| Hi, everybody! Welcome back to Ask Alisha, the weekly series where you ask me questions and I answer them, maybe! |
| Let's get to your first question this week. |
| First question this week comes from Varun. |
| Hi, Varun! |
| Varun says… |
| Hi, Alisha! What's the difference between “finish” and “complete”? |
| Great question! Very common question. |
| The very, very, very short answer to this is that we use “finish” to end something and we use “complete” when we do 100% of something. There's some kind of expectation and we fulfill that expectation. We complete something. It's 100 there. |
| So, there are some situations where we can use both “complete:” and “finish” and create a correct sentence. Let's take a look at some examples of how we might use these words. |
| We might say something like: |
| “Class finished at 3 pm.” |
| Or, “The event finished at 5 pm.” |
| We use “finish” to talk about the end of activities, like meetings or classes, lectures, and so on. We're talking about the end of something, so “finish” is very natural to use here. |
| We use “complete” to refer to doing 100% of something. So, we might use “complete” in situations where we've had to do a lot of steps in a task or a lot of steps in a project. Maybe, we work with a lot of people in order to make something happen. We would use “complete” to describe that, like… |
| “We completed this project last year.” |
| This sounds a little bit more like effort went into it than… |
| “We finished this project last year.” |
| “To complete (something)” sounds like you had to take some time and effort to make that thing possible. |
| Here's another example sentence: |
| “I completed my homework on time.” |
| Again, this sounds like I was responsible for doing a few things in order to make this happen. This is the situation where “finish” is, again, okay to use. |
| “I finished my homework on time.” |
| It sounds like that thing ended on time or that action ended on time, the action of doing my homework. |
| So, there are cases where it's okay to use both verbs, but in general, a good guideline that you can use is to remember that “complete” refers to doing all the parts of something, fulfilling some kind of expectation, and “finish” is used to talk about the end of something. So, I hope that this helps you understand the differences between “finish” and “complete” as verbs. Thanks very much for this question. |
| Okay, let's move on to your next question. |
| Next question comes from Bishal Aryal. |
| Hi, Bishal! |
| Bishal says… |
| How do you write a summary after you read a book? |
| Nice question! Yeah, writing a summary of a book can be a challenging process, and the answer to this question depends a little bit on the goal of your summary. Are you writing the summary to share it with somebody else, like to share it with your co-workers or your colleagues, to give them information, to help them with their work? Are you writing a review on the internet about what you think about this book? Was it your opinion of the book? So ,it depends a bit on what you want to do with the summary. |
| But generally speaking, when you want to write a summary of a book or you want to write a summary of another long document, it's a good idea to think of the key topics in the book. So that might mean, maybe, the key chapters or the key themes in the book. Think about those. Think about the key arguments that the author introduced in the book. So, that means what was the author's opinion or what were the key ideas that the author wanted to share, the key opinions the author expressed? Write about those and then, if it's appropriate, you might include your own opinion or your own understanding of the information. |
| So, again, this is different depending on what you want to do with the summary of the book that you've just read, but you can think about your reader. Think about your audience and what they want to get from you and that can help you to prepare a good book summary. |
| So, this is a very open-ended response, but I think a really important thing to do here when you're thinking about writing a summary like this is to think about the person you expect to read your summary and to give them the information that's going to be the most helpful for them. So, I hope that this gives you a way to think about writing a book summary and I hope it was helpful for you. Thanks very much for the question! |
| Okay, let's move on to your next question. |
| Next question comes from Jessica. |
| Hi, Jessica! |
| Jessica says… |
| How do you talk about someone you’re interested in? For example, if I wanna mention someone to my friend, how do I talk about that person? |
| Oh, okay. So, I think this question is about how do you talk about someone you're romantically interested in or how do you talk about someone that you're attracted to, when you're talking with your friends. Sure! So, you can talk about physical attractiveness and you can also talk about the things about that person's personality or their mind, their way of thinking that you find attractive. So, you can use adjectives to do a lot of this for you. |
| So, when you want to talk about someone's physical attractiveness, you can say he or she or they are hot or sexy, cute, handsome, beautiful, gorgeous, whatever. You can use adjectives like that. You can also talk about their actual attributes, like he has blue eyes or she has brown hair, or he's really tall or she's very petite, these kinds of things. |
| We can use these kinds of expressions to talk about someone's physical attributes, and generally when we say that, we could say, oh, for example… |
| “She's so petite, it's really cute. I think she's really cute.” |
| These kinds of things kind of go together. We might repeat them to make that kind of emphasized feeling as well too. So, you can describe someone's attributes that way. |
| You can also talk about someone's personality and mindset with the expression “I like that he…” or “I like that she is (something, something, something.) |
| For example: |
| “I like that he’s hard working.” |
| Or, “I like that she's really smart.” |
| So, you can use “I like that he is…” or “I like that she is…” to mean this is a thing about this other person that I find attractive about them. |
| You can also use the negative one to talk about things that you dislike about that other person. |
| For example: |
| “I don't like that he's so messy, he should really clean his house a little bit more.” |
| So, you can use these patterns to talk about the things that you like and that you dislike about the other person. |
| We can also use adjectives to talk about someone's personality. |
| For example, as I said earlier: |
| “He's hard working and I like that.” |
| That's another way to express it, or if you're still getting to know that person you can use, “seems,” like… |
| “She seems like a really kind, genuine person, I really like that about her. |
| You can use “seems” to describe things about somebody when you're still not super close to them, but you feel like you kind of understand them a little bit. |
| Another example might be: |
| “He seems like a really nice guy.” |
| Or, “He seems like a really thoughtful person.” |
| You can use expressions like these to talk about someone as you get to know them. |
| So, those are the two things that we generally focus on a lot. We talk about their physical appearance and we talk about their way of thinking, their mindset, and their personality. |
| Once you get past this, if you wanna talk more in depth about this person with your friends, you could start to use actual situations. So, maybe you've met this person at school or in a community situation or maybe you've gone on some dates with this person, then you can actually use simple past tense statements to talk about the things you did together. |
| For example: |
| “He bought dinner for me, it was really nice.” |
| Or, “She brought me a coffee at work, I loved it.” |
| So, you can use those simple past tense statements to show examples of the things that person did and whether you like those things or you didn't like those things. So, I hope this gives you a good guideline for talking about people that you are interested in. Thanks very much for the question. |
| Okay, that is everything that I have for this week. Thank you, as always, for sending your great questions. Thanks very much for watching this week's episode of Ask Alisha and I will see you again next week. Bye! |
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