Learn about adverbs of frequency
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| Hi, everybody! Welcome back to Top Words! |
| My name is Alisha, and in this video, we're going to talk about 10 essential adverbs of frequency and time. |
| Let's get started! |
| Okay. Let's get to the lesson. |
| 1. Okay, the first word is "early." |
| So, "early" is the opposite of "late." "Early" is used to talk about our activities a lot. When we do something before the scheduled time or before an appointment or whatever, we describe that as early. |
| For example: |
| "I enjoyed getting home from work early." |
| Okay, next word. |
| 2. All right, the next word is "rarely." |
| So, "rarely" is kind of a tricky word for some people to say. "Rarely,," another way to say rarely is "not often" or "not very often." "Rarely" refers to an action that you don't do regularly. So, if you imagine this on like a scale, from zero to 100 percent, something that you do rarely is very, very close to zero percent of the time, very close to never, so like 10 percent of the time or 15 percent of the time. So something that doesn't happen often or something that you don't do very often, you can describe that kind of action or activity with the word "rarely." |
| For example: |
| "It rains often in April, but rarely in August." |
| 3. The next word is "already." |
| So we use "already" when we want to talk about an expected action that has finished. So this means an action that we have planned or something that we knew or we expected someone else was going to do and we want to express that that action has finished. We use "already" to do that. Like I've already explained the word rarely. So, something that is done, that we expected to be done has been done. We express that with "already." |
| For example: |
| "I'm already going to school." |
| Okay. Let's check out the next one. |
| 4. The next word is "always." |
| "Always" is a super useful word. So, again, if you imagine a scale from zero to 100 percent where zero is never and at the top is 100 percent, you can imagine 100 percent as always, something that you do 100 percent of the time or extremely often. You wanted to communicate that feeling. It can be something that you do every day or every week, every month, every year. |
| For example: |
| "You always say that." |
| All right. Let's go on to the next one. |
| 5. The next word is "never." |
| So "never" is the opposite of "always." As we just talked about with the previous word, if we imagine 100 percent of the time is expressed with the word "always,"we can imagine at the other end of a scale, zero percent of the time is expressed with "never." So, something that you do zero percent of the time or something that refers to your life experience, you have zero percent life experience or zero life experience doing something, so you use "never" to express this. |
| For example: |
| "I've never heard this song." |
| 6. Okay, the next word is "now." |
| So, "now" refers to the present time. So, we're not talking about frequency with this. We're referring to a point in time, in this case, the present moment. So right now, I'm talking to you. Now, you're listening to me, and so on. |
| Another example: |
| "I ate too much, and now my stomach hurts." |
| Okay. Onto the next one. |
| 7. "often" |
| So, "often" refers to something that you do regularly. So, it doesn't mean it's something that you do every day, necessarily, or even every week, but a regular activity that you do with some kind of schedule, generally. So, you can use this in a question, like "How often do you (blah, blah, blah)?" or you can talk about your own activities with like, "I often do (blah, blah, blah)." So this is very common with question patterns in addition to responses. |
| For example: |
| "How often do you work out?" |
| 8. Okay, the next word is "usually." |
| So, "usually" is like a step above "often." So again, if we imagine these words on like a scale, "often" refers to something that you do regularly. It's a little higher on a scale than "sometimes." "Usually," it's a little higher on the scale than "often." |
| So, "usually" refers to something that you do a little more regularly than "often." So something that you do maybe every morning or most mornings or something that you do most Mondays. So, you can kind of think of "usually" as something that you do most of the time, like "I usually wake up and then go back to sleep." That's true. Or, "I usually don't make steak for breakfast." Okay. |
| In this example sentence: |
| "I don't usually eat breakfast." |
| 9. The next word is "occasionally." |
| So, "occasionally," you can imagine as the same meaning really as "sometimes." "Sometimes" and "occasionally" have the same meaning, yes, but "occasionally" sounds a little bit more formal. |
| So I personally would not use "occasionally" in everyday conversation with my friends. I would probably use it in a conversation at work maybe, where I needed to sound more polite or in a more formal, maybe email, for example. In other cases like with friends and family, when I'm talking in those situations, I would probably use "sometimes," but "occasionally" expresses the same feeling. |
| So you could say something like: |
| "Hmm, I occasionally checked the information on our company's website to make sure that everything is up to date." |
| Or in this example sentence: |
| "I occasionally travel to Asia on business." |
| All right. Let's go to the next one. |
| 10. The next word is "still" |
| So, "still" for this video refers to a condition or a status that remains the same. So, if we want to express that something, some condition or status has not changed from a previous status, you can use "still" to express that. You'll also notice that some people use "still" to express like a time or a condition that hasn't changed, but that you feel has changed. |
| For example, in this example sentence, we see: |
| "It's still 5 o'clock." |
| "It's still 5 o'clock." |
| You would hear this in a situation where maybe, for example, it's very, very dark suddenly and you're like, "Oh gosh, it seems so late." You check your watch. "Oh, it's still 5 o'clock." So, that expresses that even though it seems the condition or status has changed, in fact, the truth of the situation is that it's still, it remains this early time. |
| So, when you want to express that lack of change, you can also do that with "still," especially when you're talking about time. |
| Okay. Let's go to the next word. |
| 11. The next word is "sometimes." |
| So, I talked about "sometimes" earlier in relation to the word "occasionally." "Sometimes" and "occasionally" have that same feeling, but sometimes sounds more conversational, more casual, so we use "sometimes" a lot in conversation. If you want to imagine sometimes on our scale of never to always, "sometimes" is right in the middle at about 50 percent. |
| "So sometimes, I like to watch TV until late at night." |
| Or, "Sometimes, I forget to call my mom on her birthday." (Hmm, not for long though.) |
| Or, "Sometimes, I choose the wrong thing to eat for lunch and then my stomach is unhappy." |
| That's true. |
| In this example sentence: |
| "Sometimes I'm right." |
| 12. Okay, the next wod is "then." |
| So we use "then" to show progression of activities or like progression of status. So, you might hear somebody telling a story and saying "then" or "and then," "and then..." so that shows the next action in a series or the next action in a story. So, you can do this actually a lot in your everyday life, when you talk about your day, like: |
| "I woke up, and then I ate breakfast, and then I took a shower, and then I went to work, and then I went to school." |
| So, "then" shows that progression. |
| In this example sentence: |
| "Then I want to go to the beach." |
| All right! So that is everything. Those were 10 essential frequency and time adverbs. I hope that that was helpful for you. Of course, if you have any questions or comments, or if you want to practice making an example sentence with these words, please feel free to do so in the comment section of this video. So, I hope you enjoyed this video, don't forget to give a "like" and a share and then subscribe, if you have not already. Thanks very much for watching and I will see you in the next video. Bye! |
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