Should I learn British or American English? | How are they different?

[Music] hello and welcome to kangaroo English my name is Christian and today is Monday the best day of the week now today I am going to be talking about the differences between British and American English because it's a question that I get asked all the time by students and in fact I've had some students say to me our Christian you're a really good teacher but you're teaching Australian English you're teaching British English so I can't learn from you now it's really important to know that the difference between British and American English is tiny it's as significant as the difference between New York and Texas English so the idea that there's only two types of English is just pure marketing and really the differences between all of the different types of English have more to do with psychology and culture than anything else so let's start with the first question which is this one I've stumbled upon this interesting sentence you and your sugar-coated Earth sets are absolutely full of it I would really appreciate if you could explain a sugar-coated ersatz also the roots of this word okay so sugar-coated covered in sugar something that's sweet so sweet can have positive meanings you know uh he's a sweet guy she's a sweet girl but if something is too sweet that's bad if something's coated in sugar it's too sweet it goes from being delicious to being too much so sugar-coated is is not really a good thing you know if you want someone to tell you the truth if if I want to ask you listen does this pink t-shirt look good on me now don't sugarcoat it then then you can tell me the truth but the word I'm really interested in talking about is Earth SATs so Earth sets is a word that we stole directly from German and in German it means replacement or substitute so during World War one and then again during World War two there was a shortage of things you know it was difficult to find certain products especially food and so maybe you couldn't get your favorite coffee or your favorite tea you had to have a substitute replacement and normally that substitute or replacement wasn't as good as the original right so it was something earth sets something ersatz is a replacement or substitute that's not quite as good as the original and that's how a lot of people feel about American English it's like British English is the original English the correct English true English and American English is just a SATs substitute poor quality copy of the real thing when of course that's not true at all all languages equally as valuable and equally as rich and as interesting which brings us to our first question which is this one good morning here is a thing that's worth discussing yet and just can be used with simple past and present perfect but how do we distinguish its meaning do they give the same information whether used with simple past or present perfect for example we have just arrived or we just arrived what's the difference in both meanings have you started your job yet or did John start his new job yet what's the difference in both meanings so this is when we we start to make our first comparison between British and American English and if you look at this chart you'll see that in general in American English they prefer to use the past simple especially with these adverbs of time like already and just and yet so we can see that there's this preference this difference of preference but where did it come from is it just distance is it just something that happens naturally when you separate two languages well there was this really interesting paper cultural and psychological factors for the present perfect in British English and American English and the author suggests that there is a link between all of the European languages that surround English and their preference for using present perfect because you see in some European languages especially the ones that are that are close to England and the United Kingdom they are slowly reducing their use of the past simple preterite and they're preferring to use the perfect tenses listen to this cultural ties with the euro-atlantic linguistic area may be having an effect on its syntax and more specifically on the use of the present perfect instead of the simple past so it's possible that the reason that British English prefers to use present perfect is because all all of the other languages around it are also preferring to use present perfect and well there's a little bit of evidence for this but America over there isolated isn't being influenced in the same way it's always fascinating to see that link between culture and language and that brings us directly to another important part of American culture McDonald's and to our next question how is it correct I know that see and hear a stative verbs Google Translate gives a sentence I see a bird or I can see a bird now the sentence I can see a bird now is an equivalent to the present continuous or both sentences are correct so here's the really interesting thing although you have probably encountered the vocabulary of stative and dynamic verbs as a learner the truth is that this is just one way of describing grammar like when we look at language and we analyze language there are many different ways to skin a cat many different ways for theories of language to look at language and take it apart into its pieces so really the idea of stative and dynamic verbs is just one possibility and that's important because when you actually start looking at English verbs you'll find that almost all of them can be used as both and this is important because it tells us that language isn't about grammaticality and ungrammaticality it's not about right and wrong it's about acceptability and unacceptability and things that we find acceptable can change over time like for example in 2003 when McDonald's decided to use the slogan I'm loving it now there's this really great piece of research about this McDonald's slogan which talks about how before McDonald's introduced this in 2003 there was only five uses of loving as a dynamic verb in all of these corpuses of English that they looked at so basically before McDonald's started using the verb loving as a dynamic verb it wasn't really something that people did it sounded odd it sounded strange it didn't sound acceptable and that's exactly why McDonald's decided to use it in their slogan it was a shock it had this effect of what that's strange and and new and fresh which is exactly what they wanted and now you know 20 years later it's sounds perfectly normal for us to say I'm loving this class I'm hating this book that I'm reading and other verbs that perhaps twenty years ago would never be used as dynamic verbs suddenly start to become acceptable so really whether you can use these verbs like see and hear as dynamic and stative verbs is one it's about logic and two it's about what we find acceptable as language evolves and changes so for example seeing and hearing now obviously sometimes it won't make a lot of sense if you say can you see this person standing over here and you say yes I can see him that's something that we consider acceptable we don't think it's acceptable to say yes I am seeing him doesn't sound right it's not what we just not what we say but if you had a problem psychological problem and you were hallucinating and you had visions of pigs flying through the sky rabbits on motorcycles you could go to your doctor and say doctor I am seeing some strange things and at that moment it's logical because you want to differentiate you want to differentiate between saying I see something all the time and I'm seeing something in this period of time so again acceptability and unacceptability is not just about language change it's also about logic and making sense in context okay so we've spent some time in the United States talking about American English now let's cross over the Atlantic and let's go to Britain and to this question hello everyone I am Francesca from Madrid and I want to be part of this group to improve my English I have recently asked to Christian how to use so do i and how do you say that for he and we and she etc and also the negative which is neither do i but I don't know how that works for you he-she etc now this is a great example of how language comes to us in chunks and pieces and sometimes it's just a really bad idea to try to break apart these chunks and look for meaning because a lot of these time it doesn't make sense now let's look at this reply so do I now it's kind of weird because the words are all in the wrong order right I mean you don't use this order in standard English we say subject and then the verb after right unless it's a question when we do inversion but so what is this why the reason is that this is a fossil an old expression from Old English when the word order was different but what we're doing is we're bringing in this construction and we're continuing to use it in modern English but the only thing we're taking is the meaning the words don't make sense but the meaning does so do i and what's weird about this is you can only use this construction with auxiliary verbs so for example so do I here we have our auxiliary right that we use to make you know affirmative sentences like I do like pizza I do have two dogs but we could use another auxiliary like I have eaten two pizzas today so have I I am watching a lot of films recently so am I so with this construction we can put in our auxiliary verbs and it sounds totally natural but with other verbs no like for example if you said you know I eat pizza a lot you can't say mmm so eat I write so it has this very specific use which is basically a fossilized construction that's come to us from the past and of course the negative is instead of so do I we changed this first part for the negative neither do I or neither does she so we have to conjugate this auxiliary because remember in every English clause we have to conjugate one verb but only one verb and that brings us to our final question this one hello Christian may I ask you a question about the conjunction though for example in this sentence this is a quiet neighborhood a little far from the city center though is it correct or those should be placed after the comma one more thing what is the difference with although and about the use of both conjunctions so though and although are the same word they're exactly the same word but what we want to do sometimes is we want to intensify this word we want to make it stronger so in the past we added all in front of it although this made the word stronger and now in more modern times we add even so this is an intensified for this even though okay now the origin of this word is super interesting it in the past it came to us from old German and it meant that it was a demonstrative pronoun it was like pointing at something and saying and that's basically what its use is in a sentence it's used to say that something is surprising or different from what you expect for example although hello although it's raining I still went for a walk do you see it's like I'm using a word to kind of make a pointing action of something which is interesting or surprising you know although I've already eaten four pizzas I'm gonna eat another one that's what it does but of course you know words separate right words separate and they develop other slightly different meanings okay and so when we put this word in a different position like when we put it at the end of the sentence like in this example it does mean something a little bit different it basically means but right so we're still we're still using it to point at something but it's more about pointing at something which is different from before right you're pointing out the contrast so for example I normally eat four pizzas per day though I'm not hungry right you see something but I'm saying this but actually it's the opposite or I could say uhm yeah this is a quiet neighborhood but it's a little far from the city center it's a little far from the city center though and normally you would use a comma before this now remember that the comma is not really about rules okay the comma is to help the person who's reading your text to understand it better so we need the comma to add that pause commas are an aid for the person reading your text to help them read it better so we need the pause so that the the tone the intonation of the sentence makes sense it's a quiet neighborhood a little far from the city center though you see we need that we need that break just to make the the difference well I hope that you enjoyed this class and I hope that you learned something about the differences the real differences between the different types of English which really are just about the differences between different types of people and about people wanting to talk like who they talk with I'm Christian this is kangaroo English I'll see you [Music]

Channel: Canguro English

Views: 42,145

Rating: 4.9534445 out of 5

Keywords: british english, american english, american accent, british accent, comparison of american and british english, american english vs british english, difference between american and british english, british and american english, learn american english, learn british english, difference between british and american english, canguro english, learn english, american vocabulary, uk english, english teacher, kangaroo english, canguru english, english lessons, english accent

Id: JmGfX1Jm2Fs

Length: 21min 3sec (1263 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 15 2020