Lesson Transcript

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 Zara. Hi, Zara. I hope I said your name correctly.
Zara asked, Hi, Alisha. I'm wondering which one is correct to use?
A. I have worked abroad for two years.
B. I worked abroad for two years.
Thanks for your lessons. I appreciate your work.
Okay, your question is which is correct to use? So first I'll answer both of these sentences are grammatically correct, but they communicate different things.
So let's do a little bit of grammar review with these two example sentences that you have kindly provided us with.
So let's take a look at A first. I have worked abroad for two years. This means you are still working abroad. I have worked abroad for two years sounds like you are still in the process of working abroad.
And a different way to say this is I have been working abroad for two years.
This is one of the situations in which it's okay to use that progressive form have been working or not, you can choose and we can understand the same meaning regardless of use of that progressive form or not.
So if you say I have worked abroad for two years, it sounds like that's something that you're still doing.
So the other situation in which you might see this grammar used is in say a job interview situation if they ask about your work experience or your life experience.
You might say something like, Oh, yes, I have worked abroad to show that you have life experience.
But in this situation, you wouldn't use for two years.
Generally we don't assign like a length of time to that kind of experience.
Generally when we want to express just that we've had the experience of doing something like, Oh, I have eaten that before Oh, I've been there before.
So usually don't put a time with that experience.
Usually that's in a follow up question.
So you might use just the beginning part of your example sentence.
I have worked abroad in a job interview situation and that would be correct.
So to sum up my response to example sentence A, I have worked abroad for two years sounds like you still work abroad is one way to express that.
So let's compare this to example sentence B, I worked abroad for two years.
This uses simple past tense, right, I worked abroad, this shows us that the action is done, you are finished with your work abroad experience, right? So you would use this after you come back to your home country and you tell people, Oh, I worked abroad for two years.
So it shows us it's done. It's over.
This is part of the past and it's no longer something I'm doing.
You could also use this example sentence in a job interview to show that this was an experience you had in the past.
It doesn't have quite that feel of life experience that I have worked abroad has, but just I worked abroad for two years can use that for two years part at the end of the sentence to express how long you did that action that finished action.
So I hope that this helps you understand the differences between these two grammar points.
And again, I want to make it very clear, both of the sentences that you mentioned at the beginning are 100% correct, they just communicate two different things.
The first sentence communicates that thing is continuing and the second sentence communicates that thing has finished.
So I hope this answers your question. Thanks very much for sending it along.
And if you want, you can take a look at some present perfect tense example videos and tons and tons of live streams and more all on the YouTube channel.
So check that out.
Just do a quick search for present perfect tense for more about this topic. Okay, great.
Let's move on to your next question.
Next question comes from Joelle. Hi, Joelle.
Joelle says, Hi, Alicia, could you please explain the difference between harm and damage? Thanks so much.
Okay, cool. So harm and damage, let's talk about these as verbs first. So both harm and damage can be used as verbs and as nouns.
But I want to start by looking at the differences between these two words as verbs.
Let's first talk about damage as a verb.
So we can damage people and we can damage objects.
So when we damage objects, for example, it's usually through some kind of physical act like crushing that thing or hitting that thing.
We do something to the object so that we cannot use it correctly, or there's something wrong with it so wrong with it, that it might be dangerous to use correctly.
So for example, if you get into a car accident where two cars crash into each other, one car, actually, probably both cars might be damaged, and they can no longer run, you can no longer use the car.
So maybe the car is bent or parts of the car are broken, and so we cannot use them.
So to damage something else needs to cause some kind of change in that thing that makes it unsafe to use or makes it maybe look really, really ugly.
So to damage can be used in this way to talk about objects, of course, we can also use damage to talk about people.
But when we use damage to talk about people, we sometimes use it to mean emotional damage.
So that means we say something to someone else that causes them to change in some way that causes them to feel hurt or to feel unhappy.
And so we can call that emotional damage. So I'm using it as a noun here.
But as a verb, we might say, those comments really damaged me.
So this shows that we can also use this kind of breaking kind of idea with our words to cause someone that emotional pain, right.
So this is how we can use damage as a verb.
So let's compare this to using harm as a verb.
When we use harm as a verb, we typically do not use it to talk about objects, we don't say harming a building or harming a boat or harming a car or something like that.
We use to harm to talk about people and perhaps animals as well.
So when we harm someone else or when we harm an animal that refers to causing pain to that person or causing pain to the animal, like you might see a terrible news report that says that someone harmed a bunch of cats, which sounds like maybe they poisoned them or maybe they did some terrible kind of experiment to the cats.
So that means that they caused pain or maybe even killed creatures in some way.
But harm means causing pain to another living thing.
We don't really use harm with plants very much, I don't feel. We typically use it with people and with animals.
So this is the difference with harm and damage as verbs.
Now that we know kind of the difference between these as verbs, we can I think a little more easily understand the differences between these two words as nouns.
So harm refers to like the result of a harmful action, right.
So if someone does something that is very painful or if someone does something like attacking somebody else, you receive harm from that, like harm is the result of that.
So oh no, like don't do harm to other people is maybe a common expression that you might hear.
On the other hand, damage, like we talked about before, can refer to this same sort of thing happening but to objects.
So you might hear, for example, oh, the house took a lot of damage in the storm, or the car took a lot of damage in the accident.
So we often use that verb to take damage when we talk about damage as a noun.
So you might hear these kinds of differences when you use the noun forms and when you use the verb forms of these words.
So kind of a way to sum this up nicely is that we tend to use damage when we talk about objects and we can also use it to talk about people, usually with our emotions.
Harm on the other hand is used to talk about people and animals, living things and other words.
I hope that this helps you understand the differences between harm and damage as nouns and as verbs.
And of course, if you have any follow up questions, please feel free to let me know.
Thanks for sending this interesting question along. Okay, let's move on to your next question.
Next question comes from Roman Matovsky. Hi, Roman.
Roman says, what's the difference between solitary, single and lonely? Okay, good question.
So let's start with solitary because it's maybe the least used of these words.
So solitary generally means just one of something and it can have a kind of negative kind of feel behind it sometimes.
So we don't use solitary a whole lot unless we really want to emphasize it's just one person or just one thing.
So a great example of this, it's kind of a little bit dark, is like in the US judicial system in the prison system, we have something called solitary confinement, which means one person in a small place for a very long time as a part of punishment. So it's a type of jail.
So solitary there is used to show it is just one person, just one person, just one cell, all by themselves kept inside.
So that's what confinement means. You cannot move outside that space. So solitary there communicates that is just one person.
We really have that feeling of it just being one person in this case.
You might hear solitary also used in times when maybe a storyteller or a writer wants to emphasize that really there's just one of something.
They might say something like there was a solitary person on the beach, which really sounds like, oh, wow, there's really nobody else, just one person there.
So if you really want to emphasize the just one of something, you can use solitary to do that.
So with this in mind, let's move on to single.
So single has a couple different uses.
First, we use single a lot to talk about someone who is not married or not in a relationship.
We can say he is single or she is single, which means they don't have a partner or they are unmarried.
So single is used in this way.
We can also use single to mean one of something, but it doesn't have the same feeling of just one like emphasis on just one that solitary does.
So if you want to order something at a restaurant, you might say, can I get like a single serving of fries, please? Which means I just want one of that thing.
It doesn't sound as serious as solitary.
So we use solitary when we're usually talking about like people, maybe, maybe kind of like some kind of artistic or natural sort of thing.
But when we use single, like I want a single serving of that, we use it just to mean one of that thing without kind of the heavy feeling that solitary has.
So these are the two uses of single.
Lastly then, let's talk about lonely. So lonely is an emotion.
So when we feel lonely, we feel like we want to have some kind of social engagement.
We want to talk to our friends, we want to see somebody, but nobody is around at that time and very common human emotion, right? So when we want to express that feeling, we can say, I feel lonely.
You would use this grammatically the same way you would any other emotion word like I feel happy or I feel sad or I feel angry, right? I feel lonely.
So we would not use, for example, solitary or single in this way.
So we cannot use those as emotion words because they are not emotion words.
Lonely, however, is an emotional experience. I feel lonely or he seems lonely. She's been lonely lately. So these communicate an emotional experience.
They're completely different from solitary and single, which means just one of something.
So these are the differences between solitary and single and lonely.
A quick introduction to these. I hope this answers your question.
Thanks so much for sending it along. All right. That is everything that I have for this week.
So thank you as always for sending your great questions. So thanks so much for watching this week's lesson.
Don't forget to like this video if you enjoyed it and subscribe to our channel if you haven't already.
Also, come check us out at EnglishClass101$com for some other things that can help you with your English studies.
Thanks very much for watching this week's episode of Ask Alisha and I will see you again next time. Bye!

Comments

Hide