Your grammar questions answered | 29/04/20

[Music] hello and welcome to kangaroo English my name is Christian and today is Wednesday the best day of the week today I'm going to be answering some of your questions about grammar and vocabulary and lots of other things and the first question is this I've found a sentence as follows could be the milk is run if I remember we have to use run out is it correct to say only run this is a great question and the answer to this question is all about Polly see me Sao Paulo see me is how one verb can have lots of different meanings and in fact run is one of the verbs in English that has the most possible meanings you can go for a run in the park and you can also run a company so the verb has lots and lots and lots of different meanings but when we add a particle onto the end like in or out or through or over we transform this this verb into a phrasal verb and then it has even more meanings so we could say quite confidently that run and run out are two different verbs this one here has lots and lots of meanings and this one here also has lots of different meanings and one of these meanings means that something is completely finished no more it's gone I had some milk but now I have run out of milk my battery on my phone has run out why out well the the beautiful thing and and another reason I love this question is because in English we have these prepositions like like out and in and over and through and these prepositions have quite specific meanings again various meanings but quite specific meanings and the meanings are based on metaphor and metaphor so when when something is out okay so imagine that we have a container okay we have a container of money we have a container of milk we have a container of pizza right and then that thing okay that object that we have it moves out of the container well we don't have it it's it's gone it's disappeared and that's why run out means to not have any more milk next question after watching one of your life classes on YouTube Christian I've realized that I've been pronouncing the word iron incorrectly all my life I'd like to know more about this word and its origins in order to understand why the letter R is silent in this word and we pronounce it like ion well this is another awesome question because to answer this question we have to talk about the history of English and we also have to talk about phonology about sounds right so I'm going to tell you something that maybe is a little bit surprising okay this brit this is the original Old English word for bird you know the thing that flies in the sky it didn't used to be burden used to be print but over time these two letters they changed position not letters these these two sounds changed position and exactly the same thing is happening in Reverse with our word iron so originally the pronunciation was I Ren I run okay but then over time what's happening is they're moving position it's becoming IOR n iron iron and this changing of the position of sounds in English is called metathesis and it's really common it's something which happens all the time not just in English but in lots of different languages and we need to ask why why does this happen and part of the clue is that it mostly happens with the letter R and the letter L so there's some something specific happening and there's this great paper by Elizabeth human that explains all of the factors that contribute to to this sound changes so we have perception audio recognition production coordination and aerodynamics generalization cognitive categories and conformity in the communication of society so basically the first reason this happens is because some sound combinations are easier to perceive for humans and the second part of that is that some sound combinations are easier to produce so we have this production perception fight between brint and burns between iron and iron and then the second part is realization right maybe there's not a lot of words that sound similar to brint right but there's a lot of words in a similar category that sound like bird so over time this word changes to be similar to all of the other words in that category and then the final part conformity I start saying it differently and then you start saying it differently too because you hear me doing it and then society in general conforms and then suddenly a few hundred years later it's not a Brid it's a bird that's that's the magic of language change next question hello guys I wonder if there's any difference between reflecting on or upon something and pondering on or over something what seems strange to me is that although they share the same preposition on they also have upon and over which are different and not interchangeable also there's to think about or think of something are of and about interchangeable here now the reason I love this question is because again it brings us back to metaphor and so much of language is about metaphor and understanding these these deep meanings the deep logic of how humans think and how humans act helps us to understand the language so let's let's look at these four possibilities with the verb think write so we can think on something you can think over something we can think of and we can think about now these prepositions have specific meanings on is about contact think on so when we're thinking on something basically our brain is making contact with that idea it's here in our mind thinking on a recipe to cook tonight my mind is in contact with the idea over over look at this movement right it's about it's about this beautiful arcing action and it repeats okay it repeats over and over and over right so when we think over something that's what we're doing we think about it and then we think about it again and then we think about it again we are reflecting you know we're reflecting over this idea over and over there's this idea of this kind of repetition which is very very similar to about about about means around right here's our idea and we're moving about or around they're synonyms okay so when you're thinking about something or you're thinking around something yeah it's it's this idea again of this circle okay but instead of thinking like this instead of thinking like this circle with again this circle but again it's the repetition it's the it's something physical right it's a physical metaphor and finally of think of of talks about a part of something bigger right this is made of plastic this is made of glass and and metal this is made of wool right but this does not represent all of the wall in the universe right it is wall but it's made of wool okay part of part of wool is here part of the concept of wool exists here and it's the same thing when we think of an idea we are taking this piece okay this piece of something bigger this piece of the idea right so we are creating this new thing from something bigger it's about creation transformation innovation now now I sell like a rust afar a creation you know fish and the final question I created a youtube channel all about anything under the Sun I avoid speaking in English since I'm not confident with my grandma in fact I experienced someone calling my English rubbish but from now on I'll try to create more videos with English subtitles or will actually speak English so I can further improve my skills because of this pandemic I realized that life is too short and if we want something we need to start doing it otherwise it will be too late this isn't really even a question this is a statement of intent it's somebody taking that first step towards fluency and saying I don't care what you think because I have something that I want my objective is to learn English and I'm not going to make excuses about I don't have a speaking partner I don't live in America there's no native speakers around me I don't have time okay this person has decided to put videos out there on the internet but maybe no one will watch one person to person maybe their mom or their dad or their boyfriend or whatever right who who benefits from this activity is it the world at large maybe maybe probably not the person that benefits from this activity is them the person who makes the effort to actually use their English to do stuff and that to me is an example of somebody who gets it right somebody who who knows that the key to fluency the secret to fluency is just practice you're not going to get better at speaking from reading a book about speaking you're not going to improve your listening skills by by reading your book about listening okay we have to do these things it's that simple and I know I've said it before I'm gonna die I will be saying it a thousand times more until until everybody hears me well I hope you enjoyed today's question-and-answer session this is kangaroo English I'm Christian and I'll see you in class [Music]

Channel: Canguro English

Views: 37,171

Keywords: canguro english, kangaroo english, canguru english, english prepositions, english prepositions grammar, how to use prepositions in english grammar, all prepositions in english grammar with examples, phrasal verbs, phrasal verbs in english, phrasal verbs in english grammar, phrasal verbs in english with examples, how to get fluent in english speaking, how to get fluent in english faster, tips to get fluent in english, how do i get fluent in english

Id: 88strM_oQ2w

Length: 14min 52sec (892 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 29 2020