Want to speak real English from your first lesson?
Sign up for your free lifetime account at EnglishClass101.com.
Hi, everybody, welcome back to Know Your Verbs!
My name is Alisha.
In this episode, we're going to talk about the verb “live.”
Let's go!
The basic definition of the verb, “live” is to be alive.
Like, “I want to live!” or, “It lives!”
“It Lives,” that was a horror movie.
Conjugations of this verb.
Present, “live,” “lives.”
Past, “lived.”
Past participle, “lived.”
Progressive, “living.”
Now, let's talk about some additional meanings of this verb.
The first meaning is to spend your time in your life.
Some examples of this.
“She lives to work.”
“He lives to make delicious food.”
In these sentences, were seeing the purpose of that person's life.
What does that person do, how does that person spend the majority of their time in their
life?
In the first example sentence, “She lives to work.”
So, “work” is the thing she spends the majority of her time doing.
She lives to do that thing, she lives in order to work.
In the second example sentence, “He lives to make delicious food.”
That’s the purpose of his life, that's how he spends his time in his life, making delicious
food.
He lives to do that thing.
The second meaning I want to talk about is to share a space with someone else, to share
your residence with someone else.
Examples.
“We've lived together for a year.”
“She still lives with her parents.”
So, in these example sentences, “We've lived together for a year,” the first one means,
“we,” meaning the speaker and someone else have lived together, have shared a space
together for one year.
In the second example sentence, “She still lives with her parents,” we see that “she,”
whoever she is, still shares a space for her home with her parents.
In the first example sentence, “We've lived together for a year,” it could be the speaker
and someone else, it could be the speaker and the listener, just depends on who “we,”
is, in that case.
The third additional meaning is to remain in our memories or in our records.
So, examples of this.
“The musicians work will live forever.”
“Our grandfather lives on in photos.”
In these examples, we're seeing that some memory of a person or some memory of a person's
work or maybe a historical event, whatever it is, it remains in memories or it remains
like there's some record of that thing.
That could mean written records, it could mean photos, it could mean videos, whatever.
These refers to something that remains.
We use this a lot after a person has died, actually, or we could say for people whose
work, especially for artists, their work is going to live forever is another way we could
say that, meaning it's going to remain forever, someone like with a big impact.
We might use this verb, “live,” in this meaning of this verb, to talk about something
they're doing or something that they're making.
So, “The musicians work will live forever,” means the musicians work will remain in our
memories and in our records forever.
Like Bach, for example, or Rachmaninoff, composers are a great example of this, classical, Baroque,
romantic music composers, those are great examples.
Before, there was the Internet, before photo and video, there was written work, written
pieces of music.
Their work, their musical work lives on in their compositions.
There's a record of the things that they did.
In the second example sentence, “My grandfather lives on in photos,” means my grandfather
remains or the image of my grandfather, our memories of our grandfather remain in photos.
The first variation of this verb is the expression, “to live up to.”
This means to behave in accordance with something.
Let's look at some examples.
“I'm not sure if I can live up to your expectations of me.”
“He never lives up to his promises.”
“To live up to” something is to act in accordance with something else.
In the first example sentence, “I'm not sure if I can live up to your expectations
of me,” means that the speaker is concerned he or she will not be able to act in accordance
with the listener’s expectation.
So, listener has some expectation for the speaker and the speaker is worried that the
speaker cannot meet that expectation but we say, “can't live up to your expectation,”
in that case.
In the second example sentence, “He never lives up to his promises,” means he never
fulfills his promises, he never acts in accordance with his promises.
He promises A but he doesn't complete A, there's no like matching behavior there.
He doesn't meet his promises, he doesn't fulfill, he doesn't live up to his promises.
Second variation is “to live with.”
“To live with” means to tolerate or to stand or to deal with something.
Some examples.
“How much of this bad behavior can you live with?”
“If I put my family through a scandal, I don't think I would be able to live with myself.”
Okay, we see here, “to live with something” means an ability to tolerate something.
In my first example, it's a question, “How much of this bad behavior can you live with?”
We use this verb to mean tolerate or put up with.
“Put up with” also, we use in the same way as “live with” here.
“How much of this are you going to allow to continue before you say something?” for
example.
“How much of this can you live with?”
Just like this behavior, someone else's bad behavior is there all the time living with
you.
So, “How much of it can you live with?
How much?”
“Not very much.”
Maybe, “I can't live with this anymore.
Stop it!
Go away!”
So, that's one.
In the second example of sentence about a family scandal.
I used the expression, “I don't think I would be able to live with myself.”
“Live with myself” actually means I don't think I would be able to tolerate myself because
of my bad behavior.
So, if my family experienced a scandal because of something I did, I wouldn't be able to
tolerate myself meaning I would be really upset with myself, I would be unhappy, I would
be disappointed in myself.
We use the expression, “I wouldn't be able to live with myself.”
I hope that those are a few new ways that you can use the verb, “live.”
If you have any questions or comments or want to try to make a sentence with this verb,
please feel free to do so in the comment section.
If you liked the video, please make sure to give it a thumbs up, subscribe to the channel
and check us out at EnglishClass101.com for some other good stuff.
Thanks for watching this episode of Know Your Verbs and we'll see you again soon.
Bye.