hello everyone I'm Jenna and this is learn academic English on this channel I help English
Learners take their English to a higher level especially for school and work purposes in today's
lesson I'm going to teach you how to talk about similarities in English this is especially useful
if you need to use English for school in writing or for an exam like the IELTS or the TOEFL first
I'm going to talk about how to talk about things that are similar and then I'll talk about how to
talk about things that are the same because as you know similar and same are not exactly the
same before we get into the lesson please don't forget to give this video a like leave a comment
and subscribe if you want more lessons like this one and note that I teach an online class it's
called Advanced English and if if you would like to know more about that check the description box
below or leave a comment and let me know that you're interested and I'll be sure to give you
more information okay let's get into the lesson about how to talk about similarities first let's
learn how to use the words similar alike and like we can say that two things are similar for example
the climate of C California and the climate of Italy are similar okay A and B are similar we can
also say that something is similar to something else the climate of California is similar to the
climate of Italy now what if I don't want to repeat the word climate I can change that to
that of the climate of California is similar to that of Italy that means the climate of Italy
instead of using similar here we can use the word like the climate of California is like the climate
of Italy we can also use the word alike A and B are alike now does this mean that these two
things are the same no it means that they are similar which means that they share some aspects
that are the same but they are not exactly the same they are just similar now which one is more
formal well they are both used in formal and informal situations but the word similar is
more formal than like so if you're writing an essay or you need to be more formal you should
choose the word word similar let's move on to the noun similarities we can say that two things share
similarities or two things have similarities for example Brazil and the United States have
some similarities for example they are both large countries or Brazil and the United States share
some similarities or we can use the phrase similarities between two things there are
some similarities between Brazil and the United States what about
your native country are there similarities between your native country and the United
States does your native country sh share similarities with the United States next we
can use transition words similarly and likewise these two words can be used between two Clauses
to show that two things are similar or it also could be that they are the same for example in La
there are many immigrants from Vietnam and China similarly many people from Southeast Asia have
settled in Seattle so you can see that here we are combining two Clauses with the word similarly now
this is an adverbial conjunction or a conjunctive adverb and I'll link a video above so that you
can learn more about those but this kind of word can go between two sentences or it can make one
long sentence with a semicolon the transition and then a comma and another example this time
with likewise the food in Brazil includes a lot of beans likewise beans are an important part of the
cuisine of Mexico so in both of these sentences we could uh interchange similarly and likewise
because they have the same meaning another easy way to show similarities is to use the correlative
conjunction both and for example the Cuisines of both Brazil and Mexico include a lot of beans the
word both here emphasizes that two things share a similarity let's move on to talk about how to talk
about things that are the same we can also use the word identical but be careful because identical is
stronger than the the same identical means that two things are exactly the same let's look at
some examples in general the accent in Canada is the same as the accent in the US notice that when
we want to talk about two things that are the same we can use the verb be plus the same as now I want
to show that the these two accents the accent in Canada and the accent in the US are not exactly
the same they are not identical so I could say however the Canadian accent is not identical to
the American accent because there are some small differences notice that with the word identical
we're going to use the verb be again but we use identical to something another way that you could
form these sentences is to put the two nouns at the beginning and then use the same or identical
at the end the American accent and the Canadian accent are not identical the Canadian accent and
the American accent are almost the same okay let's move on and talk about how to use as as
as to show two things that are the same this is a way that we can use an adjective to show that two
things have the same quality for example my son is 511 that's his height and my husband is 511 so I
can say my son is as tall as my husband as Plus adjective plus as we can also do this with an
adverb for example my mother drives as slowly as I do and the final way to talk about similarities
is to use the word like and this can be used for both something that's similar or something
that's the same now here we're going to put like before a noun watch this like Brazilian cuisine
Mexican food includes a lot of beans before you go please check the description box below
because I always leave a question that you can use to practice in the comments with me
and I will always give you feedback if you leave a comment I hope to see you back here
again soon and please don't hesitate to ask if you have any questions take care