Use of Personal Pronouns in informal speech in English

want to speed up your language learning get access to all of our best pdf cheat sheets for free just click the link in the description and sign up for your free lifetime account right now hi everybody welcome back to ask alicia the weekly series where you ask me questions and i answer them maybe okay let's get to your first question this week first question this week comes from brinto hi brinto brinto says can you please tell me the difference between change exchange and interchange sure let's talk about it let's start by talking about change we can use change in probably the most situations out of these three words when we want to alter something so we want to make a different kind of something or we want to use a different type of something we can use change to describe that so if you want to make a maybe slight alteration which is a noun that you can use to describe a change as well if you want to do something in a document for example you want to write a new sentence in a document or you want to remove a sentence in a document you would describe that as a change as a noun or if you want to use a verb in this case you could say i changed the document that means you altered it or you made it different in some way the key with change is that you are making something different in some way or you're adding something new you're removing something that wasn't there some common expressions you might hear change used in are for example like to change the baby which means to change the diaper on the baby to put a new diaper on a baby or as we talked about earlier to make a change in a document can also be described as changing a document so adding or removing something to make something different that's what we use change to talk about let's move along to exchange to exchange means to usually have two things that you want to swap so we use this a lot when we are shopping for example if you go to a store and you buy a shirt that's small but you needed a shirt that's a medium and you realize it after you got home you might come back to the store and ask to exchange the shirts for a different size that means you have two things that are the same or very very similar and you want to swap them so we use exchange to talk about this like i exchanged my shirts at the store yesterday to use another example you could talk about maybe exchanging money at a currency exchange stand so when you want to transfer money from for example us dollars to euros you would ask for a currency exchange or in other words to swap money in this way so when you use exchange you are switching you can think of switching or swapping one thing for another thing okay finally let's go to interchange interchange i use the word interchangeably or you can use them interchangeably a lot on this channel that means that you can replace something with something else like it's okay to use that thing or this thing in this place so to use something interchangeably means that you can use one or two or maybe three or more things in exactly the same way or in exactly the same position so this is different from exchange which refers to some kind of transaction usually interchange doesn't have this feeling it's like saying you can use anything in this place or you can use anything in this way exchange doesn't have this feeling about it it just kind of refers to switching or swapping to things that are similar or roughly equal so i hope that this helps you understand the differences between change exchange and interchange thanks very much for the question okay let's move on to your next question next question comes from nihan hello nihan nihan says hi alicia i've got a question is there an adjective in english meaning that you won't talk to anyone because you're soaking but it's temporary because another person did something wrong to you and it's not that you often sulk as a personal quality yeah this is an interesting question we might not use an adjective in this case if i had to choose an adjective specifically i might describe this feeling as gloomy like you feel gloomy because someone else did something to you or something happened and your mood is low you might say i'm gloomy or you might say i'm feeling dejected or maybe if it's really serious despondent like you don't want to talk to somebody and it's very very serious what we might say instead of using a specific adjective in this case if you are actively not talking to someone because you're upset with that one we might instead say we're giving someone the silent treatment which means you are not talking to someone because they did something wrong or because there's some kind of problem so we often say that that's a kind of punishment like not talking to someone is a kind of punishment so we might use that kind of expression in this case like oh i'm giving him the silent treatment he made a huge mistake and i don't want to talk to him right now so we could use something like that to express that kind of feeling you feel upset you don't want to talk to someone you are giving them the silent treatment i hope that this helps you i hope this kind of communicates the idea that you were expressing in your question thanks for an interesting topic okay let's move on to our next question next question comes from gerardo vega hello gerardo gerardo says hello alicia i'd like to know what's the difference between stare and look at thank you very much sure okay let's cover look at first we use look at to refer to moving our eyes to something so we focus our attention on something when we use look at like look at the camera means use your eyes to focus on the camera so we use our eyes in a direction when we look at something look at that look at him look at her right but stare to stare at something means yes to use your eyes to focus on that but it means you don't move your focus so for example if you see something interesting or maybe you see like an attractive person or you see something you really want to eat whatever it might be for you if you look at something for a very long time and you don't look at anything else you can describe that as staring at something so for example a pretty girl crossed the street and he stared at her for 10 seconds straight so that means someone focused their attention on another person 100 focus their attention on another person for 10 seconds straight so stare means a long period of focused attention to look at does not have this feel we just use our eyes to focus and to take in images so this is the difference between look at and stare i hope that this helps you thanks for the question okay let's move on to our next question next question comes from achoo i hope i said that right achchu says white house staffer has tested positive for covid19 on cnn and white house staff has tested positive for covid19 on bbc in our country we use staff commonly but staffer is new to me is this an american lingo what's the difference between them great question yeah so staff generally is used to talk about a group of people right the people who work at a company or an organization we're talking about everybody there all of the employees all of the members we say that's the company's staff those are the people that work there or they belong to the organization so we understand staff as a group of people right however you may in some cases see the word staffer staffer we tend to see this more i feel in like government organizations or maybe more official organizations staffer refers to one person only one person only so in this case as with the news reports a staffer got a disease in this case we want to use staffer here to refer to one person only in this news report so this might be a decision it might be a decision that's determined by the reporting agency different reporting agencies might follow different rules for if they choose to use staff or maybe employee or staffer but this is what it means staffer refers to just one person staff refers to a group of people generally so i hope that this helps you understand the difference thanks for an interesting question okay let's move on to your next question next question comes from onerolan wonderland i hope i said your name right owner allan says hi alicia and team thanks for your great work it's amazing awesome thank you sometimes i receive short messages from native speakers without a personal pronoun like got it as far as i know this is okay in spanish or russian languages but can i do this in short sentences in non-formal verbal speech only or should i avoid it hmm good question so when you get messages like these like got it or understood those kinds of things it's totally normal it's totally natural to use those kinds of expressions in quick messages typically with your friends with your coworkers your colleagues if you're close to somebody it's generally understood that it's okay to drop that you don't have to say i got it or i understood it's fine to just say understood or got it if however you don't have such a close relationship with someone if you are talking to a client for the first time or you're exchanging emails with a teacher for the first time or you're making a new connection it's better to write full sentences i would recommend that you don't use these kind of casual expressions until you know someone and you've developed a little bit of a relationship with them but then absolutely it's completely fine to use these short messages just to show you've received something or you saw something or you understood some information so yeah got it or understood or even just great something like that those are perfectly fine to use and they're very effective ways to communicate as well so i hope that this helps you thanks very much for the question all right that is everything for this week thank you very much as always for sending your interesting questions remember if you want to send a question for this series you can send it to me at englishclass101.com ask hyphen alicia you can also find a link in the description of this video if you like this lesson please please please don't forget to give it a thumbs up and of course subscribe to this channel if you haven't already also check us out at englishclass101.com for some other things that can help you with your english studies thanks very much for watching this episode of ask alicia and i will see you again next week bye [Music]

Channel: Learn English with EnglishClass101.com

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Length: 10min 59sec (659 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 18 2021