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| Hi, everybody my name is Alisha. Welcome back to Know Your Verbs. |
| In this episode, we're going to talk about the verb "read." Let's get started. |
| The basic definition of the verb "read" is to take in information using letters or symbols through your eyes or through touch. People can read through touch, also. In example sentences: |
| I've been reading interesting books recently. |
| I read a great article yesterday. |
| Let's look at the conjugations of this verb. |
| Present - read, reads |
| Past - read |
| Past participle - read |
| Progressive - reading |
| So let's look at some additional meanings for this verb. |
| The first meaning is to interpret something as if you are reading it, so that means you're interpreting something that is not a symbol, it's not letters, but you interpret it as though you can read it in some way. |
| Let's look at some examples: |
| He's really hard to read. |
| My best friend's can read me like a book. |
| Okay, so the first example, he's really hard to read means he's really hard to interpret, he's really hard to understand. So maybe someone that you know, their emotions are not very clear always or it's not easy to know what they're thinking, we can say that person is hard to read, like it's hard to interpret their thinking, it's hard to interpret them. |
| In the second example sentence, I said, my friends can read me like a book. So that means my friends think I'm easy to understand, I'm easy to interpret through my body language or my face or the sound of my voice, it's really easy to read me, it's really easy to interpret me, so easy it's like reading a book. So I'm very easy to understand is the meaning there. So this kind of "read," we can use for people or maybe even we can use for like situations, too. So to read something like it's symbols even though it's not a symbol. |
| The second meaning for this verb is to assign meaning to something else to assign a meaning to something else, so to give a meaning to something. |
| So examples of this: |
| This passage can be read totally differently. |
| How did you read that message? |
| So here, "read" doesn't mean like physically taking in the information in a message or in a book, it means understanding or giving a certain meaning to something. |
| So in the first example, it was this passage can be read totally differently means this passage or the meaning of this passage could be understood in a different way, so that doesn't mean there's a different way to read, like, physically take the information in it means there's a different way to understand the meaning of that passage. |
| In the second example sentence, how did you read that message? It means how did you understand that message or what was the true meaning you understood in that message, what did you get from that? How did you read that message? So read doesn't only mean looking at the symbols and letters even if it seems like it here in these sorts of situations, it means how do you assign meaning to that text. |
| Let's go to a third meaning of the verb "read" then. So we can also use "read" to mean to indicate to indicate something as with like signs or time. |
| Let's look at some examples: |
| The clock reads two. |
| The sign reads visitors not permitted. |
| So here I'm using the present tense for both of these example sentences. The clock reads means the clock indicates two o'clock, or the clock says two o'clock. So when there's some indication there's some sort of message from a sign, from a clock, from I don't know, bulletin board, maybe, whatever, its indication. We can use the verb "read" to talk about them. So the sign reads two o'clock, the sign reads visitors are not permitted to indicate. |
| Let's look at some variations now for this verb. The first one is "to read into." |
| To read into something, this means to believe in a deeper meaning of something, however, in some cases, there's no deeper meaning. It's like we think there's deeper meaning for something but there really isn't. |
| Let's look at some examples of this: |
| She's being extra nice to him. I'm trying not to read into it but I wonder if they're dating. |
| Don't read into his comments. |
| Okay, so both of these mean... like, actually, in both of these I've given kind of a negative situation. |
| In the first one, I'm trying not to read into it means I'm trying not to see a deeper meaning in this situation, but I wonder if they're dating, because she's being extra nice to him. So there's a little bit of curiosity there. |
| In the second example sentence, don't read into his comments means don't imagine there's a deeper meaning there, don't read into his comments, there's not anything else for you to be concerned about here, it's just this comment, that's all. So don't think there's something behind to the comment. |
| Okay, let's go to the second variation for "read" today. The second variation is "to read between the lines." |
| To read between the lines, this means to understand something that's not directly stated, this is a very important skill and so many countries have different ways of expressing this concept, but in English, we say to read between the lines, to see or to understand something that people don't explicitly say. |
| Examples: |
| The manager said he was happy with last month's performance, but reading between the lines, I think he wishes we had done better. |
| And, |
| I think if you read between the lines you'll see that the company is not doing so well. |
| So in the first example sentence, we see this presentation, the manager was happy with the performance, but reading between the lines I think he wishes we had done better, that suggests that maybe there is a comment or there's some information there that makes the speaker think the manager is actually hiding some disappointment, so there's something about the manager's behavior that maybe indicates his true feelings are different from his happy, kind of, presentation. |
| In the second example sentence, I think if you read between the lines, you'll see that the company is not doing so well. Again, that means that there's something the speaker has noticed or has sense or has heard that suggests that actually the company is not doing so well, even though it seems that they are. This is a useful expression for social situations, like, if someone doesn't quite understand like the feeling of a conversation, or like the sort of sense in a room, we can say, like, oh that person can't really read between the lines, Kenny here. So that's how we use it. |
| So those are a few new ways of using the verb "read," I hope. If you have any other uses that you know of, or if you have any questions or comments, or want to try to make a sentence with this verb, please feel free to do so. Thanks very much for watching this episode of Know Your Verbs, and we'll see you again next time! Bye-bye! |
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