Name: 2367 - Does English Feel Like Alphabet Soup?
Uploaded: 2025-03-05T01:04:37.000Z
Duration: 15 min 26 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

So do you tend to organize things in alphabetical order?

Do you go and organize your cereal boxes according to the alphabet?

I do not have time for alphabetical order.

I suppose maybe one day, but I'm not that particular about ordering things.

Now, if for something at work, I was filing things or really needed to be in alphabetical order, that's different, but certainly not in my personal life.

No, nothing in my life is in alphabetical order.

It is too much work, Michelle, and I don't have the time.  Yeah.

So today we are going to answer a question from a listener.

Yes, I'll go ahead and read the question.

So the listener says, what an interesting topic.

I was wondering what the difference is between alphabet and number.

Okay, so it's kind of a broad question, right?

So we're gonna answer it, and then we're gonna go into, we're gonna dive a little bit deeper, and we're gonna give you some expressions with the word alphabet and with the word number.

So that's the direction that we're gonna take this question in today.

Yeah, we get a lot of great questions on YouTube.

So guys, don't forget that our show is very much on YouTube.

So if you go over to, yeah, very much so.

If you go over to YouTube and type in All Ears English Podcast, we will come up.

You can ask your question inside the comments.

We do have a team member that goes in to get your questions, and that will end up, your question will end up in our list, all right?

All right, so Lindsay, what's the difference between alphabet and number?

Okay, so alphabet is the product of all the letters known as the ABCs, right?

And number is just one, two, three, 67, 12, 114.

So interestingly enough, this was one thing I hadn't, I guess I hadn't thought about before.

Alphabet really encompasses all of the letters, but is there a word that encompasses all of the numbers?

A word that, just the numerical system, I guess, right?

Right, exactly, but we don't really say that.

I guess it's because there are only 26 letters and there are infinite numbers.

Yeah, no, we don't have, no, we don't have any kind of word that would say.

So, but we're gonna talk about that more.

But alphabet, think ABCs, numbers, think one, two, three.

And one thing you should do right now is hit follow wherever you're listening to the All Ears English podcast so you never miss anything from us.

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Make sure you are fully following us so you get every episode, all right?

How are we going to answer this question?

Well, we are gonna get more into it because I realized there are a lot of useful expressions that go along with the words alphabet and the word number.

And so I thought this was a really good opportunity to teach some of those.

So the first one is, we already went over it.

I asked you at the top of the show, do you alphabetize?

Alphabetize, do you alphabetize your cereal boxes?

And you laughed and said, no way, who does that, right?

And here's another example, alphabetical order.

Her last name is Zane and the class had to line up in alphabetical order so she was last, okay.  Yeah, I always wondered what that was like, right?

Because I feel like in school, kids often got called on for different things according to their last name.

Yeah, it seemed to happen a lot for some reason.

And I was always in the middle and you too, I guess, right?

And so that was kind of nice because you're not caught off guard.

You're not, I don't know, volunteered for something all of a sudden that you don't know what's going on.

That's true, you're kind of cozied in to the rest of it.

You have time to figure out what's happening and how to respond, yeah.

But yeah, alphabetical order, so the order in which the alphabet goes and a lot of times that does happen in school.

So alphabet soup, it's like something that doesn't make sense.

It's too much information maybe and it just, everything is kind of all bleh, right?

What is a scenario when you might use this to say something is alphabet soup?

I would say when you're being given directions for something, maybe that just doesn't make sense or you're saying that sounds like alphabet or maybe, oh, maybe someone's trying to give you some sort of explanation as to why something happened but you're just thinking that sounds like alphabet soup.

It's kind of, it just doesn't, it doesn't add up, it doesn't work, there's too much, it's all jumbled, right?

Interesting, yeah, and so the sample sentence is just alphabet soup.

And this is a good high-level bonus word for our listeners today, nonsensical.

Nonsensical, instead of saying it doesn't make sense, you can say it's nonsensical.

Oh, no, I was just thinking, it's this idea, I think it comes from this idea of, did you ever have alphabet soup, Lindsay?

Yeah, sure, it's the can of soup that has all the ABC, all the letters of the alphabet as instead of SpaghettiOs, right?

Well, yeah, I mean, no, it's exactly what Lindsay said.

It's just you have all the letters in a soup.