Name: STOP Making 6 Common Mistakes: Advanced English Lesson
Uploaded: 2019-09-29T06:11:03.000Z
Duration: 10 min 41 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...

Hi, I'm Vanessa from SpeakEnglishWithVanessa.com.

The imperative

Have you ever watched an English TV show and realized, whoa, these guys speak way different

than any English I ever heard in my English class?

Yeah, it's pretty true that English spoken in real life is way different than textbook

But never fear, today I'm going to help you with three pairs of commonly-misused words,

and I hope if you misused these words before this lesson, I hope you won't misuse them

The first pair of commonly-misused words are either and neither.

Did you learn in your classroom English that you should use either for positive sentences?

I want either cake or ice cream for dessert.

And that you should use neither for negative sentences?

I want neither cake nor ice cream for dessert.

Well, even though these sentences are both grammatically correct, that second sentence,

oh boy, we hardly ever use that in daily spoken English.

In fact, if you said, "I want neither cake nor ice cream for dessert," people would look

at you with little slits in their eyes and say, "What?

Is he a literary professor from the 1800s?"

Well, we usually just simply use or for negative sentences.

Take a look at what happens to this sentence.

I don't want cake or ice cream for dessert.

We use the negative word not, I don't, that's a contraction using do and not, and then instead

of using the kind of archaic neither/nor comparison, we're going to instead use just or.

Or, we could say this in a shortened way.

There's a word that's actually omitted here, but it's understood.

That means that we know it's there, but we don't say it.

We don't need to say the word option because either already implies that there is at least

two things here, so you can say, "Oh, I don't want either," meaning I don't want care or

Now that you know we shouldn't say neither nor, is there ever a correct and natural way

The most common situation to use neither is if I said, "I don't like politics," and you

You're agreeing with my negative statement.

I could say, "I don't like politics," and you could say, "Me either."

You could use this positive word to agree with my negative sentence.

So which one of these is actually correct?

Well, we have a negative sentence, "I don't like politics," so we need that negative word

Technically this is correct, and you should probably use this in maybe business situations

or those kind of formal situations, but in daily spoken English, you are definitely going

This is grammatically incorrect, but native speakers use this a lot.

And I don't know exactly why, but I kind of feel like it's because we feel a little strange

using the word neither because we don't use it that often, and we use the word either

So maybe people just feel a little more comfortable saying, "Oh yeah, me either.

But technically, it should be me neither.

So in this situation, you've got two options, but technically me neither is a little better.

The second pair of commonly-misused words in English is actually and now.

If you speak a Romance language, listen carefully.

I'm going to give you a sentence, and I'm going to give you two options, so you can

I can't believe that I actually fell asleep on the plane.

Does this mean, number one, now I fell asleep?

Well, don't listen to your heart when you're trying to guess which one's correct.

If you speak French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, a Romance language, you probably

have a word in your language that looks like the word actually, like the word “actuellement”

I don't know how to say it in Portuguese.

But there's a word that looks almost exactly like the word actually and it means no in

But, in English, don't listen to your heart.

So we are comparing something to reality.

The food looked strange, but actually, it tasted good.

Here we have a comparison between the way the food looked, which was strange, and the

So we have reality, the taste, and the way it looked, maybe the way I perceived it in

The other day I was going to go to a museum, and I said, "Oh, we can't go to the museum

because I saw that it's closed on Mondays."

And my friend said, "Actually, in the summer it's open on Mondays."

So she was comparing my reality to her reality, that well, in reality, it's open on Mondays

Or, you might say, "She's actually dating someone?

This is a shocking reality, like in our first sentence.

You could say, "She's actually dating someone?"