Many vs Much - EnglishClass101

Lesson Transcript

Hi, everybody! My name is Alisha.

In this lesson, I’m going to talk about the differences between “many” and “much.”

In this lesson, I’m not going to talk very much about using “how many” and “how much.” If you have questions about those expressions, please check the How Many and How Much video on this channel.

Okay, let’s get started!

I want to begin by talking about “many,” the word “many.”

We use “many” with countable nouns. So, a reminder, a countable noun is a noun that ends with an S in the plural form. So, for example, marker is a countable noun. When I say one marker, there is no S at the end of the word, but when I want to talk about more than one like two, three, or four, I need to add an S to make it into the plural form, so two markers, three markers. So, for nouns that take this pattern, for nouns that have this S pattern, we call these countable nouns, countable nouns. So, we use “many” when we’re talking about uncountable nouns- I’m sorry. We use “many” when we talk about countable nouns, countable nouns.

Okay. So, let’s look at a couple of general rules, general guidelines for using “many” with countable nouns.

First, when we make a positive statement, a simple positive statement and we use many with the countable noun, it means a lot, a lot. So, a good number, a good amount of something, a lot of something.

For example:

“Many people attended the event.”

So, here, I’ve used the word “people.” People is a little bit special. When we say like “people,” we mean more than one person. Person is the singular form, one person and the plural form is people. So, this one is a little bit different from the rule that I talked about with that S rule, but it still follows the same countable or uncountable rules with “many” and “much.”

So, “Many people attended the event.”

So, this is a general statement about some event. We use many before the countable noun, “many people attended.”

The next example sentence:

“Many of our students improved.”

So here, my countable noun is student and I used the plural form, “students.”

“Many of our students improved.”

So, another way to understand the sentence is, “A lot of our students improved.”

So, one question many learners have is why, like this sentence say “of our” like why does the sentence not use “of,” “many of people”?

So, in this case, “Many of our students improved,” we include this part to show that there is a specific group of students we’re talking about. If, for example, I removed this, I say, “Many students improved,” the sentence is grammatically correct and we can maybe make a guess about which student, we don’t know exactly though. So we include something like this, “of our,” “Many of our students improved.” This gives us some extra information.

So here, “Many people attended the event” is grammatically correct, of course, yes, but it just gives us a general idea. We don’t know which people. Was it a certain group of people or a certain type of people? We don’t know. This sentence is a bit more general.

We could say, like:

“Many people from our company attended the event”

Or “Many of the people who attended the event were very wealthy.”

So, we could add a little bit of extra information to make the group or like to make the people who participated a little bit clearer. This is one way to do that. In this case, we’re using this “student” in the plural form here and we connect it with “of” and “our students” to show that this is a group of people belonging to us.

So, you’ll see this “of (something)” pattern quite a lot.

“Many of the students in the class improved.”

Or, “Many of our colleagues took a vacation.”

So, using that “of” to connect “many” to the plural noun is quite common.

Okay, let’s compare this then to making negative statements. So, when we make a negative statement, we use “not,” not, and in this case, the meaning is not a lot, not a lot.

Let’s look at the examples.

First:

“Not many people attended the event.”

So, again, this is the same sentence as this example. It’s just a negative form.

So, a different way to understand the sentence is not a lot of people attended the event. not a lot of people attended the event. They are both correct. You can choose whichever you prefer. So, “Not many people attended the event.”

Same thing here with the second example sentence:

“Not many of our students improved.”

So, again, not a lot of our students improved, not a lot of our students improved. Both are correct. You can use whichever you like to use.

So, when we use this “not” form, it follows the same rule. We still need to use the plural form of the countable noun. So, there’s no change here, you’ll notice. The only change is that we’ve used “not” before “many,” so this makes a general negative statement.

Also, you’ll notice when I used “not a lot,” I did need to change the grammar of my sentence.

So, “Not a lot of our students improved.”

Or “Not a lot of people attended the event.”

So, you’ll notice, we need to use an “of” in this case.

“Not a lot people attended the event.”

When you use “a lot” or “not a lot,” you will need to add “of” there, so I want to make that little extra point about this. So, when you’re using “many,” you don’t need to do that, but when you’re using “a lot” or “not a lot,” we do need to connect the expression to the noun that follows with “of.”

Okay. Let’s continue to the next part. The next part focuses on comparison. So, when you want to make a comparison, you can do that with “many” and with “much” as we’ll see later. So, when we make positive comparisons, we use “as.” So, “as” on either side of many. I’ll show you in a moment.And this means equal, equal, or like the same amount, the same number.

For example:

“I have as many students as my coworkers.”

So here, I have “as many.” I then have my countable noun in the plural form, I follow it with “as,” and then this is the thing I’m comparing it to. So, what are we comparing here? We’re talking about students, in this case, the number of students and I’m comparing myself to my coworkers.

So, “I have as many students as my coworkers” means I have an equal number of students as my coworkers. So, my coworkers and I have an equal number of students. You might see this expressed in this way.

So, “as many [noun] as” is a simple way to express a comparison.

Let’s look at one more example:

“As many as 50 people attended the event.”

So, this is an interesting kind of expression. You may see this from time to time. This is something you might see in, like, a report or perhaps a news article of some kind, when they want to describe, like attendance or they want to talk about data or in this case, talking about participants in something.

This “as many as” means, like equal to or about. So, it’s about equal to this number. So, this means like about this many, about the number of 50 people attended the event. So, you may see “as many as” used in this way too. The feeling is it’s equal or it’s about the same. So, this doesn’t mean like exactly 100% always exactly the same, but roughly equal. It’s about equal. So, this is the feeling of a positive comparison with “many.”

Let’s compare this then to a negative comparison. In negative comparisons, we use “not as” and it means not equal, not equal.

So, this sentence is the negative version of the previous one:

“I don’t have as many students as my coworkers.”

So, in this case, you’ll notice, I’ve changed this part here, “don’t.” This is “don’t.” I’ve marked the -N’T in red because this is the “not.” I mentioned we use “not as” here in this pattern, the negative comparison pattern. So, we don’t place “not” here. “I do (something) have not as many.” It doesn’t sound so natural, “I do have not as many” is incorrect. Instead, we put it here. “I don’t have as many students as my coworkers.”

So, when you’re using a pattern like this, you’re making a negative, put the negative before this verb here, “I don’t have,” I don’t have. So, when you’re making a verb negative, like I don’t do something, the “not” comes before the verb. This follows the same kind of pattern.

“I don’t have as many students as my coworkers.”

This means the number of students is not equal. So, me, I, so my number and my coworker’s number, it’s not equal, it’s not the same. So, I’ve shown that here. I don’t have as many students as my coworkers. That sounds like I have fewer students than my coworkers. My coworkers have more students than me.

Okay, one more example:

“Not as many people came to the event as we had expected.”

So, this is quite a long example sentence.

“Not as many people…” okay, so here’s our countable noun, “...came to the event as we had expected.” So, why is this “as” so far in the sentence? Like why is it not here? “Not as many people as came,” right? So, here, the reason that we’re putting “as” here is because we’re talking about some expectation, yeah, “as we had expected.” “Had expected” shows in the past, there was some expectation, so before the event, we had an expectation. Maybe 50 people will come to the event, we hope, we expect. But not as many people came to the event, so we need to be specific here. So, not as many people did what? So, we want to be specific about the group of people we’re talking about and we’re showing this here is not equal to our expectation. So, we see that with “not as many.” So, this was not equal to our expectation. That means the number of people who came to the event was lower than what we had expected, was lower than our expectation. Not as many came to the event as we had expected.

So, these are the uses of “many” with countable nouns.

Let’s compare this to using “much,” much.

So, we use “much” as you can maybe guess with uncountable nouns, uncountable nouns. So these are nouns that do not follow that S rule that I talked about earlier. Like “marker,” I talked about, takes an S in the plural form, markers. But we cannot do the same thing with uncountable nouns.

Some very common examples, I’ll talk about here, are like money, time, food, wine, beer, and so on. So, we cannot count these. Instead, we count uncountable nouns in units, smaller units of things.

So, let’s take a look at how we use “much.”

One very important point about “much” is that we cannot use it in positive statements. I’ve talked about this, “Many people attended the event.” We cannot use much in this way. We cannot say like, “much money was saved” or “I have much money.” We cannot use “much” in this way. We do not use “much” in positive statements. If you want to express that idea though, please use something like a lot. So, that’s much easier to remember, perhaps, so you don’t have to remember “much” or “many,” but please just use a lot in that case. We cannot use “much” in a positive statement.

We use “much” in just negative statements. So, we use it with “not” as we practiced with “many” over here. So it means not a lot, not a lot. So don’t use “much” in the positive. That’s a key point for this lesson.

Some examples of using this in the negative then:

“We don’t have much time.”

So, just as we practiced in negative statements over here and especially, negative comparisons down here, when we make a negative, we place it before the verb, yeah. So, we do not have much time is what this sentence means. So not “we have not much time,” that doesn’t sound good. Let’s use, “we don’t have much time.” That sounds great. That’s perfect.

Another example:

“He doesn’t eat much food.”

So, remember, you do need to conjugate this verb, this helping verb to match your subject, so we (do) not, he (does) not eat much food.

Another way to understand these sentences is “we have not a lot of time” is another way to say this or he doesn’t eat much food could be something like “he eats not a lot of food,” but that’s a very unnatural, hard to think of way to say this sentence.

So please use this [negative] [verb] much [something (uncountable noun)] pattern to make negative statements.

Okay. We can, however, use much in both positive and negative comparisons and it has the same meaning as we practiced with many.

So, let’s take a look at our example sentences.

First:

“She has as much money as I do.”

So, this looks very similar to the “many” pattern. So, this “as many [noun] as [something else]. Same pattern here, “She has as much money as I do.” That means our money, our money levels are the same, so we have the same amount of money.

The next example:

“That group drank as much wine as our group.”

So, “that group,” maybe in a restaurant, that group drank as much wine as our group. That means the two groups of people drank the same amount of wine. It was about equal.

So, this positive comparison expresses equality. The difference here is we’re using uncountable nouns, uncountable nouns.

When you want to use a countable noun, please use “many.”

Okay. Finally, let’s compare this to negative comparisons. So, again, when we want to make a negative comparison, we use “not as” and it expresses that something is not equal, something is not equal.

For example:

“She doesn’t have as much money as I do.”

So, again, our negative “not” is attached to the DO verb here, our helping verb before “have” and “as much” comes before our uncountable noun. We follow this with “as.”

So this sentence, “She doesn’t have as much money as I do” means I have more money. So, “She doesn’t have as much money” means her amount of money, the amount of money she has is less than the amount of money I have. So, this is a shorter way to say that thing. So, I expressed that with two sentences. So, she has less money than I have or she doesn’t have as much money as I do. So, there are a couple of different ways. I feel like this is a pretty short and efficient way to say that idea.

Okay, one more example. Again, I’ve made this a negative.

“That group didn’t drink as much wine as our group.”

So, again, this means that group, across the restaurant, drank less wine than our group. So, we drank more wine, in other words. So, the two things are not equal here, we express that with “not as,” not as [uncountable noun] as [something else]. So, this is how we make comparisons with “much.”

I want to end this lesson with a little refresher from the “how much” and “how many” video. When you’re making questions with these words, you can follow the same countable and uncountable rules. If you want to make a question with “how many,” please make sure you use a countable noun.

For example:

“How many people attended?”

Or “How many cookies did you eat?”

So, these are countable nouns that we use with “how many.” So, we cannot say “how much people” or “how much cookies.” It’s totally incorrect. Please use “how many” with countable nouns.

On the other hand, with an uncountable noun, please use “how much,” how much.

“How much time do we have?”

Or “How much money did you lose?”

So, these are uncountable nouns, we use “how much.” Please do not use “how many time” or how many money,” incorrect, so please be careful.

Thanks very much for watching this lesson and I will see you again soon. Bye-bye!

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