Did you know that the word advice is uncountable?
Can I give you an advice?
No, you cannot say that.
You have to count it with pieces.
I have a piece of advice for you.
Stay away from disagreeable people.
Same with information.
You cannot say an information or one information.
You have to say I have.
A piece of information or two pieces of information for you
or a piece of research.
And with luggage and furniture
and news, you can say piece or you can count with item.
I have an interesting item of news.
News is singular, by the way, even though it ends in
S. Do you always count with items
or pieces?
No, not at all.
And here it gets bit complicated.
Lots of nouns have their own counting markers.
Bread. We count with loaves.
One loaf of bread.
Two loaves of bread. Luck with.
A stroke.
A stroke of luck.
Dust. A speck. A speck of dust.
A flash of lightning.
A clap of thunder.
A dollop of jam.
Today on LetThemTalkTV, we're going to look at a few more ways in
which the English language is difficult,
and I'll give you several advices.
What's that?
I'm sorry.
Several pieces of advice as to how you can
overcome these difficulties if you're ready.
Let's go.
English starts off easy, doesn't it?
Start forming sentences and have basic conversations within a few hours.
Take a verb like to work.
I work. You work.
He she. It works. We work.
They work. Yesterday I worked.
I would work.
I will work.
Compare this to, say, Spanish.
These are the verbs you need to say the same thing.
Wow. That's daunting, isn't it?
And then they have masculine and feminine nouns.
So even when you're just starting, you need to know if a chair or
anything else is masculine or feminine.
So that's a great thing about English.
In a short time, you could start communicating with people
from all over the world, which is wonderful.
And one of the reasons, I guess, why English has become
the international language.
However, anyone who has studied English beyond
a B1 level will know that not
everything is quite so easy.
Pronunciation and spelling.
The spelling in English is not phonetic.
You may have noticed that.
Woman.
But the plural women. NEW.
But SEW. DOME but EPITOME.
FINITIE
But put an end before it.
And it becomes INFINITE.
This word is pronounced.
Mayor.
That's right. You got it.
Not my. Your.
Okay, good.
How do you solve this problem?
Well, think of it as two separate problems.
Number one, to put it simply, the sounds you have
in your language are not the same as the sounds in English.
For example, though, and this are difficult
to say for many speakers, for Italians, French, Japanese,
and this is more difficult to solve.
You need to study and practice
and perhaps take lessons from a voice coach, etc., etc.
and lots of stuff that I won't go in today,
but we have lots of videos about it on this channel .
So that's the difficult part of getting the pronunciation right.
But there's another part as well.
The second category, which is much easier to solve now, there is an expression
a little knowledge is a dangerous thing and this is a good example of it.
You see an English word spelt out and you know the alphabet.
So you proceed to pronounce the word
according to the sounds of the alphabet or based on other words,
you know, with similar spellings.
Okay.
So you see W-O-M-EN
and you think, WO-MEN.
Okay. Yes, I think WO-MEN and must be.
But you know, and you know the word BREAK and you know the word FAST.
So when you say this word.
you say brake fast, which
is what you do when you see a speeding lorry coming right towards you.
You see MINE, but ENGINE.
It's not difficult for most people to say women.
It's not difficult to say breakfast.
It's not difficult to say engine.
But we have a little knowledge and that's dangerous.
It fucks us up in our head.
The solution is quite simple in your mind.
Disassociate the spelling from the pronunciation.
Imagine there's an evil guy.
Let's call him
Mr Ghoti, and he's trying to trap you all the time.
And when I teach English, I like to practice
the pronunciation of a word before I write it down.
Okay, so listen to the pronunciation.
Don't read the sentence.
For example,
Now write it down.
Wow. Have you noticed that
it's got a silent B in it. Did that trick you? So fall into
Mr Ghoti's cunning little trap.
And this is particularly true if you have the same words
with a different pronunciation in your language.
Now, I teach in France and I'm always correcting
the pronunciation of words such as culture.
It's culture, not culture.
The French are perfectly capable of saying culture,
but they don't because they default to the familiarity of their language.
Same goes for.
Problem. No, it's not problem.
It's problem and image,
not image, etc., etc..
English has a big vocabulary.
English is kind of like a sponge.
And it has soaked up lots of words from from old English,
from French, from Latin, from Old Norse, and more languages.
For many words, there is both a Germanic and a Norman
or French version of it.
Think, for example, of understand and comprehend or begin and commence.
Rarely do two words have exactly the same meaning in English.
The difference could be quite subtle and may just indicate
a level of formality or maybe something else.
If you tell a girl she's a vision,
it's very different to if you call her a sight.
Think of how many synonyms there are for to walk.
You can amble or hike or saunter or shuffle
or stagger or step or stride or stroll or strong.
You get the point.
English has many words.
Once again, two points to bear in mind.
Firstly, English may have a large vocabulary.
There are 600,000 words in the shorter Oxford English Dictionary.
Yes, the shorter Oxford English Dictionary.
However, the average speaker will probably use the same number of words
in daily conversation as you do in your language .
An educated speaker might use 10,000 words and know 35,000.
And if you
do want to increase your vocabulary, how do you do that?
Well, the answer is quite simple.
You probably know what I'm going to say. Now, read.
Read things that are just a little bit too difficult for you.
And then repeat.
Then do it again. And again and again.
And that's how you'll get from intermediate
to advanced in terms of your vocabulary, anyway.
English register and the YOU problem.
One of the things that makes English appear easy
to learn is of English is the fact that we only have
one word for YOU.
Many languages have a formal YOU
and a familiar you like in French when you speak to someone.
You have to calibrate the closeness you have to the person you're
speaking to by deciding whether to address him
or her as TU or VOUS
and the same in many languages.
And it's true that we don't have that in English, only one YOU,
but in some ways it makes things complicated.
We have to change our language according to the person we are addressing now.
There are FOUR main registers in English
you have formal, neutral, informal and vulgar.
The formal registers you use when you speak to a boss during an interview.
In formal business situations and in situations
where you need to be very polite,
neutral, you use for everyday
use, have with strangers, with clients, informal
you would use with friends and close colleagues, and vulgar
you'd use with close family members, close friends and partners .
And getting the register right can be difficult.
You don't want to come across as too familiar
or overly polite because we only have one
you in English, you get more formal by speaking more indirectly.
And this includes using models,
past tenses and negative sentences.
For example, informally or in the vulgar register,
you might say, Will you have more of this informally?
You could say, Can you help me?
And in the formal register you use a negative sentence with a question tag.
Excuse me. You couldn't help me, could you?
You couldn't help me, could you? Formally, you
might say
I'm unable to attend your gathering on Friday evening.
Informally, you would say I can't come to your party on Friday night.
Notice that in English you often use a word of French origin
to sound more formal.
This is because they tend to be more precise.
Compare.
Please continue formal to please go on informal.
You may commence.
That's formal.
You can begin.
That's informal.
Even verbs may have a formal and informal form.
Sales have increased.
That's formal.
Perhaps while you're giving a presentation at a meeting.
Prices have gone up.
When you tell your friends that your grande
spiced, pumpkin latte is more expensive now.
Formal less. Let's next week.
Informal.
Let's meet up next week.
So sometimes we use a phrasal verb
instead of normal verb
to bring the tone
to a more informal register.
Even when there's no phrasal verb.
Sometimes we just add a preposition to the existing verb.
To lighten it up a little, as in the case of meet up, meet and meet
up means same thing, but adding UP
just shifts it into the informal register.
Another example of this is hurry and hurry up.
Same meaning.
Hurry up.
Being more informal or wait and wait up.
Please hurry, sir
the crowd is waiting for your speech.
Hurry up, darling.
We're going to be late. Or come in.
Formal.
Do come in, madam.
First is come on in.
Informal.
Come on in, guys.
Okay, so we just add the preposition ON
in informal situations
and having the reflex to know when to use a phrasal
verb or add the extra preposition
or use a word of Anglo-Saxon origin
or word of French origin takes time
and is kind of difficult getting that balance right.
Formal versus informal is one of the most complicated things in English,
and it just takes practice and a lot of exposure to different registers.
So both the formal and informal situations
Imprecision.
English has an extensive vocabulary.
However, most people use few words in conversation,
and often they'll use the same words again and again
in different contexts, with a slightly different meaning, such as get, get
can mean become, getting tired, get can mean obtain.
I'm going to get some water.
Get means by I'm going to get a new phone, get means receive and fetch.
And this can be confusing.
Another example of this is when we use go
and then follow it with a preposition to change the meaning.
Okay, so you go up there, then you go down there across.
Then under the bridge and through the field, then up.
In other languages,
you'd use six
different verbs by an English, one
verb but six different prepositions.
And this, by the way, is called satellite framing.
And we have a video about that up here in English.
You can be precise when you want to, but most of the times
English speakers get a lot from context.
And this is difficult and I don't have any silver bullets,
but if you are aware of this and will help.
Phrasal Verbs.
Now, I ran a poll on YouTube where I ask what makes English difficult to learn?
The spelling and pronunciation came top, but second came phrasal verbs.
And you can see why you know a verb.
And then you see this verb, but is followed by preposition.
And it completely changes the meaning.
And you try to understand it from the context.
But you can't, you see PUT.
And then it's followed by
OFF. Put off,
which means disgusted or distracted or dissuaded.
The food looked good, but I was put off by the smell.
And then you see the phrase, the verb again, and you think, Ah,
I know what it means, but this time it means something completely different.
Can we put off the meeting?
Put off the meeting
disgusted by the meeting? I don't understand
put off the meeting until next week. Ah! Put off
means postpone as well.
Yes, that's right.
These darn phrasal verbs can have multiple meanings.
Take go off. It means explode.
The bomb went off.
It means start to ring.
My alarm went off at 5 a.m..
It means become putrid.
Yuck, this milk has gone off.
It can also mean to leave.
although this isn't strictly a phrasal verb.
I'm going off now. See you next week.
There is
no easy solution to learning phrasal verbs.
You need to treat each one as a piece of vocabulary and as with the spelling.
Don't fall into the trap of thinking that because you know the main verb,
it gives you a clue as to what the phrase the verb means.
Sometimes it does, but sometimes it doesn't.
There are a few rules with phrasal verbs, for example.
Sometimes UP can mean completely.
For example, drink up.
We have to leave soon.
So that means finish your drink, not just take a few sips.
Eat up means finish your food, okay?
And finish up means completely finish to the end.
I'll finish up and I'll meet you in half an hour.
However, there are too many exceptions to rely on the rules for phrase
verbs, and I have made a video,
perhaps more than one on this topic.
Check it out.
So what do you think?
What do you find most difficult about learning English?
Or if you're a teacher, what do you find the most difficult to teach in English?
I'll be very happy to read your comments.
Stay mellow and let's meet up again soon. Bye.