard, hard rule. Now, these are, as I said before, compare it to use m, and these are down here, superlatives. Now a superlative doesn't compare two things related to each other like this. More or less. Superlatives compare things in extremes. Here's a whole spectrum and this is one end, and this is another end. This is the least and this is the most. Those are the words we use to tell us. That doesn't, maybe it doesn't even matter how many things we're talking about. This is the farthest on this end, okay? Maybe there are 500 things here. I'm comparing this most thing to 500 things, okay? And this is the least, and I'm comparing that to 500 things that are more than that. Now you could just be talking about two things, that's fine. You could say, you could say of these two, these two people, she is the funniest. That's fine. I'm talking about too. That's okay. But it doesn't have to be two. You can use these for more things as well. Fastest, oldest, smoothest, coolest. Notice I'm using the same words, the same adjectives. Most funny, funniest, least exciting, least interesting, most exciting, most interesting. So pay attention to this. The same rules work here as here. Generally speaking, one syllable words. You use EST at the end. Fastest, oldest, smoothest, coolest, two-syllable words. Same thing. Sometimes more common to use one than another, right? Again, if it's an I-N-G, it wouldn't be EST after ING. So if we said, for example, boring guest, boring, just maybe a toddler would say that. A little kid would say that this is the boring movie I've ever seen. But it doesn't sound right, right, so that one doesn't work there, we would say most boring or at least boring. And sometimes both are okay. You just have to listen out for which ones are most common. Communist? Yes, you could say a communist and most common both. Both are okay there. I'm just doing a quick internal check. And then least and most for three adjectives or more, least exciting, least interesting, most exciting, most interesting. So you can see that actually these two groups, comparatives and superlatives, they're similar in a lot of ways. They share a lot of common characteristics, but we're talking about different kinds of comparison, right? So let's now, now that we've done that quick overview, let's hop into a few specific examples of common issues around comparatives and superlatives. 8. Common Comparative and Superlative Problems: The examples that we look at for our common issues are pretty simple to fix. But what I've noticed is that these mistakes often come up because someone is speaking too quickly without thinking and it just slips out and they didn't notice it. So this is where you really need to develop self-awareness. Are you doing this? Even though you know actually how to do it correctly? Big difference between those two. Yeah, I know. Why didn't you do it then? Because it's not a habit? Exactly. Exactly. Okay. The bus is more faster than the subway. Well, what's the problem here? Well, you've combined two of the things we talked about. We use more for times when we have a sometimes two syllable word or a three syllable force syllable, five syllable, adjective. And we're comparing two things, bus and subway, and fast, the adjective fast, okay? Now could we say more fast? No, Why? Because fast is a one syllable word. So we shouldn't say that the bus is faster than the subway. Okay. Easy enough, easy fix, but make sure you do it correctly every single time. I don't want to hear oh, that's easy. And then you do it sometimes. I don't want to hear it. This is another one that's very similar. The new model is not as cooler as the old one. Okay? Is not as cooler. Remember if we use this not as adjective as the structure we talked about. If we're going to use that, we have to use the adjective in its basic form. Once the adjective, cool. Does the number of syllables matter? No, remember for as, adjective as, as interesting as, and not as adjective as, not as cool as. It doesn't matter how many syllables the word has. But just make sure you use the simple form. Don't add ER to it. It's almost like doing double of something. You've already compared them using this phrase not as ads. So now you're using another thing that's used for comparisons. What are you trying to do here, right? So don't do that. If you use as, as, as, as, don't add ER. It was probably the least funniest show I've seen. So what are we doing here? Well, we're using this word, which is for superlatives, right? To say that it's very low, It's, it's the lowest, it's the least, right? And we're adding that to an adjective. Funny in this case. So if we do that, then we can have this one. They both have the same function. Est is for superlatives, least is for superlatives. So why are using both? You can't. Now, funny is an interesting one because you could use either if you said least funny and funniest, either one of those is correct. Sometimes people say that's the least funny joke I've ever heard. I'm deeply offended. It's the least funny joke. Okay? Now, saying funniest as a different, different meaning, right? But funniest is also a superlative. Funniest would be like, most funny. So what we can't do is add these pieces together. What we can do is just do one of them least funny, most funny and funniest. Now what if I wanted to say though not funny because I said here least funny, not most funny means it's not funny. It's the lowest funny. Well, we would use there a word that means the opposite. And this is something I want to focus on for a second. What is the opposite of funniest? Well, in the context of jokes, that might be, let's just say dum, dum. Dum. Can we use least for most? Can we say that was the most? In this case, it would be most. That was the most dumb thing I've ever heard. Rarely do people say that if they really, really want to emphasize it. I don't want to say you should do that because it's quite rare, but you'll hear it sometimes. The rule we've said is if it's one syllable than its EST. So let's stick with that and say that there may be one or two exceptions. There are always exceptions. But this is the rule we said that was probably the dumbest show. I've seen. The dumbest show I've ever seen. That might work, right? Or the most boring show I've ever seen. But we couldn't say most boring list and we couldn't say the most dumbest. Don't mix up the pieces that tell you that it's a comparative or superlative. That's all. I know that you probably know that, but there's knowing and doing and I want to make sure that you've got to the doing part, that you're not making these mistakes ever. But I want you to think about this opposite thing, right? If I say least funny, is dumbest the opposite. But maybe not. That's subjective, depends on how you feel, right? If I say not as easy as what's the opposite? Well, it's probably hard or not as easy, harder. It's not as easy as it's harder. But maybe you want to use a different word. Yeah, you could use difficult. Difficult. Then we have to say more difficult, right? Not as easy as is the same as more difficult. So just remember that the other option you have is to choose a different adjective, right? But the choice you make is sometimes up to you because there are a lot of, maybe not a lot. There are some different adjectives that feels slightly different depending on what you mean. Because sometimes easy as like simple and if easiest, simple than maybe instead of saying not as easy as is similar to harder, maybe I would say complicated, complex, right? Not as complex or more complex, less complex, complex or doesn't sound right, right. So I just want to say, make sure you choose your adjectives carefully. If you want to say the opposite, think carefully about it. Not all adjectives mean exactly the same thing. Even harder and more difficult, feel a little different. They're slightly different connotations with these adjectives. Every word has its own flavor, its own feeling, and that's not always about what's correct. It's about what does this feel like to others when I say it, okay, so you just have to think about that and make sure when you're learning new words, you'll explore lots of examples so that you know the connotation, the feeling that people get when you use it. Now this has been the last set of examples that we're going to be talking about for this section about word forms. But I want to just give you a quick note about suffixes before we go on to the next section. 9. Suffixes and Word Forms: Now, before we hop into our next section about counting things, which is going to be, I think, very interesting. I wanted to talk quickly about word forms, something that can help you get an idea about what kind of word you're looking at. We've been talking about nouns and verbs, and adjectives and adverbs. And how we can often mix up these word forms and cause confusion and how we fix those, right? How do you know what kind of word you're dealing with? Remember, we looked at the example earlier on of success and succeed in successful, right? Well, what's, what's going on there? What's telling me those are the different forms. There. We can look at something called a suffix. A prefix or suffix. You might have heard of prefix and suffix. Now, these are pieces that are added two words, but they have different functions. Prefix goes at the beginning, fixes the idea of attaching, right? You fix something to something, you've attached it. So prefix like pre is fixed to fix that, to tell you that it means goes before, before. It's like before. So if you see preview that's viewing something before. Okay, so pre is something about before. And you've seen IN and b and e x, all of these prefixes are attached to words and they change the meaning, right? Okay. What about suffixes? Suffixes are at the end and yes, they might change the meaning, but they also tell you about the form of the word. Now, don't be too strict with this. I'm just going over this quickly with you to give you a sense for what we're talking about. A sense for how you can use suffixes to guess. Now this probably is an adjective and this probably is a noun, okay, especially for adjectives and nouns. I would say earlier we talked about LY. How not all adverbs and an LY, right? Well, LY, the suffix that tells you, hey Mike. It might be, although it's not always an adverb, just because of where it ends. And LY though doesn't mean it is always 100% and adverb, but it's a good chance that it is. Now you can see here different ones, ION and ESS, SCHIP, I-T-Y, verbs, ED, ICE, ING, SQL. I see, i o us, l ESS for adjectives, adverbs, LY, WAR D. And there are more. There are more. And you have to just find the patterns. But I want to say that even though these can help you guess or get an idea, don't be too focused on it. Don't say that it has to be because it has this ending. There are, there are almost always exceptions because English is a language and languages are messy. But remember, we talked about before, succeed, success, successful, successfully, successfully. That's probably going to be an adverb. Successful. That's probably going to be an adjective. Success, ful, and successfully, right? That's giving us that, that hint. Okay? Now, you can probably think of examples for these and you can certainly look up plenty of examples for these to learn them. I'm really just trying to get you started here to look out for these endings to tell you that the suffix can give you a hint. But what about for I O N? Well, let's say motion. What about N E S, S? Well, how about this one? This one's interesting. Help, Les Mis. Why is this interesting? Well, if we cut out the next part and we just look at helpless, looking at this LES S adjective, help less, no help. It's telling us about the meaning, but it's also telling us, hey, look, this is an adjective. I am helpless. We are helpless. But if I then add ness to it, now I'm changing it to a noun. Very interesting. Now just because something has E, D at the end, doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be a verb. Because for example, we talked about words like B0 RED. Well, is that a verb? No, I am bored. That's an adjective k. So that's a, that's a pretty classic exception. That's a very common type of adjective. We are bored. She is bored. I am relaxed, right? So it's not going to work every time, but it might tell you that it's a past tense verb. We walked and if we walked, that's different than we are bored we walked, that's doing some action. It's telling me that it is a verb in the past tense, but not always. Ing is another interesting one because ING can be used to talk about an action, can be used to talk about verbs. If we say, for example, they, We're, what am I doing? They, THE a y with v, they were running. Right. Okay. Ing. That's the thing that they weren't doing in the past. That's their action. But if I say, for example, running, this is something we're going to be talking about later on. Running is fun. There. Yeah, you could say that R1 is a verb, but this is not being used as a verb. This is something called a gerund. We're going to talk more about these later on, as I said. But that's kinda being used as a noun. It's like a noun that's shaped like a verb in a way, but it is used as a noun in the sentence. So again, there are exceptions here. I've just wanted to bring this up quickly to get you started on the idea that suffixes can help and that they exist for a reason. And that's why you see these common endings. So hopefully that can pique your interest and get you researching suffixes and prefixes, honestly. Okay, that's it for this lesson. That's it for this section of the course talking about word forms. Now we're going to go on. We're going to talk about how we count things. And some common mistakes are issues that come up when we're trying to do that. To say how many or how much of something that we see. 10. Review of Countable and Uncountable Nouns: In the last section of the course, we talked about word forms and common issues that arise with different forms of words. In this section are going to be talking about counting things. Counting things. 1234567. Well, yes, kind of words that we use when we're talking about quantity, how much or how many of something we have. And that can be a little bit tricky. So we'll look at examples. Of course. We're also going to be talking about countable and uncountable nouns. This can be tricky too. And that's what we're going to start with. For example, if I say, what was your major in university and you say business? That's correct. Okay. Business. That was your major? Yes. Do you mean businesses? That doesn't make sense. You have to say business. That was my major. Okay. That's it. That's a thing, a noun. Alright. Well, what are those two things over there? Across the street? Those are two businesses. Okay. So sometimes I can count that and sometimes I can't. What's going on here? So now let's talk about this sometimes tricky issue of countable and uncountable nouns are going to pop over here. We're going to be talking about counting. As I said, this is really about countable and uncountable nouns. Now what is a countable noun? Well, this is a noun that you can count. Some examples would be one ring, two rings, three rings. One dinosaur to dinosaurs, three dinosaurs. One mistake to mistakes. Three mistakes. Once smile to smiles. Three smiles. Okay? But then we have something like this where we can't really say one advice. One help, one, rain, usually, one traffic, one yogurt. Usually. Again, there are a couple of interesting exceptions here. These are then uncountable nouns, generally speaking, and these are countable nouns, things that we can count. Now, notice for these countable nouns, It's one. We have this without the S, And if it's more than one, we add the s. This is a regular countable noun and that's rings, dinosaurs mistakes and smiles. If you want to make that singular. This is probably review for you, but I want to make sure it's clear because we're going to look at some examples. One ring, one dinosaur or plural, just what these are called. And that would be two rings to dinosaurs. Okay? Now there are some interesting exceptions here, of course, with some words being a different word completely when it's plural. And we'll look at some examples in just a second. Now, what about some of those exceptions? And you saw me make a funny face when I said yogurt. Well, this is where we have words that can be both. Remember I said business, right? Well, if we're talking about the general thing, the idea of it, it's hard to count it. And that would be, for example, the major, What's your major business? The activity of business. How can you count that? Right? But that restaurant over there next to that accounting firm over there, those are two different businesses. So that can be counted. So we're talking about two different kinds of things. One is the idea of it, the concept of it. And often we're talking about concepts for things that are uncountable. Ideas, write the general idea. Ideas. And then the other one would be, that's the building over there. What kind of thing is that? Well, it's a business. Our business, It's one business. We're talking about specific things that we can point at using our finger. Now, can you point at a smile? Yes, you can point at a smile. Can you point at an idea? Not quite, but you can talk about it like pointing at it. I have a good idea. I just thought of a good idea. That's a good idea. Can you point at a mistake? Again? You can see someone make a mistake and you could say that was a mistake or You could talk about it like pointing at it. I made three mistakes yesterday, 123 and I can talk about it like pointing. So we say that's countable. Then again, this uncountable stuff is either like ideas or concepts. Advice, general kind of idea. Help. Very hard to count one of those, right? What about rain? What about yogurt? Well, rain and yogurt, there's so much of it that it's almost impossible to count. What are we talking about, the molecules in the yogurt? What are we talking about? The, each drop of rain when we're looking at it raining at. So impossible to do that. We say it's uncountable, especially for something like rain. Now we can make it countable by adding a word that is countable. A drop of rain, a bit, or a piece of advice, maybe a bit or a piece of advice. Traffic would be a tough one. Maybe a section of traffic or something like that, a cup of yogurt. So then we add something, a noun in front of it that we can count and we contain it in that way. Now what about going back to this when it is both? If we say a yogurt, is that wrong? When I say a yogurt, maybe I'm talking about a container full of yogurt. And it is yogurt, which we're talking about the stuff itself that we're looking at. It's falling through my fingers here. I can't really count it, can i? But if I have one in a container here, I won't always say, Would you like a cup of yogurt? Would you like a container of yogurt? Would you like a bottle of yogurt? It's a little long. So often you'll hear people just say, Do you want a yogurt? Do you want a yogurt? Would you like a yogurt? Sure. I'll have one. Catch. Eat, right, or drink. Same thing with pizza. Pizza is an uncountable noun generally, I love pizza when you hear people talk about what they love, they're usually talking about, often talking about the uncountable thing, right? I love football. Football could be a football, but it's also a sport and that would be uncountable. It's kind of an idea or a concept, right? Part account. Well, pizzas the same. I love pizza, but you can count pizza too. If you have pizza pies, a pie of pizza, a circle of pizza, a square of pizza, right? We usually just say, Do you want to go get a pizza? And that would be counting it, a box of pizza, a pizza pie. A pie of pizza, right? So we can speak of it as countable or uncountable. Now the interesting thing would be, it's correct to say both. Do you want pizza and do you want a pizza? You say, do you want pizza? That's uncountable. Do you want a pizza, one that is now countable? If do you want pizza? Could be three pizzas, four pizzas, five pizzas were just talking about wanting that thing in general. And time. We talked about business and how that can be both. Time, we would say I remember a time in high-school a time in high-school, a specific event or moment, or a period of time, sort of like a period of specific period. Right. My freshman year in high school. That time. Well, that is a period of time. A period of time, a specific duration. What about time as uncountable? But time is a concept. Time is a thing that's always moving by, moving by for me right now. And you're watching this, it's moving by for you too. You can count seconds and minutes and hours. But the time itself, Not really. No. Okay. Now, I mentioned that there are some other interesting exceptions to these down here. Let's quickly go through these before we look at our examples. Remember the simple way to change singular to plural for irregular noun would be ring, rings. Dinosaur, Dinosaurs mistake mistakes at an S. Easy enough. But what about deer, fish, aircraft, and species? These are just a few examples of this type of word. This one is the same, whether it's singular or plural, doesn't matter if there are one or 101, dear, dear. One fish a 100 fish, one aircraft, a billion aircraft. One species, three trillion, four hundred ninety six million, seven hundred eighty seven thousand, nine hundred and twenty one species. Alright. So it's the same no matter what. And there are quite a few of these two. They don't change no matter how many there are, even if it's one. What about this one? Then the unique thing about this one is that they are irregular. Irregular means they have a singular and a plural form, but it's not as simple as adding an S. We wouldn't say child's unless we're talking about something that belongs to the child, that child toys, then we would add a little thing called a, called a hyphen, sorry, an apostrophe right there, like that. Alright, that'll be different. We're not talking about that. The plural form of this one is, I think you probably know, children, teeth, woman, women. Change it to MEN. It's a different word. One woman to women. Notice the pronunciation is not like woman is women. Women. Then matrix is matrices. Matrices, matrix matrices, which is close to being Justin and S, but not quite. You have to change it a little bit. So we counted as irregular. So that's generally how we do transformations from singular to plural and how we deal with countable and uncountable nouns. Hopefully just as a review for you. Now let's look at a few common issues with this type of noun. 11. Countable and Uncountable Mixups: Let's take a look at a few issues when it comes to counting things and see if you can pick out the mistake. Before I say what it is. Again, I think a lot of this stuff is easy when you're really looking at it. But are you doing it when you're speaking and thinking about other things. Also, very important to realize that there isn't always a single solution. There may be several correct answers. I think I bought too many stuffs. Too many stuffs. What's the issue here? Well, what is stuff? Stuff, It's kind of a general word, right? Hey, that's my stuff. If I say, Hey, that's my stuff. Am I talking about the thing that you have in your hand right now? Hey, don't touch that. That's my stuff. Or am I talking about the general idea of things that belong to me, including that thing in your hand. It's that one. So we use the word stuff very broadly. It's a concept, It's an idea. We don't say one stuff. It's uncountable. Okay? So stuff doesn't have an S. It's uncountable. We don't say to stuff. We say stuff. But there's another problem then here. We corrected that, but is that it? Many stuff. Remember, we can't count it. We're going to get to this. So this is kind of a preview of something that's coming up that we're going to talk about. This doesn't work either, because many is only used for countable things. And if stuff is not countable, then we can use many. I think I bought two. What's the word? Much? Too much stuff. Now I don't want to go too far into this and talk too much about much because We're going to, we're gonna do that in the next lesson. So just a little, a little preview here. Now we fixed it. I think I bought too much stuff, no S. But what if we want to use many? Okay, That's fine. We just have to change the noun and make it countable. Because many is for countable things. I think about too many. What, what's something we can count? Things? Hey, those are my things. That's my that's my thing. Does my thing. I don't know why that sounds funny. There's an S here. Many things. I think about too many things. Okay, now it works. If we say things, if we want to be specific, then we could say, I think I've got too many gifts. I think I've got too many souvenirs. I think I bought too many Lego sets, whatever I bought too many things of if it's countable. I don't want to have a lot of children's well, I think this one should be pretty easy to fix. We just talked about this. So children is a countable noun, but it is irregular, which means is a very common issue. It doesn't need an S. Adding an S when you've already changed the word. Doesn't. It's weird. It's wrong. Don't, don't add an S here. Children is already the plural form. Singular is child. Okay? Alright, a lot of children. Could we say many? Yes, we could. I don't want to have many children. So if we have many, then we don't use of many children. I don't want to have a lot of children, then we need to use of, okay, we found three sofa. We like three sofa. That should be pretty easy. A sofas a thing I can count 12345, and it's a simple noun, it's irregular noun, so easy enough, just at an S. Now this is really common. It amazes me how common these two are. Because most people know this. We want to make a regular thing, plural, just add an s. If you want to change the word child to plural, make it children, you know this, but often it's forgotten. So you have to really try to dig it into your habits to really be self-aware. My teeth hurts. That almost sounds right, doesn't it? My teeth hertz. What's the issue here? Can I say my teeth? Remember we said that tooth is singular and teeth is plural. Yeah. Yeah, my teeth my tooth different meaning if we say my tooth and it's just that one there. And if we say my teeth and it's all of them, or maybe several. But there's another issue. We have to make sure that the verb that follows agrees, agrees with the thing we're talking about. This is by the way called subject verb agreement. Subject verb agreement. We'll talk more about it later in the course. But the verb has to match in a way with the thing that we're talking about and this does not. So if we say my teeth, then we don't use the S. My teeth hurt. If we say my tooth, then we do use the f the S. Hello, I'm an English teacher. My name is Luke. My tooth hurts. My tooth hurts, my teeth hurt. My tooth hurts, my teeth hurt. So just be aware that if it's the subject, if it's the thing you're talking about at the beginning of a sentence. The verb does have to agree with it, so just be careful about that. We'll focus a little more on that later on. Could you give me some advices? First? Some can we use that with anything? Yet generally, we'll talk more about this, but generally some can be used with either countable or uncountable. So we don't need to worry about it. We don't need to change anything there. But this one, advices. Think about that. One advice. What is advice exactly? It's the idea of explaining something. It's hard to contain that, right? Remember I said you could say bit of advice. You could say piece of advice. Let me give you a piece of advice. That is a thing we might say. That's sort of a container for the advice, which is otherwise just laying on the floor. And you can't really scoop it up because it's kind of an idea, right? It's hard to contain. So it's uncountable, so it doesn't have it s. Okay. Can you give me some advice? Now we'd have the same issue for this one. If this were many, then we'd have to change that. Can you give me many advice? That'll be totally weird. Okay. Could you give me some advice? Could you give me a bit of advice? And that would be okay to uncountable. So I know probably this is something you're at least familiar with, but that's not enough input, output. So get started self-correcting. Make sure you do this right. Every single time. Now we're going to talk about what we've been previewing, hear things that help us count. These are called quantifiers and there are quite a few issues with these. So let's go on to that. 12. Review of Quantifiers: We've been talking about countable and uncountable nouns. Let's stay on that. Not the confusion of the nouns themselves, but issues around the words and the phrases that we use before them to say how much of something we're talking about. And that's called a quantifier. How much, how much? Well, you could say a number, you could say six or seven. Or you could use a word like a lot, a few, many. But it's easy to get these mixed up. So we have to get clear on which ones are used for countable and uncountable. Then we're going to look at some common issues. So let's first just go over on the blackboard here, which quantifiers? And this is a technical grammar term. So, who really cares? Which quantifiers go with which type of noun? Or in fact, which ones go with both? Many. A few, a couple. A large number of sometimes. I mean, yeah, that's okay. A small number of not as common. These go with countable. A bit of, a lot of too much, so much, not much. Notice that much isn't by itself there in any of those enough. A glass of a bowl of a handful of these go with countable. Now, just because these go with uncountable nouns doesn't mean they go with all of them. For example, you wouldn't say a handful of advice, would you know, that's weird, but you wouldn't say a handful of rice. You might say a bowl full of almonds, a bowl full of yogurt, a handful of yogurt. Not for long. A handful knows full of ice cream. That would be silly, but it's just a way of containing the uncountable noun. But a little advice. Too much advice. So much advice. Not much advice. Enough advice. But glass of advice now, not a glass of advice, a glass of water, glass of milk. So it depends on which thing It's going with, but these generally are uncountable. And then for this last set, we have both. Both. That means you could use it for either one. Some advice, some bananas, a lot of hope, a lot of bananas. Lots of hope, lots of bananas, a bunch of bananas. In fact, that is the correct word to put with bananas. It's called a bunch. A bunch of bananas, a bunch of grapes. And you could sometimes use this with uncountable. This is less common with uncountable. Write it a bunch of love. It's, it's, it's fine. You really have to pay attention to the situation. It's being used in that one is more often used for countable a ton of and tons of very common for both, write a ton of time. We've got a ton of time. Don't worry about it. A ton of time. Well, that is a ton of almonds. I've never seen that many almonds before. Okay, tons of same thing. And know, and any also can be used with both, might say, no bananas. In fact, I think that's a song from World War One. Haven't eat bananas. No time. Or have any time. We have no time. Okay. So both, okay, with those. Now let's look at some common issues. Let's look at our examples. 13. Confusing Common Quantifiers: Now, for the common issues around quantifiers, some of them are not exactly grammar mistakes, but are things that if you think about it, just don't quite sound right? They're not common perhaps. Or the meaning just doesn't mean what you want it to mean when you say it. So let me, let me, let me give you an example so that you know what I mean, I made too much money last year. Think about that. Now, if we say that too much means a lot, then it's okay. But too much does not mean a lot. So we have to be careful. Too much means more than what is good right now. That's of course, different in different situations. I always give the example of water. How much water is too much for a horse? How much water is too much for a spider? That amount will be different. Maybe too much water for a horse to drink is a swimming pool. And too much water for a spider is a full glass of water. Spider couldn't drink that. That's too much water. Okay. Let's more than what they can drink. It's more than what is good. If this person means here that they made too much money and making too much money cause them some problems, then. Okay. Usually, Usually we don't say that making a lot of money is a bad thing. We usually want to make more money. So unless this person is making a specific point about maybe, I don't know, paying taxes or something like that. They have to pay way more than before because they made so much money and now they're complaining. Unless that's what this person means, this is going to be incorrect. Or let's just say, not what you mean. What do you want to say is a lot of money, maybe so much would be ok. So much doesn't have that meaning of more than what is good, right? We could say a ton. I made a ton of money last year. A ton. Okay. Lots of money. A lot. Lots. Those are the same the same thing. So those would be fine. Just be very aware when you use too much, you have to think carefully about the situation. Is that really what you mean? Do you mean more than what is good? And also, does it fit? What you're talking about? Is this the spider or the horse? Because the glass of water is not enough for the horse. Okay, but it's too much for the spider, not enough for the horse, too much for the spider. Okay, so have to think about what you're talking about when you use too much, okay, just be careful with this one. It is of course, very useful, but don't use it to say a lot simply. We have not much milk. Let's get some. Now, what's the issue here? Not much. Yeah. How much milk do we have if the answer to that question is just not much? Again, the question is, how much milk do we have? Not much. How much money do we have? Not much. Okay. That's correct. But that's only when you're answering that question in a negative way. I want to say it's a little bit, but if you're making a statement with the thing in the sentence, don't do this. You have to change the way it's phrased. So this should be instead of we have not much, we don't have. This is a very, very, very, very common issue. I hear it all the time, even among very high level English learners, we don't have much milk because we're making a negative statement about something, right? I don't want that. We don't have this. We don't need it. If you're making a negative statement, you want to use the word negative than negative word. Before you say the verb. We don't have, we don't have. And the reason for that is if you say it this way, we have the person's initial thought when they hear that first we have is we have something. Oh good, good, good, good. We have something. We have not much. Okay. So it kind of gets confusing. This not as kind of fighting with this have because when I here have I think all good half and then I here not, not having. It gets a little confusing, right? So it's better to start with the negative which is, Don't. We do not. Then we can use have, start with a negative than say have, we don't have much milk. So it's not an issue with much here. It's an issue with. The order of the verb and the negative of naught. That's the issue here. So start like this when you're making this kind of negative statement. Okay? How many time do we have to finish it? How many times? How many times? Now this one could be confusing because we said that time could be countable. We can say two times, three times, right? A time, a time long ago. We can count that. We can say there's one of those times, yes. But also time as an idea, concept, the thing that passes as uncountable. So which one are you talking about? That's why this one can be confusing. What are we talking about when we say it here? This is going to be the uncountable meaning of time, not the countable one. So that's why you have to be careful, especially for words like this. If this is uncountable, did the time that passes, right? Then we can't use a word like many, because if you remember from the list we looked at, many can only be used for countable nouns. Many ideas, many pizzas, many bananas, many fish, many smiles, many hamburgers, right? Well, many times I used to just that would be correct if we're talking about events in the past many times when I was in high school. I used to blah, blah, blah. That's correct. This is not that. We have to say much. Instead, we have to use a word quantifier that goes with the uncountable form. Alright? How much time do we have to finish it? How much time? If you want to say the unit the thing, how many how many weeks do we have to finish it? Fine. That there's no problem with that many weeks because you can count weeks, right? Many weeks. Many how many days. But I don't think that would be as common as saying How much time, because if I have no idea, I don't even know if I should be asking about weeks or days, right? Let's order pizzas. This is an example of it not being wrong, but just a little odd. If we have no quantifier, then usually we're going to just say the uncountable one or just use the uncountable one. So we would say, let's order pizza. I haven't been specific about how much pizza we're talking about 1010 of them or one or two slices or what? Just the thing, the uncountable thing. I just want pizza. Let's order pizza. If we want to suddenly count them, which is fine. We would usually add a quantifier and we wouldn't just leave this blank and say, let's order and then say pizzas. We would say, let's order some pizza is there. If you use some, remember, some can go with either countable, uncountable. You could say, let's order some pizza, Let's order some pizzas. That's fine for both. That's perfect. We don't know what to say. Just say let's order some pizzas or let's order some pizza. But we're counting it here. So let's order of few pizzas. Let's go over a few pizzas. Nine pizzas. That's a little specific, right? Let's order a couple of pizzas. That's ordered a couple of pizzas. We say, let's order many pizzas. That would be strange. There'll be a little weird. I'm not sure exactly why that's weird to say. It's just not a very common thing to say, let's order many pizzas. Sounds weird to me. Grammatically, it's correct. If we want to say one specifically, then we would say, let's order a pizza, one pizza. You've given me some good idea. Some good idea. Now sum here, we don't have to worry about because remember, some can be used with either countable or uncountable nouns. No problem. This being before idea also, no problem. It's just an adjective. Good, bad, stupid, ingenious, right? The problem is that we forgot something. We forgot that when we mentioned this. It can't be one. That's the problem. If we change this to you've given me a good idea. Suddenly it's fine. Suddenly it's okay. We have to remember. It's easy to mix up and forget sometimes if we're talking about things that are not physical, which one is countable and which one is uncountable? Well, an idea is a countable thing. It seems weird that it should be countable. I agree. But it's accountable thing. You can have one idea or you can have two ideas. Or you're going to have 100 ideas, great ideas. And if you're talking about the general thing, it's ideas. Ideas, big ideas, big ideas. Some ideas would be write. The issue here is that this needs to be an S, or we get rid of the sum, change it to. And it's good idea. You've given me a good idea. One, that this idea, yes, you've given me some good ideas or a few good ideas. Are many good ideas. Okay, so hopefully those are clear. You have any questions, let me know. Now we're going to go on and talk about Article issues. So let's do that. 14. Review of Articles: In the last section, we talked about issues with counting things. In this section, we're going to be talking about something similar. In a way. This is talking about specific things or things which are not specific. And how it's very easy to confuse those when you're speaking or communicating. In any way. We're talking about articles, news articles. What kind of articles? No articles in grammar. These are the letter a, an, and the. So lets hop over to the blackboard and just do a basic overview, just a basic highlight of what these are. Then we'll go into our common mistakes. So and the, alright, now why do I separate these? Because these two are what we call indefinite. And this is what we call, I'm using the arrow for this, these two definite. Now what does that mean? Alright, yeah, good question. These indefinite definite, those are boring words. Who cares, right? What does it mean? Well, let's say we've got a table here with 123. Not, they're not hand grenades. These are, these are apples, alright? And we've got one that's red because this one's Arad. Okay. And these two are yellow or green, they're the same color. If I say, give me an apple or pleas to be nice, please give me an apple. You can choose which one. You can choose this one or this one or this one, right? Because I didn't say specifically which Apple I want. I haven't specified. It's indefinite. Can I have an apple? Yeah, sure. And then you grab this one in the middle. Now if I say give me, Please, please don't forget to say, please. Don't forget to say please. Very polite. Please give me the apple on the left. Then you should give me this apple. Or if I say please give me the red apple. The red apple, then I want the one on the left. So there are different ways to be specific about which one I'm talking about, right? But notice here that when I use the there is some specific thing I want, right? And if I use, I'm not that specific, but I do want an apple. So notice that these are both specific about which general thing I'm talking about. They're both about apples. But then this one is even more specific than that. This one is anyone in the category of Apple. This one is only one in the category of Apple. Now what if this is an apple and this is an orange, and this is a banana instead. So three different types of fruit is only one apple, one orange, and one banana. Then all I need to say is, should I say, give me an apple or give me the apple? Which one should I say? All I need to say is give me the apple. The apple, why? Because there's only one. So if there's more than one and I want a specific apple, I'm going to use that to say which specific apple. If I care, if I don't care, then I'll use a or an in this case because it's an apple, right? To say, I don't care which one. But if there's only one, then I'll use the to say, among those different types of fruit, apple, banana, orange, give me the apple. The apple, There's only one. Okay? That's how it works. You probably know the difference between an n is really the next sound. So I would go in front of a consonant sound, like be a banana, cherry, tomato, right? And n would go in front of a vowel sound, an apple, an orange, and ostrich, right? Now, there are some interesting exceptions to this. For example, we would say, ah, and then unicorn. Because of the pronunciations, it's actually not the letter. The letter is not as important as the pronunciation because this is pronounced, you like the word you. We say, oh, if it's this one, this is actually incorrect. Even though this is an h here. We don't pronounce the h. We don't say, How're we say hour. So this should be n an hour. So it's not about the spelling, it's about the sound, It's about the next sound. After that, the beginning of this, of this word. So ignore the spelling. Listen. Listen. Is, is it a standard vowel sound? If it is like our umbrella, then you're probably going to use n. And if not, then you're probably going to use. The common issue then is using mixing these up. Making a mistake where we would say, give me an apple and we want a specific one. That would be a common, a common issue of communication. But also using the when we don't need to use the and not using the one we should use the. Now, I'm just making a statement there. So you're probably thinking, Okay, how about some examples, please? Yes. Alright, so let's look at some common issues and a few examples that show those issues. With articles. 15. When 'The' is Not Needed: This first set of examples we're going to look at is for when the is not necessary. But not necessary because we're talking about something that's not specific. Something that's not specific. Specific thing is that one that's specific thing that I'm talking about, that one, not another one. Okay. The communication is an important skill for almost any kind of work. Well, communication is a general thing we've learned. That's an uncountable noun, right? It's an idea, It's a concept. It's just a concept. So it can't be counted. Alright, well that's one reason maybe why we shouldn't have. But also there are different kinds of communication. There is non-violent communication, There's aggressive communication. There's clear communication, right? So we're speaking generally here. And if we're speaking generally about communication, we don't need to use the because we're talking about something in general, a general concept, just the idea of communication. So here, if we're talking about a general idea about something, communication is an important skill for almost any kind of work. Now if we're talking about someone's specific style of communication, right? Say this style of communication that you use, the communication techniques that you use are very impactful. Alright, then we use the right. We're talking about specific brands or styles of communication. Not if we're speaking this generally though. I think you play the video games too much. I think you play the video games. I've heard this so many times. Why do we need the I think you play video games too much. Does this person only play one video game? Well, if so, then we would probably say, I think you play that video game too much. What does that mean? That may not mean that this person plays too many video games in general. That may just mean one friend is making fun of another friend for not trying different games. I think you played that game too much. I think you play it and it would be okay to say, I think you play the game too much, a specific game that you play, okay? But here we're talking about in general, the activity of playing video games. I think you play video games too much. I think you play too many video games. We don't need them. There. We're talking about a general activity. We're not being specific. We do not need the most about this last one. Have you eaten the dinner yet? Okay. Have you eaten the dinner? The dinner? Which dinner? It makes it more confusing if we have the here because usually I don't need to know everything you ate for dinner. So that dinner would be a specific meal that someone prepared for you? Right? Did you eat the dinner? I left in the fridge. Yeah. I hate it. Well, that's a specific dinner. Which one? The dinner I left in the fridge, I made a dinner and I put it in the fridge and I want to know if you ate that one, not a different one. No, I didn't need it. I ate outside. Okay. Did you eat dinner? It's a general statement. This thing, the meal people eat every day in the evening, not a specific one, just the meal in the evening. It's called Dinner. Dinner is the specific meal. So dinner achieves what the meal in the evening does. There. 16. Common Proper Noun Mistakes: This next set of examples, we're going to look at some common issues when the is used for something that is specific, but it's not necessary. Remember, we said the apple, the apple on the left. Okay, we're talking about a specific apple, or we're talking about a specific fruit, the apple, not the banana, not the orange. Okay? But that doesn't mean that should be used. In all cases. When we're talking about something specific. Specifically using that word a lot. Specifically when there is only one of that, unless it's in the name. If there's only one of that thing in the world, we don't need to use the perfect example, Manhattan. Now there might be other places named Manhattan. But if I know which one I'm talking about, the one in New York City. One. And that's the famous one. That's the one most people know. You don't need to put The in front of it even though it is a specific thing. It's called that. So don't use the we often visit the Manhattan on weekend afternoons. If you say We often visit the city on weekend afternoons, That's okay. Which city I'm talking about, maybe New York City. Visit the city. A specific city. New York City. We wouldn't say the New York City because again, that is the specific name. For use the name. We don't need it. If we don't use the name, we do need it because the city there are many cities, right? I'm talking about the specific one I visit. Which one? New York City. Uh-huh. But New York City is already the name. So don't use the the name makes it specific. Don't use the Manhattan is specific. That's the name. Don't use them. We often visit Manhattan on weekend afternoons. Know the are you going to visit your family on the Thanksgiving? Thanksgiving is a holiday in the United States where I live. And because it is the name of the holiday, right? We don't need to use the if we use the name. If we say the holiday, then we do. There's a holiday coming up. Which one? Thanksgiving. But I don't say the name. I want to know. Are you going to go home to visit your family during Thanksgiving? I say Are you going home for the holiday? Will you be visiting your family for the holiday during the holiday? That's correct. The holiday because holiday is a general noun and there are many holidays and I'm being specific, but Thanksgiving is already the name of that holiday. So it is already specific. So I don't need the are you going to visit your family for Thanksgiving? Perfect. Alright. I watch your videos on the YouTube all the time. This is something that I've heard people say, way too often, written and spoken. I watch your videos on the YouTube all the time. Youtube. Youtube. Youtube is the name of a platform. Youtube is the name of a company, right? Because it is the name. We don't need to use. The it's already specific because we gave the name. It's almost like the name does the job of the VOA, so we don't need the verb. That's why we use the name. If we don't use the name, then we use the, the the city. Alright? I know which one you're talking about. New York City. Alright. I know which one you're talking about. In either case, I'm accomplishing what I want to accomplish. I'm being I'll use it one more time. Specific. I'm being specific. Now. What about times when the is in the name the Great Wall of China? Well, yeah, it's in the name. So if it's in the name Hoover Dam, the Great Wall of China, often landmarks will have the name, of course then you have to include it. You can't say, I can't say that in front of Great Wall of China because Luke said don't use the in front of the names of things. No. It's in the name. It's called the Great Wall of China. That's the English name. It's called the Hoover Dam. That's what it's called. So don't take it out. If it's in the name. What about things like the moon? That's the name of it, right? Well, yes, it is the name of it. So that's one thing. But also it is just one of many moons. There are billions, trillions of moons in the universe. We're talking about hours, the specific one going around the Earth. So we say the moon. That's also, it's named for either, for either reason, it's called the moon. So just be careful with this. Make sure you are very self-aware. You are listening to yourself when you're speaking. It's really most difficult when you're talking quickly and it slips out and you didn't notice it. Now I want to make a quick note on the Before we move on to an end. 17. Special 'The' Cases: Now there are a couple of cases where we use the when at first it might not seem like we should. I'm going to the gym later. The iPad changed the history of technology. And the squirrels tail makes it appear friendly by comparison. So what's going on with these? Well, in all of these, the is correct. We should use the Y. So for this one, I'm going to the gym. There are many gyms. Which one are you going to? Why didn't you say which one? It's a little confusing here because I just said the gym and maybe I'm 30 miles away. And you don't know which one I'm talking about? And I haven't said the name of it. Usually, when we say that something we first have to say which one we're talking about. Earlier on. We say the name of the gym. I go to Bob, big big Bob's Jim. The gym and then later I say the gym and you know which one. But here it doesn't matter so much. All you need to know is that it's the one I go to. You don't really need to know the name or where it is. Unless you really care, you can ask me. Right. But usually people just say, I'm going to the gym, that that breaks a rule that we usually say about the and that's what I said earlier. First you need to say which thing you're talking about and then later you can use the gym. But for the gym, for the office. Office. Especially for these two. They're the ones I go to. The office I go-to because it's my job that GMI go-to because that's the one I go to. They're probably not going to ask which one, which gym be specific because it doesn't really matter in this situation. So these are just common things to say and are kind of interesting exceptions to that rule of first having to say which one I'm talking about. The one on the left, right? The apple. That is not one of those other two things we are looking at. The iPad changed the history of technology. We're talking about this though here. That one is specific iPad. That's what the is used for. A specific one? No. No. Here it is a category. And when we're talking about a category, sometimes the is used. There are no exceptions here. There's not one iPad that we're excluding. It's just this category, iPad and all examples of it, right? All examples of iPad. This general thing. If we're talking about a general thing, we could say iPads, but that might make us think about individual iPads, which is not what we want to say, the innovation, the innovation of the iPad. So it's kind of like a category. If it's kind of like a category of a thing. Often you'll hear people use the, the iPad changed history. The iPad changed the history of technology. Same here. The squirrels tail makes it appear friendly. Am I talking about a specific squirrels tail? I could be, but in this case, probably not. I'm talking about a category of things, not the tail of another animal. I'm talking about the category of squirrel. And one of the things that squirrels have, which is their tail. So you hear this on nature documentaries, the squirrels tail makes it appear friendly by comparison to other types of rodents. It's my, kind of my David Attenborough impression, the squirrels tail, right? So this is a category. And because it's a category, you often hear people say the right so you hear that. Don't get angry at me if you hear it because it's just one of those interesting kind of exceptions to what we're used to with articles, especially. Now we're going to go on and talk about and n. 18. Typical 'An/And' Mixups: When it comes to the articles and an, the most common issues are very simple. This is using the instead of, for example, or using a when you should use nothing or mixing up an end, right and the wrong place as we talked about before. So we're going to look at examples that highlight these. And once you've got the basic idea, hopefully you can start building them into your habits. Okay, So here we go. Please give me the pen. Now, is there anything wrong with this grammatically? Definitely not, but it depends on what you mean. If I say give me the pen. Please give me the pen. Sorry. Always use please. Please give me the pen. Then you might for a second, I want to ask me which pen because there are ten here. If there are many pens and some are blue and some are black, I might want to then ask you whether you need a blue or black one. Why? Because you said the if you said the that must mean that in your head there was a specific pen that you wanted. So it's possible to cause confusion here. Most of the time, probably not, but it is possible. So if you really don't care which one, you just need one, blue, black, whatever. I just need to write something, then make sure you use a instead of the, this may be the most common issue using the, when you really wanted to use a where using the might cause someone to start thinking too much and you don't want them to start thinking too much, just want them to get the thing and give it to me, whichever one I don't care. Blue, black, pink, green doesn't matter right? Now. What about this one? Would you like coffee? Is this wrong? It's actually not wrong. But it depends on what you mean. If I say, would you like coffee? Often? I'm talking about the experience of going to a coffee shop, ordering a coffee, sitting down and having a conversation. It often means that would you like to grab coffee? Would you like to grab some coffee? Now you could say, Would you like to get a coffee? If you say get a coffee, It may mean the same thing going out, right? So if that's not what you meant, that might make someone think that you're inviting them out somewhere. But if what you really meant was I'm in the break room and I could quickly grab one for you and bring it to you, then it's probably better to use. Would you like like a coffee? Would you like your coffee? I'm in the break room. I text you. Would you like a coffee or I'm standing here making a coffee for myself and I say, Would you like a coffee? Now it's it's it's okay to say, would you like coffee in that situation? I'm making coffee and I'm standing here and I say, would you like coffee? But it's better there to say, would you like coffee? Because that immediately makes you think of the correct thing which is a cup that contains the coffee, isn't focusing on the broader experience of sitting down and having it and having the conversation, right? I think it's better in this case, if you mean that to say a coffee anyway, just be careful and think about what you really mean before you choose which way you're going to say it. I got an email from her this morning. I think you know what this issue is. This is where as we talked about, we use one or we should use the other one, N, because of the next sound. So this is E and because it's e vowel sound, then we should use and I got an email, an email. But remember, we're focusing on sounds not letters because things like, as I said, H0 EUR. Well, that's a vowel sound even though it's spelled with an H. And you form I said unicorn before, but whatever same thing would be a uniform, not an uniform. So pay attention to the sound, not the spelling. They have quite a few ideas. Now this one has two meanings. One is common, one is not. We do have to add for the one that is common. If we say they have few ideas without quite, that just means they don't have many ideas. But if I want to say that, then I'll probably will focus on the knot. Like I said before. If you want to say the negative thing, start with that, start with, don't, start with not, right or can't or isn't. Then say the verb. If we say we have few, we have few. It's not as, not as common, right? So probably not. What you meant, probably a mistake here. What we want to say is we have quite a few ideas. Now. Is there any difference between quite few and quite a few? Absolutely. Quite few means not many at all. Not many. Very little, a small amount, tiny, tiny, tiny. It's focusing, focusing on that being close to nothing. But if we say quite a few, That's more like a lot, many, big amount, a large number of, right, with quite a few people on the team usually were impressed by how many were impressed by the large number. Wow, you have quite a few people on your team. Wow, quite a few interesting chairs in your house, right? We're focusing on the quantity being high, not low, whereas quite few, quite few. Quiet fuel that's focusing on the quantity being low, not high. Are you journalists? Are you a journalist? When you're talking about your role, your job, what you are, your position, right? You're one of many journalists. There are millions, trillions of journalists in the world and you're one of them. So we should say, journalists, not journalists. Journalists is not an uncountable noun. Journalist is countable nouns, so we should use a o is a way to count nouns, right? Up pizza, a journalist, I need vacation. Vacation is also countable. We need to count a vacation. We can say one vacation to vacations. However, sometimes we use it in an uncountable way. We say, for example, vacation is great. Vacation is a wonderful thing. It's actually better to say vacations and counted vacations are amazing. But vacation as an idea, as a concept is also okay. So if I say I need vacation, I need vacation. It's it's technically not wrong, but it's so uncommon to use it that I would say it's pretty close to wrong. What you should say here is again, I need a vacation. I need a vacation. So these are some of the common issues that come up with an N. Make sure you've really got them drilled into your brain and listen for when you're speaking or you're writing something, make sure you're paying attention to that. Be very, very careful, very, very self-aware so that you're fixing your habits. Next, we're going to go on and talk about verb tense issues. So see you in the next lesson. 19. Review of Subject-Verb Agreement: In this section of the course, we're going to take a look at some of the most common mistakes that English learners make when it comes to verbs. Now, there are quite a few different issues. We're going to be looking at. The most common, the ones that come up most often. And we're going to start with subject verb agreement. If you don't know what that means, don't worry. We'll go over it very briefly before we jump into the issues. Then in the next couple of lessons we're going to look at a few other common mistakes. So let's pop over to the blackboard here. And I hope this is, hope this is, of course, review. This looks familiar, right? This is your subject, subject. Subject, subject, subject, subject, subject, subject, subject, subject, subjects, subjects, subjects, subjects, subject, subject, subject. All of these, the first one is the subject, that is what the sentence is about or who the sentence is about. Or we could say who or what is doing the action or doing the main verb of the sentence. Then we have the main verb of the sentence being done by the subject, need, need and eat and eat and eat and eat was were, were, were was, was, wasn't. Okay. Now, there's some differences here. You could say, because this is was, and that's not quite, in some ways an action, right? It's a verb about the subject. We'll look at that next, but let's start over here. To keep it simple, I've used the verb need and then different subjects. Okay? I need, you need, we need, they need. So you notice here that this doesn't change for IU we and they, but then for it than its needs. So we have to change this to agree with the subject. Now, what if we replaced it with any kind of thing, the name of a thing, right? Let's say, for example, my brand new computer. Is that still an IT? Ask yourself that is my brand new computer. Got some adjectives in their right to describe it, but it is a computer, is that it? Yes, that's an it. So would it be my brand new computer need a new part or my brand new computer needs a new part should be needs. So these can replace common nouns, things like computers. They can replace people, the names of people, for example, or groups of people. But we have to be careful. That's where it can get a little confusing and it can get easy to get mixed up, right? Can get easy to get mixed up. Yeah, that's right, That's right. So then we go back to S0. And he and we noticed that he and she are the same as it. So I you we they that is without the S. So we have it. She and he needs and then I you we they need we can group those together. Now, I want to make it very clear. Just because we have need a needs here doesn't mean it's always as simple as no S and S. You have to look at it individually, verb by verb. There are different forms of verbs and they change in different ways to agree with the subject. So you have to look out for those. There are some common, of course, common characteristics. With verbs. There are regular verbs and irregular verbs. But generally speaking, I would say just look at, as you learn verbs, make sure you're paying attention to the different, the different forms. Now, look at this one. He doesn't need. He doesn't need. Okay. Well, if we say this one, why is this need and not needs? It's needed, not needs because we've already used this to agree with he. He does. He does. Well, what if it were we? We do, we do. So if the verb is due than I do. Oops, I need to know there you do. But if it's it he or she than it does. It does. She does. He does. So the common thing there is that it's going to be the same pattern where these three are going to use one form and these are going to use another. Usually it's going to be like that Almost, almost always. So this one does is agreeing with he doesn't need. So no matter what this is, it's need. Always need because we've already. Agreed. Does with he well, what if what if it's i then it wouldn't be doesn't it would be I don't and it would still be need. I don't need he doesn't need she doesn't need. It doesn't need. We don't need. Okay. He goes, he can't go. Same idea here. Goes is the one that agrees with he, she and it and go agrees with IU we and they and then if you have something here between in this case, it would be he can't go. But what if it's I I can't go. Oh, okay. I can we can They can it can. She can. So there it's all can it doesn't change at all. So again, you have to look out for each one and look for interesting exceptions times when it doesn't change at all no matter what the subject is. And times when it does, which is most common. So there you just have to study patterns. You have to look out for patterns and you probably already know most of them. Now if we look at these over here, we have to again, remind ourselves that we can't always make a simple rule and suddenly understand everything. We have to look at them individually. Well, these are all going to be in the past. All right, we can notice that we've got the past, but this doesn't have to be a simple action. We could say I was reading for example, or we could say, I was happy about an adjective about me or I in this case. So this is just a verb. It doesn't have to be an action verb. But notice here, I need, You need, we need I was, you were, we were. So I is different here for this past tense one. Let's look at another past tense verb. Let's use have. For example, in the past, I had you had we had they had it had she had how about go? I went you went? We went. They went. It went. She went. Alright. That's all went. Okay. So that's nice. Usually they're all the same, but here's an interesting exception where it's different. Well, is an m is already kind of a strange one because we have I am for the present and you are here. And it is She is here. Right. So we can make sure we're a little bit more careful with these because they're a little weird. So I guess what I'm trying to really point out here is the subject and the verb need to agree. But you can't always make very simple rules to follow to make sure that they do. You have to learn by example. And you can make your own little rules and patterns. But don't be too rigid and don't be too strict about it. Because you will find exceptions. You will find weird little things like, Oh, well, most verbs are always the same in the past, right? No matter what, they agree with the subject, and they're always the same, except this one doesn't follow that rule because it wasn't were are different and then it's it was in she was and she wasn't again. Okay. So that's a little weird. So just don't be too strict. When you're learning these be a little flexible, be open. And the key thing is to just make sure that the verb and the subject to grep. So this is just high level stuff too. And when I say high level, I mean broad stuff to make sure you get the idea of subject verb agreement. But now we need to look at some examples that can show us where it gets confusing, how it's easy to get mixed up with this stuff. Some of the common mistakes. So let's look at those. 20. Confusing Subjects: Part 1: Let's look through our first example here and see what the mistake maybe I say, maybe intentionally, the team are excited to attend next week's workshop. Alright, this is an extremely common issue. Extremely common. But some would say it doesn't really matter which way you go. The team. Remember the computer example I gave? A computer, isn't it? Right? And what agrees with it is, it is it is. But the team that's a group of people. So that would be, uh, they, they, I should capitalize these but okay, whatever they they, then it's R. But if it's an inch, then it's is. So we talking about a group of people who make up a thing, a team, or we're talking just about a group of people that were thinking of as people together, which would be a vein, well, most of the time, you'd want to consider a team as a whole unit, as a thing. A team. The team is ready, the team is excited, the team is working hard. That's how it's often used, especially in a workplace setting. This is a unit, yes, it's made up of people. That's true, of course. But we're talking about this group of people as a thing in a way, a unit. So most common would be it is, however, you will hear people sometimes if it's a group of people together, say, are the team, are, That sounds weird to me. Personally. I would not go that way. I would consider a team to be a thing, a unit, as I said. So I would say the team is, that would be my preference. You will hear people say the team are. And that's where we get into this sort of fuzzy territory of, hey, it's a language. Some people say it like this, or most people say it like this is. But we have to be a little flexible here. Again, it depends on what you consider it to be. And there are other things like that. The group, the group is or the group are. Again, the group are sounds very weird to me. Sounds totally wrong. It is, it is wrong. It is wrong. But you hear people sometimes say it. The group is, oh, that sounds very natural because the group, a group is a thing. Okay, so let's take a look at the next one. All of you inspires me to make sure I'm always doing my best work. Does that sound right? Let's put it in the same terms that we did for the last one. Okay, so the team are right, we said the team has in it. So if it were, it would be, it inspires to agree, right? And that should be a capital it, but whatever it inspires, and then it would be, if it were they, then it would be they inspire to agree. And this is one of our simple verbs, irregular verbs, which are actually more common, where you can just add the S to make sure that it agrees. When agree is another one. I agree. Agrees. Okay. So all of you let's say it's the team. Someone goes into the room where the team is. Not the team are, the team is here. They are. There they are. I'm looking at them. There's Kathy and Wanda. Everybody's here. Okay. All of you. Now my talking about a team here. The way that I say this, all of you makes it no longer for the sake of agreement, no longer a thing like a team, like an int. So in order to agree, we have to consider this more like, uh, they, they inspire, not it inspires. There you are in front of me. I'm considering you as individuals now, not just this unit of a team. So it's all of you inspire me to make sure I'm always doing my best work. If I say the team again, then it would be the team inspires me to make sure I'm doing my best work as a collective, that group of people, right? But all of you, that person in that person and that person and that person, they over there, that team over there, those people I'm looking at, they inspire me. Okay, so that's a little tricky. I know that's a little weird, but this is, this is how it goes. And it doesn't always make perfect sense. It's really the words you choose, not only the situation. You're in. So are we talking about this thing that's a group or are we talking about individuals? Here? We're talking about individuals, individual people. The ideas in this groundbreaking documentary about existentialism is really opening my mind. Okay, So this sounds a little confusing. What makes this one confusing? Well, here we have ideas, and that's one we can say. Now let's just say this is, this is one thing we're talking about. Let's just say it's the thing we're talking about, this groundbreaking documentary. So another thing about this thing, Let's just say this is the topic, okay? Existentialism is a branch of an idea in philosophy. So what are we talking about? What does, Is need to agree with, should is agree with existentialism, which is in it. We would say this isn't, it? It is. Okay. Should agree with groundbreaking documentary. This is just, this is just an adjective. Groundbreaking documentary is a movie. So this is another, it, this whole thing we can replace with it. And the ideas plural. So that's not an, IT, that's a vey. So what is the, is supposed to agree with? Well, I like to simplify sentences like this. So if I wanted to, I could say the ideas in it about it is really opening my mind. Suddenly it really sounds weird. Why does it sound weird? Because I've kind of revealed that the thing I'm trying to agree with is this, that this is the subject, the ideas. And these are details, this groundbreaking documentary about existentialism. These are details about this, but I'm really focusing on this. The sentences about this. V ideas. The ideas which are a, can say, we can replace it with day. They is, they is, no, it would be they are. Okay. So if you really can't figure it out, It's a lot of things, It's complicated, just trying to simplify the sentence a little bit. And then you can get an idea. If I simplify this sentence all the way down to is really opening my mind. Oh, okay, Well obviously then this should be our, alright, problem-solved. So don't let yourself get confused by a bunch of things in between. You're not agreeing with the noun that comes directly before. You are agreeing with the subject of the sentence. That's why it's called subject verb agreement. Alright, then we have one more quick set of examples to look through before we go on to our next lesson. 21. Confusing Subjects: Part 2: Alright, these last two examples are related. Notice the OR and the end here, we're talking about very similar things and we want to untangle this very, very, very common issue. Either Amazon or Google need to start working on a robot that can do housework. Amazon and Google needs to collaborate more closely on data privacy. Alright? What's going on here? Either? When we say, either, we are talking about one of two things. If I say, which flavor would you like, chocolate or vanilla? And you say either. That does not mean both. Both means I give you two ice cream cones, one chocolate, one vanilla. Either means I can pick chocolate or vanilla. No matter which one I pick, I'm only picking one. And so the grammar is based on one. It, it 11. So either it, the company. Now this is not correct to replace these with it. I'm just trying to simplify to show you or it need to start. Where does that sound right? Well, if that's it, then it wouldn't be it need right? To make that agree. If we have need, you remember, we just add an s, right? It needs, it needs, they need. So we're not talking about Amazon and Google together as two things which would be a day. This is individually, either Amazon or Google. The best way I think to get this is to continue the sentence. Imagining it's one or the other. So like this, either Amazon need no, no, that can't be right. If it's just that either Amazon needs to start working on a robot that can do housework, or Google needs to start working on a robot that can do housework. So if you do it like that, make the sentence for each one of them, then it becomes obvious that this is incorrect and it needs to be, needs, it needs to be because we're not talking about these two as a group. We're talking about them as individuals. Either Amazon or Google needs to start working on a robot that can do housework. Now this is the opposite then Amazon and Google needs. Okay, hold on a second. If I say and now no longer am I saying it or it these two as separate. I'm saying it and it him and her. Right. Well, if it's two things together, then it's no longer an, IT. Now it's a group. Well, I should say a group of people that were looking at, I don't want to confuse you. It's a day. It's a day because we have two companies here. We put them together. Now it's not it, it now it's, they, they need, it's needed to agree. They need to collaborate more closely on data privacy. So don't let yourself get confused. The best thing you can do is for these oral ones, make each one as its own sentence and then it will be very clear. And then if you have an end, man, it's two things or three things or two companies or three companies or people, then you can put them together as a day and then make sure that the verb that you use agrees with vague. I know it's not too crazy difficult to understand once you look at it, but make sure you're really paying attention, really self-aware when you are making sentences like these. In the next lesson, we're going to continue talking about verbs. We're going to look at some common verb tense mistakes. 22. Verb Tense Mistakes: Using verb tenses correctly can avoid a lot of confusion. Verb tenses, how we change the verb when we're talking about different times, if something is happening now or in the future or in the past. And a lot of the common issues are quite simple to fix, but you have to be aware of them. Once you're aware of them and you can notice them and start to correct them. You can avoid so much confusion and so much miscommunication. So we're going to look at a few examples, quite a few examples to really get across these common issues with tents. And it's not as simple as saying, when you're talking about the present, now, use simple present tense. Actually, simple present tense is used more often for other things not related to the present. When you're talking about the present, you use present continuous tense, not simple present tense. Silly, right? This gets a little tricky. We have to talk about it, right? Let's pop over to the board. Now, I'm assuming that you know most of the verb tenses and you know basically how to use them. This is not a lesson about verb tenses. I'm not teaching you in depth how to use them. That's something that I've done in my other courses, more in-depth grammar stuff. We're really trying to look at common issues, but we will be pulling out the usage of these tenses in our, in our examples, of course. So let's dive into the first one and see what issues we can dig up. I was walking toward a mountain in the distance. Beside me, I see a cactus. So maybe here you're telling a story. Maybe you're talking about a dream. What do you notice? I was walking. This was walking. This is happening in the past. I and g is a continuous tense. This is called past continuous. I was walking toward a mountain in the distance, and beside me I see a cactus. What is this? This is the simple present tense. Okay, well, that's not the same as this. So right away we see an issue. The issue is that we've used two different ones. And often this happens in a story. Talking about a movie, talking about a dream, flipping around using different tenses and then causing confusion as a result. Now, if you're talking about your dream and you decide to use this present simple tense throughout the story. Great. But stick to it. Make that the tense of the whole dream. I see a cactus there. If we're talking in the present, we would say, I am walking toward a mountain in the distance beside me I see a cactus. This simple tense is interrupting the continuous tense, that would be the present continuous tense. So I am doing something and then I see something that makes sense, no longer confused. But if it's was walking past continuous tense and then this stops it. Now we're confused. We can either change this so that it's all present or change it so it's all past. I was walking toward a mountain in the distance beside me, I simply saw past simple tense, right? I saw a cactus. That works. Just make sure it's consistent. Don't flip flop around. You can do either one. It doesn't matter. In fact, in a way I think it's more interesting to tell a dream or a story, or a movie that you saw to tell this story in the present tense. I think that's fine. That's really interesting. I'm not telling you you should do that, but that's fine. No matter what, stick to it. Be consistent, otherwise, people will be confused. Okay. Your brother is going skiing in Colorado, right? Okay. Now, the problem here is that I don't know what you mean. Is he's skiing right now or will he be skiing soon? Because if I talk about the future, I might say I'm going I'm going skiing next week. That's the future. That's my plan. When we talk about our plans, we say, I'm going to do something. I'm going skiing, I'm going hiking, I'm going hiking. This weekend, That's the future. Great. But if I'm doing that now and someone calls me and they say, What are you doing? I'll say the same thing. What are you doing? I'm going skiing or I'm skiing, which will probably be more common. I'm skiing. I'm on the mountain right now. I'm skiing. Okay? So the problem here is that it could have two meanings and that is what makes it confusing. Your brother is going skiing in Colorado next week, right? Your brother is going skiing in Colorado next week, right? By adding the time in the future, it makes it clear that I'm asking if that's your brother's plan or if I want to make it really clear, I might say your brother is going to go, going to go. We can definitely do that when we want to talk about future plans. Going to do, going to see, going to what? I'm going to watch a movie tonight. That's a future plan. That's what I'm planning to do. Doesn't mean I'm going there now. It means that's my future intention. So way to talk about the future. You could also say Your brother will go skiing. That's alright. But that's a little awkward. You could say your brother is planning to go skiing in Colorado next week, right? That would clarify it as well. What if it's happening right now? What if that's the question? Well, then I think to avoid confusion, we would just cut out going cut it out. Then we're not talking about the future. Your brother's skiing in Colorado, right? Is skiing. So minimize the number of verbs you're using is skiing, is walking. Use the present continuous tense, that's called the simple present, not the simple. I just meant it is simple present, continuous. So avoid this possibility of it being confused for a question about the future and just cut that out and say, Your brother skiing in Colorado, right? It must be about now. So I know he's not he's going next week. He's going skiing in Colorado next week. Okay. Well, that's more clear. So we want to avoid multiple meanings. We want to avoid confusion. Let's sitting down over there with our burritos. Let's sitting down. Okay. Can we say She's sitting down over there with her burrito? Yes. That's happening right now. Can we say we were sitting down on that bench with our burritos 20 minutes ago. We were yeah, that's present continuous tense. The first one and the second one is past continuous tense. We were sitting down with our burritos, were agrees with wheat, right. Okay. Now, what's the issue with this one? Well, I'm not talking about what we are doing. We're we're doing. What I'm talking about is what I think we should do. Let us, let us, this is a suggestion. This is totally different. So this is more like let us go, let us walk. Let us sit. That's the one that should be an i. Let us sit. So let's sit, let's is a contraction of lettuce means let us, Let's sit down over there with our burritos, okay. Because we're not talking about what we are doing. Then if someone calls me, after we do that, we're sitting down, we're eating our burritos. They say, Hey, what are you doing? I might say, we're sitting down on a bench eating burritos. Kind of awkward thing to say, but that would be grammatically correct. So this is not, this is a common issue to say something like, let's, and then follow it with this I-N-G verb. Instead of the simple present tense. They waited for us for an hour. Let's hurry. They weighted k. Does that mean they're waiting now? Actually, no, it means they waited and maybe they left. But maybe you meant they're still waiting. Well, that's where we again, have some confusion. If they're currently waiting. And that started an hour ago, but we want to mention that it's still going on. Otherwise, I wouldn't say let's hurry, right? The reason I say let's hurry is because they are still waiting. If they waited for us for an hour, that means they started waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting. After one hour they stopped. They were tired of waiting and they left. They waited for an hour and then they left. Well, then I have no reason to say let's hurry. Because let's hurry suggests I want them to stop waiting for us. I want to meet them and so they won't be angry anymore, right? So what I should do instead is something called the present perfect tense. This is where we use, and you might know this already. We use have or has to agree with whichever one agrees with the subject. And then what we call the past participle. Now this may be been, It's often we use been. And then ING and I-N-G verb, been waiting, been watching, been living, been talking. But it doesn't have to be. We could just use another past participle, verb. Past participle is a special form of a verb and you can look up that anytime, but it's eaten, for example, or done or seen. Ben is perhaps the most, the most common. It's sort of a special form of a verb. Okay? So what we want to say is they have been waiting here because they still are, it's still going on. We want to use the I-N-G. It's continuing. Its continuing have been suggested began before. So this is the perfect tense to use, started an hour ago. It's going on, it's going on and hey, right now, it's still happening. They have been waiting for an hour, will be there in 20 minutes. If we hurry. They will have waited have been waiting for an hour and 20 minutes by the time we arrive. So when you want to mention something that is going on now that started in the past, it's continuing. You want to make sure you use the present perfect tense. Different story. If we wanted to use the past perfect tense, that's when it stopped in the past. But for this one, it's definitely better than using weighted because weight it makes it seem like they're not waiting any more. Okay. So this is a very common issue. It can cause some confusion with all of these verbs. We want to just avoid confusion. Let's look at a couple more examples. 23. Past and Future Verb Issues: I mentioned in the previous example, the present perfect tense, where something started in the past and is still going on. Then we also have the past perfect tense, which is very similar. But the thing that was going on stopped at some point in the past. So let's look at this example. Cathy had lived in Seattle for the past six years. Okay. Now, is this wrong? Technically, no. But the problem is the past six years makes me think that we're here now. This is now. And I'm going to go back to this time when Kathy began to live in Seattle. And this duration is six years, this phrase, the past six years, it makes me think this is the time window that Kathy lived in Seattle. But the grammar tells me that she doesn't live in Seattle. Why? Because it's had lived had live means at some point in the past, she stopped living in Seattle. Now she lives somewhere else. But then the window, the duration is past six years. This phrase, the past six years, from now, six years into the past. So this is the confusion. So maybe that what she stopped living in Seattle yesterday. So we can still say six years. I don't know. It's confusing. So either we have to change this to Kathy has lived in Seattle for the past six years. Or Kathy, you could also say, if we wanted to use that continuous tense, has been living in Seattle for the past six years also. Okay, we can do that. But if we want to say that it's finished, we want to use had lived in Seattle. We need to change this second part. Cathy had lived in Seattle for six years and then maybe we have some event until last winter until she got a new job in Colorado. So something stopped at something made her leave. Then we know the duration is six years, but it's not six years from the present into the past. I hope that makes sense. Again. You have to choose the tense that expresses what you mean. In order to avoid confusion. It's totally okay to use has been or Kathy has lived okay. For the past six years. What that means is she's still there or you can use had lived or you can say had been living. That's okay too. In Seattle. And then say for six years, That's the duration, the whole period of time. But now, once we've removed the past six years and we just say six years, we can take that duration of six years and we can move it wherever we want. Slide it along the scale forward and backward. That's fine. As long as it's in the past, right? So maybe that's maybe that's something like here's the six-year period. And this ended in 2012. Long time ago. This is six this is a six-year period. That's how long she lived in Seattle. Now. This is now we're in the year this is the year 20 Seventy-five. I'm speaking to you from the year 2075, believe it or not. So that's a long time ago that she lived there. We can move this forward and backward because we're no longer bound to it being the past six years, which is specifically from now when we say that. Okay. So just make sure you're clear on those two and then make sure you're carefully using them. Make sure that you're using them accurately. Okay, this next one, we were playing video games all weekend. But actually nothing wrong with that. Right? But what's the difference between we were playing and we played? I would say we played is more common. To me, it sounds a bit more natural. But why we were playing is often used to talk about a continuous action. In the past. We were walking, I was listening to a podcast, right? Something was happening and then there's some kind of interruption. So usually that past continuous tense is used when you either want to focus on the thing that caused it to stop. I was watching TV when I heard screams outside my window, something's stopped. This was watching is kind of like context background information. It gives you an idea of what thing was going on before the exciting things stopped it. Or you have two simultaneous actions, two things going on at the same time. I was watching TV and my friend was outside going for a jog. Two things happening at the same time. That's usually the function of using the past continuous tense. There's really no clear reason why you would use it here to talk about all weekend. Unless you really want to stress this feeling of it was the literally the only thing we did, right? The reason that I think this one is better, we played video games all weekend is that it is a completed action. Okay. I slept all day instead of I was sleeping all day. I was sleeping all day gives this feeling of there's literally nothing else that I did. I didn't even stand up to go to the bathroom is the feeling I get. But when I say I slept all day, it feels a little more natural. You know, that I probably had breakfasts and I probably went to the bathroom in a few times and maybe walk the dog. So we played video games all weekend as this completed thing, it's like putting this activity on a shelf. The label is all weekend. And then this activity, it doesn't make me feel like nothing at all else happened. I don't feel like that. It's just this is something that happened a lot last weekend. This is something we did. So to me, it's just more natural. Again, it's not a matter of which one is correct. It's just a matter of the feeling that we get, the connotation that we get. And as I mentioned, usually we use that past continuous tense when we want to have something stop an ongoing action where we have two things happening at the same time. The last one here, I will go to Stanford if I'm going to get a high SAT score, a high enough SAT score, okay? This is the score that we need to get in order to get into a university. The SAT is a test, okay? So notice here that we have the future tense. I will go and then I'm going to, going to get, this is the problem. I will do this. If I will do that. I will do this if you will do that. We usually don't need to have double tenses like this. And in fact, we definitely shouldn't, especially in this case, it causes confusion. Even if we're using two different ways to talk about the future. I will go, I'm going to go, I'm going to get, I will get those are the same thing basically, right? Just two different ways to talk about the future. So let me give another example. I will go if she will pay for my ticket. This is the same basic thing, same basic problem. We've used well for both, but it doesn't really matter. Again, we'll go into both about the future. Okay. I will go if she will pay. Sounds weird. We don't need double future tense. I will go if she get rid of this one. The first one we need, keep the first one and then we have to agree with xi. Okay. What is agreeing with she pays I will go if she pays for my ticket. Okay. That sounds more natural. We don't need the double future tense. Same thing here. I will go or I'm going to go either one. I will go to Stanford if. Now how do we simplify this? We just keep it simple. Simple tense. I will go to Stanford. If I get a I will go to Stanford. If I get a high enough SAT score. That sounds much more natural. So just be aware of overusing tenses just because you're talking about the future doesn't mean that every verb has to be in the future tense. You do it at the beginning to let your reader or listener know this is going to be in the future, then you're okay, especially if it's in the same sentence. So keep that in mind. Those are the most common verb tense issues. Now before we go on to talk about infinitives and gerunds, that sounds scary, don't worry, it will be okay. Before we go on to talk about those, let's just take a very quick look at the simple tense. I wanted to just mention a couple of things quickly before we go to the next section. 24. Review of Present Simple Tense: Before we move on to the next section to talk about gerunds and infinitives. I'd like to make a quick note about the present simple tense. Now we've been talking about this tense. I am often in the habit of just calling it the simple tense. But the present simple tense is we could say, the basic form of the verb, go, goes and walk. Walks, Right? The basic form of the verb. You can put it in the future simple tense if you want to do that, or the past simple tense if you want to do that. But I want to focus on this one for a moment. Why is that? Because if you think about it, this tense is often not used to talk about just what's going on in the present. In fact, if we talk about what's going on right now, in this moment, we're usually going to use the present continuous tense, which we've talked about. For example, they are watching TV, are watching TV is running, is raining, right? That's what's going on right now. Now we can use this to talk about general things going on in the present. So for example, I live in London, which is not true. I live in London. Well, this live is a thing that's generally true now. It's been true for awhile and it will probably still continue to be true. But if I want to focus on this moment, I'm not going to use this one. I'm going to use probably. I am living in London right now, although that's kind of a weird thing to say, usually when you're focusing on, at the moment you're doing some activity, you're walking the dog, you're eating lunch, right? Well then you're going to be using the usually continuous tense. Or perhaps we could use the present perfect tense to talk about the present. Something that began before that is continuing up to the present, which we've talked about. Okay, So I just wanted to go over a few examples, correct examples, not mistakes of the simple present tense. To give you a feel for some of the different ways that it can be used. 25. Present Simple Usage Examples: So let's go over a quick set of examples that use the simple present tense in a similar way. The United States spends a lot of money on the military. New movies play in the cinema for a couple of months. And you could have someone recently asked me this question, do I have to have of for a couple of months is also a side point. I visit my aunt a few times a year. I drink coffee when I'm sleeping. Now this one is a little different. But let's look at these. What are we doing here? Well, is this happening right now? This is true about the past. It's true about probably the future, and it is generally true. Now, here we're talking about a general truth or reality. And yes, it is a truth or reality that we are in now. So it's kind of in the present, but probably true about the past, probably true about the future. It's kind of general. We're not really focused on the timeline here. For a lot of the verb tenses, we look at the simple past tense, the simple future tense, The, the past perfect tense, present Purple, Purple tense, present perfect deaths, and present progressive tense or continuous tense. All of these tenses, we're talking about where it is in the timeline and how does it fit onto some thing in the past and when did it begin? And this is really relaxed in a way, it's not too focused on the timeline. That is often how we use this simple present tense when we're not so focused on the timeline. General truths, general realities, new movies play in the cinema for a couple of months. Yeah, That's generally true. It's been true as long as I can remember. And I don't really see a reason to imagine why it wouldn't be true about the future. It's not that it has to be true in the future. It's just that I'm not too focused on when we're talking about here. I just want to kind of generally say something that's generally true. That's the idea here. I visit my aunt a few times a year. Yeah. My last year I did a few times. Could be 34. Could be could be more. Next year. I probably will this year I did. It doesn't even have to be that strict. It's speaking generally, I visit my aunt a few times a year and we could add there, I generally might make it more clear. I generally visit my aunt a few times a year. That gives even more flexibility to not be too strict about this. Now this one, I drink coffee when I'm sleepy. Does that actually mean that every time I feel sleepy I drink coffee? No. What it's trying to say is when this thing happens, when I'm sleepy, this thing may often be connected to it. And again, we're not being too strict. It doesn't mean, hey, you're sleepy. Why are you drinking coffee? What's wrong with you? You lied to me, you betrayed me, know. Okay, relax. Alright. It just means that these are two conditions which tend to be together. It is a kind of general truth. Except here we are attaching one to another for these are just saying things that are generally true. Here. We're linking together the drinking of coffee to this thing, this other thing which is a feeling using when and this is very, very common. I do this when I feel this way or when this happens. It doesn't have to be a feeling. We could say, I go for walks when the weather is nice. Does that mean every time the weather is nice? No. But usually it's when the weather is nice that I go for walks, not necessarily every time. It's almost like a condition for me. Going for walks. I go for walks would be the tense to use. I drink coffee would be the tense to use, because we're not really focused on the timeline. Let's look at another group of examples. 26. Present Simple for Events and Stories: The party begins at seven. Don't be late. Well, seven is the future. So why don't we say the party will begin at seven, or the party is going to begin at seven. This is often used here. This simple present tense is used when we're giving a description of something. And again, not focusing on the fact that this is an upcoming future thing. It begins at seven. When does the party start? That's the question. Not when is the party going to start or when will the parties start? Yes, it is in the future, but I'm asking you to describe the party in a way. And one of the descriptions of the party that it's a Halloween party, that it's going to be a big party, that it's going to be a costume party. These are descriptions. What's another description? That it's a party that begins at seven. That's a description of the party, not focusing on the timeline. You get the common pattern here or not too focused on the timeline. So the party begins at seven, Don't be late. The party starts at seven, Don't be late. It's not incorrect to say the party will be starting at seven, but that sounds weird to me. This is a better way to say it. Andrea moves to Belgium in a week. Again, it's a future thing. Now there are different ways we could say this and all of them would be correct. Andrea moves to Belgium in a week. Andrea is moving to Belgium in a week. Andrea is going to move to Belgium in a week. Andrea will move to Belgium in a week. All of those are valid, but each one has its own connotation. Connotation is that feeling that comes with it when we say it. If I say She will move, that I'm emphasizing that sense of this future event. It's a future thing that's coming up. But maybe we already know this, so we don't need to describe it as this future thing coming up because we all know that this is something that Andrea is doing, but maybe we forgot about the fact that it's very soon, that the amount of time is not much. Maybe we thought it was happening in a month. We weren't really thinking about it. Oh my God, it's in a week. Andrew moves to Belgium in a week, we should plan a going away party for her. So it's kind of just focusing on this number, again, as a description rather than this feeling of telling me that this future thing is happening, which I already know. So don't tell it to me like it's a future event. Of course you can is moving to Belgium in a week is also okay. I think it's a feeling of maybe she's preparing and she's getting ready. This is very soon. It feels kind of immediate. It's okay. I personally think Andrea moves to Belgium in a week as is the best one, although It's pretty close to, is moving to Belgium in a week, the main character spends all his money traveling to Nepal. He looks for the master and finally finds her in Katmandu, but she throws him out a 100 bonus points. If you can guess the movie. Well, think about a movie, about a dream. Think about a story. If you're telling a story, is it important that it happened seven years ago as opposed to ten years ago? Is that important? If so, it might be easier to use the simple present tense. Now in fact, you might be more often using the simple present tense and the present continuous tense to tell that story. But for things like stories, dreams, and movies, it's very common to communicate or express it like this. Spends all his money. He looks for the master, he finds her, she throws him out. All of these verbs are in the simple present tense. And I think this is a way to make the story field very immediate. And it simplifies it in a way and avoids getting lost in all of the verb tenses, right? And also, think about it, the movie, when did it happen? Well, it's a movie. You can watch it in the future or the past doesn't matter so much. Again, we're not really connected to the timeline. Whenever you watched the movie. Well, this is what happens in the movie, right? Same thing for a dream. It's a dream you had last night. It might feel a little bit more visceral and immediate to say, I'm walking through a desert. I see two people in the distance. Instead of I was walking in the desert. And I saw two people in the distance. Which one feels more like a real story that you're inside of? Personally, I think the one with the simple present tense. So that's just a sense for this. There's a lot more to say about all of these tenses. I would encourage you to check out my other courses to learn these more in depth with lots of examples. I really just want to highlight some of the issues that are common for verb tenses. Okay, next we're going to go on and talk about gerunds and infinitives. 27. Review of Gerunds and Infinitives: Have you ever been confused by sentences like, I like dancing, I like to dance. And perhaps you thought, Well, I think those are the same to dance. Dancing. So if they're the same, can I always use them in the same place interchangeably? What if I need, can I say I need dancing, I need to dance. One of those doesn't quite sound right? This is confusing. Which one should I use? And what the heck is going on? Why is dancing not being used like a verb? Ah, if you ever felt frustrated, confused by this, a little lost, don't worry. That's what we're going to talk about. We're talking about gerunds and infinitives. Now don't get lost in the names. Of course, gerunds are simply ING verbs that are functioning like nouns. So we said dancing. Yeah, dancing could be used like a verb. If we say, for example, she was dancing, that's the past continuous tense that we've talked about. But if we say She likes dancing, I like skiing. Suddenly it changes a little bit. Okay. So that's the gerund. Let's mark this one, g, g, That's the gerund. And we can test it by replacing it with something like it. I like skiing. I like it. I like skiing. I like it. Now. The next one, we can always replace with it simply because it's a little bit more complicated. This one is the infinitive. Which one is it? Should it be? I like ski. I like to ski. I like to ski. I like skiing. I like to ski. I like dancing, I like to dance. This is our infinitive, and that's really just to plus the base form of the verb, the simplest form of the verb. And it's not always used as a noun. It can function in different ways. We're not going to be doing an in-depth lesson on all of the grammar around gerunds and infinitives. We're going to be looking at some common mistakes. That's what the course is all about and how you can fix those. But I want to make sure you've got the basic idea, okay? These, in this case, interchangeable. You can use either one. It doesn't matter, but that's not always true. Okay? Now this, I like CKY is just wrong. So let's cross that out. That one's wrong. I like to ski. I like skiing, have the same exact meaning. They're interchangeable in this case. But we need to go into more examples to really understand. Now, just while we're on the subject here of describing what the heck are gerunds and infinitives. A few more examples that are correct. Running hurts my knees. Now notice here that we can do a little test. Is this a gerund? We can replace it with it. It hurts my knees. What hurts your knees? The activity of running. That activity, it hurts my knees. Oh, okay. I'm so sick of running. I'm so sick of it. Alright. Pretty simple. We're replacing it with it there or that we could replace it with that. That hurts my knees. I'm so sick of that or it I'm not ready to run. I'm not ready to run. Now, could we replace this? I'm not ready running with the gerund? Maybe not. Definitely not. Okay. So where we're seeing already that this is not so simple. I need to stop. I need stopping. Know I need to stop. I need to stop is okay. And this is being used as a kind of object of the verb need. This is the, we call the direct object of the verb need. I need what? I need that, that, Yes, I need to stop. But the infinitive is not as simple as the gerund because it's not always as easy as replacing it with it or that it's not always that simple. It can function in different ways. Anyway. I hope your takeaway so far is great. Gerunds and infinitives have some similarities, but they have some differences to their being used to explain maybe some kind of activity, some kind of thing that's going on, but not exactly in a verb way. They're not the main verb of the sentence. Need to stop. That's the main verb of the sentence, right? I am not ready. I am is the main verb of the sentence. I am sick of running. I am sick of running. Again, sick of this thing. Running is not the main verb of the sentence. Running hurts, hurts, my knees. This is the main verb of the sentence and not running used as a noun. Okay, so that's the main idea. They're not the main verb of the sentence. That's something that they share. Okay, Let's now go into some common Jeran infinitive mistakes. Get an even deeper feeling for this. 28. When to Use Gerunds: Here we go. Sit at home and do nothing is a waste of time. Okay, Well, sit by itself. That is a verb. But we're talking about these activities and saying something about them. So actually, what we're trying to do is talk about these two things. But if we're talking about these two things, there, things in a way. And so we shouldn't say the verb by itself, the verb by itself here, we need to make them into the subject of the sentence. So we have to say, sitting at home and doing nothing is a waste of time. Now you might think, wait a second, shouldn't we say are a waste of time? Well, we're considering actually all of this as the subject of the sentence. One subject. That is a waste of time. The main verb of the sentence is, is here it, what is this whole thing? Doing these two things together? Sitting at home and doing nothing, that general activity. It's a waste of time. Okay. So we have to change, sit and do two sitting and doing. Eat cake is unhealthy. Again, here we have, is, is, is unhealthy. What do we have to do? Of course, eating, eating cake. Now, what's the subject eating cake? So it's not just the word eating, it's what we're eating too. Then is, tells us that this is the next piece of the sentence. This is the activity. Same thing here. Sleeping all day as a waste of time. Sleeping all day is a waste of time. So here we have at the beginning of the sentence, we need to make sure when we're using a verb as the subject of the sentence or an activity as the subject of the sentence. It can be added to other things all day to describe how much of it we're doing at home and nothing, right? Cake. It can include the other words in its piece, right? But we have to make sure that it's the I-N-G form. That is the gerund form, sitting at home and doing nothing, eating cake, sleeping all day. These are the subjects of the sentences. These all can be replaced in this case by it. It is a waste of time. It is unhealthy. It is a waste of time. Both of them are waste of time to waste of times. Sleeping all day is not a waste of time. I want to say not a waste of time. Sometimes that's a very good thing to do. Are you interested in go to Spain for a short trip? Another common issue is when it's later on in the sentence. So now we're not talking about the subjects. These were all talking about the subject of the sentence. Now we have a different issue here. Are you interested in go to Spain for a short trip? This should be going should be going to Spain for a short trip. Are you interested in going to Spain for a short trip? Can that be replaced, the whole thing be replaced by, for example, the word that Are you interested in that interested in what I like to do a little Q&A with myself to try to get a feel for what it is. Are you interested in going to Spain for a short trip? Are you interested in that? Yeah, I'm interested in that in what seemed going to Spain for a short trip. So yeah, okay, the whole phrase is going to be a noun phrase, a giant noun phrase. And in fact, often you'll see a Jaron that begins a noun phrase. Okay? I feel exhausted after run, after, run, well, after is after thing, right? So we need to say the activity we were doing after running. After running, to mark it as an activity. I feel this is the main verb of the sentence. I feel exhausted when, after that, after it, after running, there isn't much time for sleep. For sleep is not. So actually this one is not incorrect because, and the reason it's not totally incorrect is that sleep can be a noun by itself. Right? To sleep is inaction. I'm sleeping where sleeping, they're sleeping. But sleep by itself can be used as a regular noun. There isn't much time for sleep. So if we want to broadly described this category of thing, we could say it like this, just like this, and it could be correct. But it would be more common to say, by now you've hopefully started to feel comfortable with this. There isn't much time for sleeping. That would be more common. Using it as the gerund form helps us feel like, okay, it is an activity. So this is just to give you a sense for some of the common issues around gerunds when it's at the beginning of the sentence and when it is toward the end. Now we're going to take a quick look at infinitives. 29. Common Issues with Gerunds and Infinitives: Okay, so here we have some common issues, especially with infinitives, the two form we need by a few things before we leave. We need to add here to the main verb of the sentence is this. We need, we need, and then everything else is a detail of what we need. This whole thing is the object. That's what we're talking about. This is the main verb here that's connecting together the subject and everything else we need, what? We need to buy a few things before we leave that whole piece, there can be considered the object of need. We decided not to visiting my parents. This is a very common, surprisingly common issue of putting both there. Now, we're going to look at an example in a second where you will see both together. So don't make any hard rules for yourself. Generally speaking, a common issue is putting the two and then following it with the I-N-G form, we decided not to visit my parents. Okay. Now, don't get stuck on that, but generally that's going to be true. Be careful about that. Don't accidentally write or say two and I-N-G, I want to go in, I want to visiting. Again. There are exceptions. Always exceptions. You don't need studying for the exam. You don't need studying. Now you might be beginning to ask yourself a question. I've seen need there and I know that actually it's needed to to study. But why is it sometimes to study in that follows some but then other times it's should be ING what is going on here? It's another thing we're going to talk about very soon. But what you have to learn is which ones go with which verbs? With some verbs, it's a gerund. With some verbs, it's the infinitive and with some, it's both. Right at the beginning we talked about I like to ski. I like skiing. Right? So yeah, there are both. Sometimes it's one, sometimes it's the other. And we'll look at examples with that too. So I don't need to study for the exam is correct. Notice the verb here, need, need, need, need, need, need to buy. Need buying. No, no, no, need to buy. She suggested to buy them a gift card. This one not to buy. This one is buying. No confusing, Confusing. Pay attention to the verbs. She suggested buying them a credit card. Okay. She told us to buy them a credit card. Not she told us buying. She told us to buy a credit card. That would be correct. She suggested buying so the same basic meaning there, but pay attention to the verb that comes before suggested, need, decided, need. Alright? Okay, now what these last two? Notice the use to, notice the use two gets a little tricky here. I am not used to ask for people's help. I used to making short films in high school. Okay. To be not used to something or used to something means accustomed to, you've adjusted to that. If that's what we mean, this, you can take this phrase used to, used to as an adjective, to be used to something I am not used to. It is what I am related to it, right? It's an adjective about it. This, this little phrase here used to. So if we're talking about an IT probably going to use the ING I'm not used to what? I'm not used to asking for. It's an I there I'm not used to asking for people's help. You're not used to what it, what is it that, what is that? Asking for people's help? Asking this whole phrase begins with the ING, just like we talked about before. Now, one useful thing here might be to replace this used to, because we see that, that two there we say, I know but asking ING can't go after to. Well, the grammar is working differently here. We should consider this used to use two as a word in a way we could replace it with comfortable. Okay, that's an adjective. So if we say it like that, suddenly it's a lot easier. I'm not comfortable to ask. I'm not comfortable asking I'm not comfortable asking for people's help. So we just have to think of it a little differently and accept that yes, there are exceptions to this. What we talked about before, not putting too and ING together, but not many exceptions. Okay. I used to making short films. Now this used to as a different meaning of used to, used to have different meanings. This used to mean something I did before. Use to use two. So now we're looking at this as a regular to, right? We're not considering it together as an adjective. I used to do something, I used to make something, I used to see something. I used to ask something. So we should have the simple form there. I used to write this over here. I used to make short films in high school. Again, because used to has different meanings. This one being a thing I did in the past, I used to go, this one being like an adjective. Comfortable. I'm used to it. I'm not used to it. Alright, now, as promised, we're going to look at briefly which verbs go with gerunds, which verbs go with infinitives, and which verbs go with both. So let's quickly do that. 30. Verbs that Go with Infinitives: Sometimes, especially when it comes to learning English, the best way to learn things is just to see a bunch of examples and get a feeling for it rather than learning some rule and memorizing some rule. Because rules typically have exceptions and that can make things even more confusing. So we've talked about generally how we use and don't use gerunds and infinitives. We looked at quite a few examples, but still you might feel a little confused. I don't know why sometimes it's the I-N-G and why sometimes it's the two. Well, I think the best way to tackle this and talk about this is just to give you examples where we look at the verb that comes before the gerund or infinitive. So let's do that. This is the verb that comes before. Wasn't, need, have, prefer, wait, offer. Once again, but after don't. Okay. So pay attention to these. Remember these, remember that after these, we should use the infinitive. I want to know, I need to sleep, I have to stop. I prefer to make I can't wait to leave. I shouldn't offer to contribute. I should offer to contribute. I offered to contribute. I don't want to hope so if you use do or don't want or just one by itself, that doesn't matter so much. What matters is which one it is connected to, which one comes before that. Okay, So for these and there are more, just to be clear, these are not the only ones. I'm just giving you a quick list of the most common ones. Use the infinitive. You can find a much longer list anywhere online, I would recommend you search something like which verbs go with infinitives and you'll find a huge long list. But let's now look at a few, not many, a few that go with gerunds. 31. Verbs that Go with Gerunds: Now, here's our list of common verbs that go with gerunds. And again, there's a long list that you can look up if you want to see all of them or most of them. Let's say here are some of the common ones. I suggest bringing it. They considered spending $200. I enjoy discovering. He will stop working. Stop working. I don't recall seeing. You should consider sending just the beginnings of these sentences because I want to give you the basic idea and not confuse you with whole long sentences. Now, if we put the infinitive form after these, it would sound weird. Why not so clear on that? Sometimes things arise because they just do out of common usage. And if that's the case, then you just have to remember them. I suggest to bring doesn't sound right. They considered to spend o sounds awful to me. It almost hurts my ears. It makes my ears hurt. I enjoy to discover that one I've heard some people say after enjoy, similar to like in love. Using the infinitive form being sometimes acceptable. Almost always it's going to be the gerund. So I would strongly recommend using the Jeran there. Okay. He will stop to work. Now let me mention one thing about that. If you say he will stop to work and you mean it as in he will stop and then that activity then yes. Okay. Don't do that. He will stop working, correct. But that sentence could have another meaning where the two is different. The function of the two is different. Remember we said used to and use to two different meanings. If I used to do something in the past, I would say I use to go, then we would use the infinitive. But if I am not used to something, I would say I'm not used to swimming outside, for example. I'm not adjusted to that activity, then the ING is okay. Remember that, well, this is similar. If we say he will stop to work. One, meaning of two is in order to do that or that's the purpose, right? I'm going there to ask a question. I'm going over there to ask a question. My purpose is to do that. I am going to do that. So if we say he will stop in order to work, he will stop in order to work, which doesn't really make a lot of sense. At least the grammar could be correct there. And the two There is more like, that's my purpose. That's my intention, right? I'm going to go on a diet to lose weight. Alright? Well that's a different meaning. That's a different function of two. So you have to be careful here. You can't just blindly say, alright, look set at 100%, always true, no exceptions. This is how I live my life now. You should use your brain all the time. That's good advice. Generally. Use your brain all the time. Be aware. Be paying attention. Say, oh, look, there's an exception. That's interesting. And then absorb that into your English brain. And don't, don't be too stiff. Goes back to what I said at the beginning of the course. Be flexible, be open, use patterns, learn patterns. This is usually true. But look at this. Sometimes we might use to differently. That's an exception. Alright. I don't recall seeing that. I don't recall seeing you there. Okay. I don't recall to see To see. No. No. And we couldn't use it the other way either. We couldn't use to there as in the goal or the purpose. You should consider to send? Nope. Incorrect. Considered to send. Consider sending. Well, that sounds right. To send. Consider to send any other way to mean that? No, Not as far as I can tell. Okay. So again, go look at the longer list if you like. These are some of the common ones. Now let's take a quick look at verbs where we can use either or both. 32. Either Gerunds or Infinitives: So our last set of examples here and our section about gerunds and infinitives, times or verbs rather, where you can use either the infinitive or the Jeran. And it doesn't matter which one we've talked about like, right. We like to run. We like running. We like running. She loves, loves is also common. Let's say eating. She loves eating. She loves to eat me, to save me a spot. She began dancing. See, she began to dance. You should start planning. You should start to plan. They prefer reading. Maybe we could say, for example, they prefer reading fiction, or they prefer to read. Now, for this one, it's a little bit interesting because there are some times where you would use prefer with a certain activity and it would be more common for that activity to be an I-N-G. And perhaps sometimes where it might be more common with the infinitive with the two form. So look out for that one, especially with prefer, my sense. And this is just my general intuition, is that the infinitive is more common after prefer. For these other ones. Start, began, loves, love, like likes. These. My sense, my intuition is that they're pretty much equally common. But for some reason, I feel that prefer is more often followed by two. Prefer to read. I prefer to do my own research. I prefer to have someone here beside me. I prefer to go alone instead of I prefer going alone. Again, it's just my sense. So take that with a grain of salt. That expression means basically, this is one person's view of the language. I'm just trying to give you the same sense that I have. People are different. Of course, I only have my own window onto the language, but I have been teaching it for quite awhile. So take it with a grain of salt, but also, I've been teaching for quite awhile. And it might be different in different places. Maybe one is more common in British English, for example, as opposed to American English, I don't know. So those are the most common verbs that go with either gerunds or infinitives. Now we're going to take a quick look at gerunds after prepositions. I want to clarify one thing before we go on to our last section of the course. 33. Prepositions and Gerunds: Remember I said before that too can be followed by ING, an interesting exception. There are always exceptions. Well, I'd like to just briefly dive into that a little bit more because there's something that's common for gerunds. And that is, prepositions tend to be followed by gerunds. Prepositions being from with about two on, and there are many, many more, right? So for this, if, this is the grammar, if you have a preposition and then you need to say some thing. And that thing is, for example, an activity. Well, then it's going to be the gerund form most likely. So let's go through some examples here. They asked me about living in Phoenix, about we replace this with that or it this activity living in Phoenix. Alright, Well, there's nothing too weird about that. We know that in this case, we are using it as a kind of noun phrase at the end of a sentence, we're used to that. But what about this next one? This is where it can get a little weird. Or immediately at first glance, it can be a little weird. Go from waiting tables to running the kitchen. That means in charge of the kitchen. Well, let's study this for a second. This from and two are connected beginning here, ending there. Or I went from, that would be more common. I went from waiting tables to running the kitchen from six to eight, beginning at six, ending at eight. It's the same basic idea except we're talking here about activities beginning with one activity and ending at another. From this to that from, let's replace it. This waiting tables to running the kitchen. That's the boss, the head chef. To that, this is an activity. And because it's an activity and hear this from two, is just setting up the beginning and ending point. We should use the gerund form. This two here is not about the verb. This to here is not for an infinitive. This two here is a preposition. It is being used to connect pieces together, which is what prepositions often do. She thanked me for buying her the car, for buying for that. Easy enough. I'm reading articles on starting a business on easy enough here on that. I'm reading articles about that about on very similar in this case. She's not used to driving manual cars to what? To it. And we looked at an example very similar to this one earlier on. So I just wanted to quickly bring this up to make you comfortable with the idea that anytime we learn something, we're always going to find exceptions. And when you find exceptions, you shouldn't stress out. In fact, now you know more, this should expand your view of what you've learned, not make you feel uncomfortable or stressed or nervous, right? So practice your own examples of these, of the ones we talked about earlier. And once you really start to feel comfortable, make sure as you're communicating, as you're using these that you're paying careful attention to what you're saying. I haven't said it in a little while because I wanted to give you a break, but I'm going to bring it back. Be very self-aware. Always pay attention to what you are saying. Carefully listen to yourself, and don't be afraid to stop and make a correction. Because once you do that, you can start building better habits. You can start communicating more clearly. You can start avoiding these fairly common, not so difficult to correct mistakes, but only if you're very, very self-aware. Okay, now we're going to go on to the next section and talk about some more really common English mistakes. 34. Question Phrasing: Part 1: Welcome to the last section of the course. I usually try to save the best for last, and that is definitely the case for this one. Now in previous sections we've had a single theme tying everything together. Gerunds and infinitives or verb issues. In this section, we're going to be jumping around a bit. We're going to be trying to cover things that we didn't get to cover in previous sections. So in that way, a bit of a catch-all, but that also I think makes it a bit more fun. We're gonna be talking about a pet peeve that I have. I'll explain what that means when we get there. I'm going to talk about sentence ordering issues with Ordering Sentences correctly, common issues. We're going to be spending some time on odd phrasing, just some strange phrasing that I come across very often among English learners. And we'll talk a bit about redundancy. But first, but first, we're going to be focusing on word order in sentences. So lets hop over to the Blackboard as we do. And we're going to be exploring, as I said, issues with word order. We're going to explore what the issue is and then a few different variations for how we could say each one correctly. Alright, so here we go. Why I didn't work harder? This is a really, really common one. What's going on here? Well, think about the phrasing here. There's something off about this beginning part. And it may be because it's a question. In fact, questions are phrased differently than statements or regular sentences. They're phrased differently. Remember when we, when we make a regular sentence, we usually have the subject like i, and then the verb like Wundt, and then the object like that. I want that. But if we're going to change things into questions, We typically not, not in every single case of course there are always exceptions. But typically, we're going to need to change things around a bit, especially at the beginning of the sentence. So that would be these two. In this case. If we're going to make it a question, Let's make a really simple 1 first though. I can go, let's just, let's not even make the dot, dot, dot. That's just a sentence. Okay, I can go. Now, what if I want to change? I can go to a question by itself. Just a question. Well, all we have to do is flip these two around. Can I go? Can I go? I can go. Now that's not the answer to can I go would be you can go, but that would be how we transform this sentence into a question. So you notice that these two are flipped around. Now, what about when we use question words? Like why? Like, how, like who, like, when? Like what? Well, they're not all exactly the same, but generally speaking, we're going to be following the same pattern. For example, if I want to use y here and change this to Kent, then I would write it as, where can I write this? Why can't, can't can't I, why can't I go? Why can't I go instead of y? I can't go, right? Why can't go? Is actually phrasing it like a statement we would take out why and we would say, I can't go. So it's flipped around. Again. There are, of course, exceptions here, but that's, that's why this is weird. Okay? And again, it's usually for questions. Why didn't I work harder? Why I didn't work harder? Why didn't I work harder? Flipped around. Alright, well, maybe we can make this as a statement. I want to know why I didn't work harder. Now notice that when I say it this way, I still have the question word y here. But it's no longer a question. Of course, you can use question words when you're not asking questions, especially y, right? How does a very common one too? I wanted to know how I didn't work harder. It would be the same thing if it's why or how, or I suppose where, although, maybe not for this sentence. I want to know why making a statement here. Okay? I want to know why I didn't work harder. Notice that we have this and that is correct. Why I didn't. So if this is included in a statement or a common sentence, so we could say a, a declarative sentence then yeah, it's totally fine. But when we want it to be a real question, we have to flip it. Okay? Why do you think I didn't work harder? Alright, now what's going on here? Why do you think now we have here? I didn't work well, I thought we were supposed to flip it around. Yes. But we still have flipped it around because The part here that we're asking about is this, this is the beginning of the sentence, so it's following that same grammar. Why do you think, do you think that would be how we ask the question? Do you think? Do you think, ignore the rest, just do you think so? That would be how to ask that question. And then if we want to answer it, we would say, I do think so. Now we often just remove the do actually when we answer it. But if we wanted to make the statement, I do think. You do think. Why do you think? Do you think? Okay, So flipped around. Now, what if we wanted to start with this and continue it? Why I didn't work harder. Comma, I'll never understand. That would be making a comment about not understanding myself or something that happened in the past, I should have worked harder. I got a great job. I didn't try my best. I don't know why I didn't try my best. I got lazy. Why I didn't try harder. Comma. Don't say comma. I'll never understand. I'll never understand. That is correct. Starts with why not a question. Alright. How about this one? What time they got home? Well, if we're answering this question, we understand what this person means. For answering this, we would say they got home at 11, that's the time. This is a really common issue. We can't use this same format when we're asking this question about time. In fact, we have to put something here, right here when we're asking about time. Now, in general, this could be a lot of different verbs. We could say, what time did, which in this case is correct. What time did they get home? What time are they getting home? What time should they get home? What time will they get home? What time have I missed any were they getting home? So we would put this verb right here in front of them. And then in the case of did, this should change to get because the did is telling us it's in the past. So the did is using the past tense to tell us I'm asking about the past. So the gut should be now get, what time did they get home? So this is really just missing something. Now, what if we want to make it a statement? Well then it's fine. The original is fine. But we wouldn't start with what time because that tells us it's a question. Right. The what is the question word? I don't know. Making it a statement. I don't know. Then the rest is the same. What time they got home, then it's fine. Then it's fine to have this in the past tense. I don t know. We've made this statement here to make it clear that this is not a question. This is a statement. Does she know what time they got home? Okay. Now, this is getting a little bit interesting. Now we don't have the question word what? This is now a yes, no question. We can call this a I like to call these simply yes, no questions. So the answer to this is either going to be yes or no. Now the reason that this one is different than the what time question is that we can consider this whole piece. Like we talked about before. We can consider this whole piece and it or that and replace it with it or that. Does she know it? Does she know that? Do you know it? Do you know that? Now it's does here because this has to agree with sheet. She does. Does she do you do you Well, why would it be due there? Because do agrees with you. Okay. So then the reason that this is right is the same thing we talked about before. It's just flipped around because it's a question, Does she she does, does she she does. This is the part that gets flipped around and this is just a statement that can be replaced with that. It's a, it's a noun phrase. Okay, I hope that's clear. Let's look at a couple more examples. 35. Question Phrasing: Part 2: One common issue that I see also with questions is actually not incorrect, but it's used incorrectly or it's used in the wrong way. And that is she's waiting for who. Now, if this is a common question and one person simply wants to know the answer of which person. 36. My Pet Peeves: What is a pet peeve and why am I bringing up pet peeves in a course about common English mistakes? Well, it's because there is a common English mistake, which I admit is a pet peeve for me. But what is a pet peeve? Well, this is something that annoys you, something that irritates you, frustrates you, drives you crazy. Maybe it doesn't bother other people, but it bothers you. We all have pet peeves. Maybe one of your pet peeves is people talking in a movie theater behind you or babies crying on an airplane or kicking your seat. Those might be pet peeves. Okay. Well, what's mine? Well, let's take a look. So a pet peeve, I'm going to spell it for you. Pet peeve related to punctuation and capitalization. Basic rules of punctuating sentences. I really am mentioning this because I don't think I'm the only one who has this pet peeve. I think that there are a lot of, let's say, native English speakers who have the same feeling when they see what we're going to look through. Now, maybe this is not you. You may have heard me talk about this before, if so great, this is just review for you. But if this is you, I would strongly recommend listening carefully and making a very simple change in the way that you write. Super easy, super easy. We spent a week in Utah, which is beautiful. After that, we drove up to Yellowstone National Park. It was a three-hour drive. The sulfur springs are all inspiring. I would recommend it if you're interested in natural beauty, ok. Now I threw one thing in here that's not really my focus. But do you notice anything? When I see this? I want to close my eyes. I want us I want to close my eyes and rock myself back-and-forth in a corner because it sounds great. Spoken, yes. But I see it. And suddenly my brain does something weird where it looks only at this and only at this and only at the problems, the basic problems. And I completely forget the meeting. I'm not even paying attention to Utah or driving or national parks. I go up immediately. And so if you're writing an email to a colleague or a resume, or you're sending an e-mail out colleague or whatever to someone who you would like to take you seriously. If they feel the same way as me, they might not. As a result, in front of a comma, we should have no space. No space. So there should be no space here. No space. After a comma, we should have one space. Boom. No space, one space. In front of a period at the end of a sentence, we should have no space. After the period, we should have one space. Same thing as the comma. Pretty easy. Same thing here. We would need to add a space after the comma right there. This one is perfect. Look how beautiful that is. That one's correct. This one's perfect, beautiful. Look at that. Here we have two exclamation marks. Now if this is a text to someone on your phone or a message on Instagram, alright, fine. But if it's not and it's an email for example, and you're trying to be correct. You would want to use one, not two exclamation marks. Now for this one, we actually have an adjective here of DR. So Dr is the noun because this is an adjective, three-hour drive, 28 page book, right? Man eating crocodile. We have to have a hyphen between all the words. If you say, I have a three-year-old son, three hyphen year hyphen old? Is correct. Okay. So this is taken us not that long to fix. It's been very easy, right? I would recommend, if I will focus on that in a second, interested in natural beauty. Period. Got to end sentences with periods. This is basic stuff right? Now. We have a couple of other things. The other issue is now capitalisation, capital N. This is the name of a park, capitalize names of things. Yellowstone National Park. That's the name of the park. So it's Yellowstone National Park. That's the whole title of the park. Capitalize the T beginning of a sentence. Capitalize. Do not capitalize after a comma. So which is okay here. After his capitalize correctly, That's good. We've gotta capitalize the T there. Okay, I is capitalized. That's wonderful. That's great. Okay. This is looking much, much better. Now we have one spelling error here, and if it, I would recommend it. If your, it's a common mistake. Even many native English speakers do writing Y-O-U-R instead of y, o, u apostrophe R-E. Okay, It's gotta make sure to get those straight. That's a contraction of you are. Okay. This is at least looking much better. Now. Yes, it's a pet peeve for me. But it's so easy to get these basics that why not do it, right? Why not do it? Especially if you're sending out English emails to people that are going to read it and then judge, you based on that, if that's the only communication I have from you and you write like this, like we had before. I'm you may be very smart, but I can't take you seriously. Honestly. I've had people send me resumes and I have deleted the e-mails if they look like this. Right. I actually recently had to pick someone to do some to do some work on a project I've been doing, right? There were several people. One of them had this kind of writing, just the basic stuff, sometimes lowercase, I sometimes just, hey, you know, we might say No big deal. I made my decision largely on that basis because I saw this person is careful. This person takes the time to do things right? I'm going to take this person seriously. I'm much more likely to choose this person to work with. Okay? So just bear that in mind. And honestly, you can even use a tool that will fix all of this for you. Something like Grammarly. There are others out there, there are quite a few. Just, just do this. I need, I strongly recommend it. I know it's just my little pet peeve, but I suspect that it is actually quite common and super easy to correct. Okay, now we're going to go on and look at some very common odd phrasing and see how we can fix that. 37. Odd Phrasing: Part 1: Can something be both correct and also wrong? I guess what I mean by that is, can something be grammatically correct but still sound unnatural to a native English speaker? And the answer is definitely absolutely 100%. Yes. Now the other question then would be, why is that? Well, languages, this organic, naturally changing thing, and things become common just because they do, phrases become common or popular, people tend to say it this way, not that way. This is an natural process, right? And so you can't always ask the question. Can you please give me a rule that explains why this is right and that is not right. Often, no, there's no rule. So you just have to learn by example. And the key there is to really pay attention to your English environment. When people are speaking, when people are communicating with you, when you're having conversations, when you're watching movies, when you're reading books. Try to always be aware. Notice the way that things are said. That sounds so obvious, but it's really, really important because sometimes English learners, I'm not saying this is you. But sometimes English learners will focus on learning ten words in a list or learning three different phrases with no context at all. But if you have no context, how do you know if this is something people actually use or not? If you have no situation that it is used in no real life example, then you might just be wasting your time learning this word. Because maybe this is a word that nobody uses because there are many of those many words, many phrases that are not common or perhaps common in one situation, not common in another. That's where you really need to develop your radar, your antenna, for what sounds natural. When it sounds natural. That's why you should always learn in context. Now, we can of course, look at all possible examples, but we're going to spend a bit of time looking at some odd phrasing, some things that I hear fairly often and how we can fix those. Not necessarily incorrect, but just kind of unnatural sounding. Okay, so let's spend a bit of time starting with these four. People should carry out a hobby. Now, what does carry out mean to carry out something means to do a task, right? So we might carry out a task that someone has given us. That's how it's usually used. Carry out has other meanings. Carry out can be related to food. There are different ways to use the phrase, but I want to try to correct this and say, what is the most natural way to say what this person means? People should very simply have a hobby. You have it, yeah, you do some action with it. It is a regular thing, but for whatever reason we just say that we have it like having a book. Do you have a book? Yeah, I have many books. You have rollerblades? I have rollerblades. Do you have a hobby? Yep. My obvious rollerblading and reading books are my hobbies are rollerblading and reading books. So I don't know why it just is, owning a car is not worthy. That you might have heard that phrase in some Marvel movies or something. If someone is not worthy, that means they shouldn't get something not worthy of attention, right? Most often when you see this phrase, it's going to be followed by of not worthy of my attention, not worthy of my time of something. If it's a very dramatic situation like Thor and his hammer, then it's a general phrase. It's used as an adjective, worthy or not worthy. But that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about owning a car. Owning a car. I think that this one is just a mix-up of the word worth and the word worthy. Alright, so worthy can usually a little bit more dramatic. So the typical phrase for this sort of thing would be worth it. What is it? Maybe the cost of owning it or all of the repairs or whatever, owning a car is not worth it. This is a common phrase that we use. Something is worth it or not when the investment involved in that, doing that, practicing that spending money on that spending time with that is something that you should do because this is valuable, right? Owning a car is worth it. Owning a car is not worth it. Now you could say worthwhile. I don t think that would be natural in this case. I think worth it is the right phrase and worthy would be for something else. I want to be a friend with you. There are a number of reasons why this one is a bit odd. So grammatically, I suppose it's okay, although probably would be friends with you, I want to be friends with you would be the correct they're really natural way to say it. The main reason that this one is odd is that and I don't know if it's true for everybody, but if someone walks up to me and says I want to be friends with you, I would say absolutely not, excuse me, I'm going somewhere because that's not how friends or made you don't make friends by walking up to people and saying, I wanna be friends with you. Now, I've heard this a lot I think, because someone may have the intention of just wanting to start a conversation. So they're the best thing to do would be to start a conversation. And then gradually over time, yeah, You may become friends. You don't need to label this person a friend. Maybe you will, maybe you won't. But the best way to get to know someone and make friends, at least English-speaking friends, is to ask a question. This start a conversation with an interesting question that makes the other person go, well, I would like to answer this, right? And that would be a good way to make a friend. And actually that, that is the more, the more common way to say this. If you want to say it, I'd like to make instead of be friends, I'd like to make friends with you. I'd like to be instead of a you could say be your friend and not with you, just be your friend. If you want to say it, that'll be the way to say it. Again. I'm not I'm pretty sure it's not the best way to actually make friends. We sell them, travel abroad, perhaps one of the most common ones that I hear this word seldom is becoming very outdated. I seldom hear people say it. It means, of course not often. But it's becoming so rare among modern spoken English speakers that especially in the United States, I would say, don't use it. I would say rarely. I rarely travel abroad. I almost never I don't often obsessive. There's gotta be a T there. I don't often travel abroad. So those would be much more natural. I don't often, not often, rarely, and almost never instead of seldom. Alright, let's look at a few more examples. 38. Odd Phrasing: Part 2: We're going to look at one more set of odd phrasing examples before we go on to our lesson about redundancy, I did some preparation before the event. Anything grammatically wrong here? Nope, it's actually grammatically, totally correct. But think about this, and this is actually really common. Did some preparation. We'll talk about this when we get into redundancy as well. But often what I see is unnecessary words that could easily be replaced by one simpler word being used to say something. So this is three words that can be replaced by one. And the one word is a verb. And verbs tend to be better than using now. So if you can generally use a verb to say something, do that instead of using a noun. Instead of having, for example, a noun or doing a noun, just use the verb that says that same thing. So instead of doing preparation, that's doing a noun. You prepared the prepares a perfect verb. Use that it sounds much more active. It sounds much more, I think, alive. I prepared before the event. But now even this is a little redundant because preparing before are similar, but one is happening before the event and before means before the events. It's a little redundant still, but it is at least better sounding to replace these three words with one. And again here, you should take more rest. Again, we have a verb. Here, take, and then a noun. Take more rest. Did some preparation. Grammatically fine, but it does feel kind of passive, not very active, right? So what can we do here? You should rest more. Use the verb. What's wrong with verbs? You should rest more. You should rest more. Sounds to me way more natural. Everyone is not perfect. Now this does actually mean something, but you have to think about it carefully. I hear this one really often. Everyone is not perfect. That means that no matter who you look at that person, that person, that person, that person, that person, every single human being is, has a flaw, right? Not perfect. Now if that's what you mean, actually, you should say it like this. Nobody is perfect, right? Because that's number one, simpler. Notice that simpler is usually better. Simple as good. But also it reduces this need to think too much about what's happening, everyone, okay, so I have to picture everyone and then I have to say that everyone is not something everyone has not. And then that thing that they're not is perfect. So it would be a lot simpler to just say nobody is perfect, right? But maybe that's not what you mean. Maybe what you mean is that some people are perfect, but not everyone. Well then you would just say, not everyone is perfect. Not everyone is perfect. Some people are perfect, not everyone is perfect. So there you're emphasizing the fact that many people are not perfect. So the meaning would be different depending on what you mean. Okay, another very common one. I wish I won't be late. Now we use wish, right? For a lot of things, but most often it is to talk about what I want you to do or I wish you would do, or what I hope happens in my life in general. Something kind of out of my control, out of my power, out of my hands. That is often how wishes used. So I wish you would get here on time saying that about you. I don't have direct control over you as a person. So this is something that I feel and I wish that this is how you work. I wish that you were a timely person. We might wish something about ourselves that again, we don't have control over. For example, I wish I were rich, I wish I were rich. I'm not rich. Perhaps. If I'm saying this, I'm definitely not rich. But I wish I were. It's out of my hands. Maybe I feel that it's out of my hands. I'm just kind of dreaming. I wish I were rich. I wish. And especially by the way, not so much for future things that could happen soon or we expect to happen soon. But things that were just kind of thinking about dreaming about, that would be great. That sort of thing. I wish there were more rain. Maybe it's a very dry summer. It's not raining a lot. I wish there were more rain. I wish there were more rain. That would be great. I wish it was raining. Right now. It's not raining. I wish it was raining. Okay. I'm just sitting back. Thinking about things and thinking about all the stuff that I want to happen. Now, in this case, I wish I won't be late. The problem is the reason it doesn't sound natural. I think the reason it doesn't sound natural is that I have control over the situation. Even if I'm on the bus and the bus is going to be late, right? It's my fault that I got on the bus late. So wish doesn't feel quite right here. But I still feel in my heart that's what I want. But again, because it's kind of more immediate and something about me and something that I could have changed that would have made things different. Hope is better here. I hope I won't be late. Now we can use hoped for a lot of these two. I hope we have more rain this summer. But it's often focusing on the future rather than what might be different about the present. I can say I wish there were more rain. That's about now, right? I wish I were rich. That's about me wondering about now it's not true. But I can't say I hope I were rich. That doesn't make sense. Hoping is a feeling we have about the future. I hope I won't be late. That's the thing that's coming up. I will either be late or not. I hope I become a millionaire in the future. I don't know if it's going to be true. I can do something about it, but it is about the future. So that's just the general feeling, okay, Hope is about the future. Sometimes it's about things we have no control over. I hope I get to see this person at this concert, right? No control over that. Maybe. Or perhaps it's something we have control over, right? I'm I hope I'm not late. I hope I do a good job, that's fine. And then wishes this feeling of dreaming. And it can also be about imagining a different present. Okay? Alright, last one here. Please help me rectify my grammar. Mistakes. Rectifies for big things, right? We cannot rectify these economic mistakes. This is a disaster, some huge problem, usually the whole economy or politics or something like that. Usually we don't use rectify for little things like fixing grammar. So we just say fix there, please help me fix my grammar mistakes. Please help me correct my grammar mistakes. I've seen that one quite a bit. I don't know where that came from. Rectifier is not used in that way. Again, it's all about learning in context. If you learn the word rectify in contexts, you'll just get a feeling for it. If you learn the word hope and wish in context, in sentences, in movies and TV shows, you're kind of just get this feeling for it. And when you use it in the wrong place, you'll feel it and you'll say, Oh, that's sounded weird. I don't know why. I don't know why that sounded weird. It just sounded off. It sounded strange. Okay. Let me try again. I hope I won't be late. That sounds better. So you'll develop instincts over time. And that is like a superpower, but you can only get there through learning in context. Always learn in context, in the language, in the situation. And always be very self-aware. Pay attention to what you say and trust your instincts. Okay, now we're going to go on and talk about redundancy. 39. Redundancy: Part 1: Well, first, congratulations on making it this far into the course. Well done, give yourself a pat on the back. This is going to be the last lesson where we really go over examples. And in the next one, we're going to just go over a few final thoughts, things to keep in mind right at the end of the course. Now, in this lesson, we're going to focus on redundancy. Well, what is redundancy? Redundancy is a great thing for airplanes, where if something breaks, There's another thing there that can cover that function. So the airplane doesn't crash. But maybe not such a great thing for communication in English. It can be ok. There are a lot of common phrases that everybody says that are a bit redundant, but I want you to be aware of this and especially some examples where it is a bit odd sounding. But it'd be a simple example. How about a fictional novel? Think about that for a second. I'm not repeating myself, but fiction is not real, right? And then novel is a type of writing, a book, a story. That is, it could be based on something real, but the story itself is made up. So the meaning of fiction is kind of built into the word novel. So saying, I'm reading a fictional novel is redundant. You don't need to say, I'm reading a fictional novel. You can just say I'm reading a novel and novel contains fiction inside it because that's what it is. It means that, right? So that's the kind of thing we're talking about. And I don't want to say that these are things that you're not allowed to say or cannot say. These are things I want you to be aware of to start thinking about so that you can communicate more clearly, more effectively, more efficiently. If you can communicate clearly effectively and efficiently, post might be a little bit redundant. Well then you're going to be able to get more stuff done. You're going to make sure that what you're thinking, what you mean, gets across to others. Alright, so now that we have a pretty good understanding of that, let's jump into our examples. Here we go. Amazon company has everything. Well, and this is again a very common one. I'm, I'm giving examples here that are really common that I see a lot. Amazon is accompany. It doesn't tell us anything extra. When we say it. Amazon has everything. Now you might say, what about the Amazon River? That's true. It could be the Amazon River. Well then we would say the Amazon has everything. But usually the context. That context is going to tell us whether we're talking about a river or a giant company, right? On e-commerce brand. We're going to know what the other person means based on the context, the situation that we're in. Okay. This is another really, really common one, and I can't believe it's so common, but it's so common. I have to mention it. The blue color house is unique. It's just blue. Blue is a color. Don't say blue color. Don't say anything. That is a color. And then the word color after it. If you say, Oh, I love that color and you don't name it, that's great. That's a beautiful color. What color are your nails? That's so nice, right? Then you can tell me the name. But if you say chartreuse color, that's gonna be wrong. If you say chartreuse, I'll say, ooh, nice. I liked that mode. Is that move not move color, but move, right? Okay. Learning knowledge takes time. That's true. But learning is learning knowledge. Usually, learning takes time. Now, if we want to be more specific and say, well, I don't, I don't mean things like learning a sport. I mean knowledge and facts and figures and that sort of thing. Psychology and philosophy. Great. Learning. What specifically takes time, right? If, if we want to be more specific than be more specific, learning knowledge isn't really more specific, is it just, it's just sort of almost repeating the idea of learning. Learning to skateboard takes time, learning gymnastics takes time. Learning to do anything. Well, takes time. Learning how to read philosophy takes time. What exactly takes time? So here you have a great opportunity to be more specific. Learning how to learning about learning to, for example, dance. Okay. Those things take time. Yeah, I agree. I agree. So you have a great chance there to be specific and saying knowledge is not specific. The main idea here is what you're trying to do is find things that aren't adding anything. Grammatically. They can be there, but they don't add anything, right? Amazon company, does Company add anything to the meaning, if Amazon is a company and you know it and I know it probably not. So just think about that when you're communicating, whether you're speaking or writing. And I think you'll, you'll at least begin to communicate more efficiently. Usually simpler is better. Usually simpler is clearer, right? So that's a good thing. We want to be. We want to be clear if possible, and this is a great way to do that. Now we're going to look at a few more examples. 40. Redundancy: Part 2: Okay, let's take a look at three more examples of common redundancy. We go hiking, go cycling, or go play tennis. Okay. What's the issue here? Well, if all of them are go, then we don't need to use go for all of them. This is more repetition than redundancy, but we could say that the goal is used redundant Lee. So get rid of this, get rid of this and say we go hiking, cycling, or play tennis. And that is totally fine. And it would be the same thing with something like movies. Do you prefer French movies? Do you prefer Bollywood movies? Do you prefer Hollywood movies? Do you prefer French movies? Bollywood movies, or Hollywood movies? Do you prefer French, Bollywood or Hollywood movies? Sometimes it makes sense to put it at the beginning on the first one. If we're making a list, sometimes it makes sense to put it at the end. In that example with movies, we would put that at the end. If it were something like cuisine or food, we might put that at the end as well. Would you prefer Japanese tie or Italian cuisine? Okay, put that at the end. We don't need to repeat cuisine for all three. Just like for this, we don't need to have go for all of them. We can use go for just the first one we need to use go here instead of at the end though, because it is a verb and we need that for the grammar. The rides there are extremely exciting. Now you might be thinking, wait a second, I definitely hear that all the time, and that's right. But I want to say, think about it at least, right? You hear, of course, native English speakers all the time say, Oh, it's extremely exciting, extremely exciting. But if something is extremely exciting than it's exciting, you're saying it's more exciting. So it's kind of like saying vary. While there's nothing wrong with saying very, very good, very exciting, very fun, there are also more accurate adjectives that can be used instead of using vary all the time. So yeah, saying very fun is like saying exciting, very fun equals exciting. Well, is it better to say exciting? We're very fun. You decide, but think about it and be precise with the language. Use the one that fits what you mean. But you do have the option to not use very, if there is a more accurate, more precise adjective, right? Okay. So maybe don't use extremely if exciting is good enough. Exactly, Exactly, You're exactly right. Now, some people will say exactly emphasizes, right? That's exactly right. That's right. Which one sounds more to you? I would say that there's something about adding exactly that makes it a little stronger, puts more emphasis on it. So I can't say Don't do it. All I can say is make sure you know when to do it, right. If you're going to be redundant, do it intentionally. I actually don't want to tell you to never be redundant. There are so many expressions that native English speakers use all the time that are redundant. And I would say exactly right is a perfect example. It's really common. I would say, make sure that you know what you're doing. That's the key. You're doing it with intention. I want to say exactly right, because I want to add that extra emphasis to write even though it's redundant because that expresses how I feel. Okay, great. I think very sounds better than Extremely. I prefer it, I want to use it, alright? As long as you're making those choices intentionally, I think intentionality is really important. The paintings are vibrant and colorful. Again, here, sometimes we say something very similar because if it's vibrant and colorful than fibrin is kind of like colorful and colorful is kind of like vibrant. We're kind of being redundant here. But if you want to cover it twice, you want to be redundant because you think that makes it stick in the other person's brain. Go ahead. But do it with intention. This whole course is about being more aware. Fixing habits, paying attention to your surroundings, to context, being intentional, being careful. When you're doing all of those things, you find over time you become really good communicator. And if you're a really good communicator, you are powerful. You can do so many more things. So I hope to motivate you to become a powerful communicator. So that's it for our redundancy examples. Now we're going to go on and just discuss a few final thoughts. A few things I would like you to keep in mind right at the end of the course before you continue on your English learning journey. 41. Final Thoughts: Hey, great job, You made it. It's not an easy thing to commit to. Seriously going through a course like this. I certainly hope you got a lot out of it. I've really enjoyed the process of taking you through these common English issues. I hope you continue to put what you learned into practice. And of course, if you ever have any questions as you go along, just let me know. I really want to help you as you continue your English learning journey. Also, I have quite a few courses on other topics like pronunciation, grammar, writing, e-mails, customer service, how to think in English, words and phrases, and a lot of other things. So feel free to check out my other courses as well. Now, there are just a few things I would like to leave you with here at the end of the course. And a lot of this is going to be re-cap. But I want to make sure it's really tattooed on your brain. That's a phrase I've heard from a TV show. I want to make sure it's tattooed on your brain so that as you continue your English learning journey, you have the right mindset. Now as we've been talking about, it's very important to always be self aware of set at a billion times. But what does that mean? That means really listening to yourself, really pausing to make corrections, really paying attention to how you use the language and not being afraid to hook. I could do that differently. Not being afraid to change. Because if you just keep on going and you never pause and you never listen, you'll never change, you'll never get better. So always be self-aware and always, always be observant. That means don't just watch a movie, really pay attention. Oh, that's an interesting phrase. I haven't heard that phrase or that word used in that situation before. Pay attention when you're in conversations to how others are using language. Really listened when you're reading books or watching videos online. Pay attention to the language and how it's used. Don't be passive in a way. Participate in it with your brain. Lock onto things and say, Wow, I haven't heard that before. What is that? And maybe go look it up, right? And this also is connected to the idea of learning in context. Always, always. We talked about those phrases, which sounds kind of odd. Well, why? Sometime I don't know why. Sometimes you have to just get an instinct for what sounds natural and what doesn't. And that only comes through learning. In context. Don't learn words and phrases in isolation. So learning context, always learn by example. Also. Ask questions. You know, what I've noticed in teaching for quite awhile is that those learners who are not afraid to say, Hey, what, what does that mean? I haven't heard that before. This work in that situation. Can you explain this to me? Those people, The Curious Minds, the people who have open minds and want to figure stuff out and aren't afraid, who aren't afraid to ask questions. They're usually the ones who improve fastest. So hey, I'm here. Ask a question. If you need help, let me know or let someone know. Always, always ask questions if you have a question. Also, build habits. When I say build habits, I also mean change habits because you may have a habit of saying things one way and you're used to it. And number one, you're maybe not noticing it. So you develop your self-awareness, then you start to notice it. Then you can catch yourself, then you can pause and fix it. Then over time, after doing that for awhile, it just comes out naturally by itself. That is the process of changing habits. And you have to do that if you really want to improve this course, you're learning stuff. Learning is only one part. Remember we talked about input and output. Input and output. Output is part of building those habits. It's really, really important. Now. Finally, finally, the last word I want to write down here on the blackboard is and perhaps most important lifestyle. And that's one word. It looks like two, it looks like there's a space there. Maybe if I make the S longer or make the E a little longer. There we go. If you make learning English part of your lifestyle. I've seen I've seen the difference. Some people say, I hate English, I'll just do it 20 minutes a day. Boring. Those people improve, but slowly. And the people who naturally just read articles in English and watch movies and videos and try to have conversations and ask questions and just engage in the language constantly. Those are the ones who are improving. So the final piece of advice that I would like to leave you with is continue learning. But don't do it as a thing you have to do. Do it as part of a lifestyle and you're going to find you improve much more quickly and it's not painful. You start to enjoy it. Pursue your interests in English, develop an English learning lifestyle, and you will see the benefits. Of course, as I mentioned, if you want to check out my other courses, you can do that. Also, feel free to leave a review with a comment on the course. I would love to know how you felt about it. I would love to hear from you. So good luck as you continue your English learning journey. And I will see you hopefully in the next one.