| Hi, everybody! Welcome back to Ask Alisha, 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 Manjeera. |
| Hi, Manjeera! |
| Manjeera says... |
| “Hi Alisha, your lessons are very useful. I have a question about ever and never. I’m a bit confused about using them. For example, I never seen &I ever seen. I’m unable to understand properly.” |
| Okay, yeah, let’s review this point. |
| So, first of all, “never” means “not ever”. |
| You can think of it as like the negative of “ever”. So, we cannot use “ever” alone to talk about life experience. We can, however, use “never” alone to talk about life experience. For example, if you want to talk about the Mona Lisa, you could say, “I have never seen the Mona Lisa”. You cannot say, however, “I have ever seen the Mona Lisa.” We cannot do that. We can say, “ I have seen the Mona Lisa.” |
| So, please keep in mind when we use “never” and “ever”, we typically put it together with present perfect expression. So, “ I have never” for example, “I have never seen the Mona Lisa” or “ I have seen the Mona Lisa.” So, we cannot use “ever” alone. In cases where we use “ever + the verb”, we use it in questions and we use it full sentence responses to things. |
| For example: |
| “Have you ever seen the Mona Lisa?” |
| Or |
| “The Mona Lisa is the most famous painting I have ever seen.” |
| In situations like these, we can use “have ever” followed by the verb, but we cannot use ever like, “I have ever seen”, we cannot use that to express life experience, life experience that we have. We can use, “I have never seen” though. So I hope that this helps you. |
| This is a very, very quick introduction to these points. I would recommend, if you want to review this, please take a look at this video on the channel. I made a lesson about using “never” and “ever” and I hope that it can answer your question, so please have a look at that. |
| Thanks very much for this question. All right, let’s move on to your next question. |
| Next question comes from Hiro. |
| Hi, Hiro! |
| Hiro says… |
| “Hi, Alisha! I take many pictures, especially portrait and nature pictures, so I have a question. What’s the difference between photograph and photography? How should I use these words?” |
| Great question! Yeah. Photograph, first of all, photograph is a countable noun, so we can count photographs, images, pictures. We can say one say photograph, two photographs, three photographs. A photograph is the individual image. |
| Photography then, refers to the entire activity, the process of taking pictures, editing pictures, all of those things together as a hobby or as an activity. That is called photography. So you can say, “I’m interested in photography” and “I take lots of photographs.” So, keep in mind, photography is the activity, photograph is the result here. |
| So, one point that I want to make though is that we don’t really use the word photograph so much in everyday conversation, unless we’re talking to somebody who shares our hobby or they’re also in that field. Typically instead, we say “picture” instead of “photograph”. So instead of “I like taking photographs”, you could say, “I like taking pictures.” |
| I would not use “image” so much. “Image” is a much more general word. We use “image” to talk about, like things that you see on the internet, you know, so it can be a picture, but maybe it’s a painting, so, “An image of a painting.” “Image” is a more general word. |
| “Photograph” refers specifically to something that’s captured by a camera, but we use “picture” as well to talk about that, more commonly, in everyday conversation. |
| So in sum, “photography: activity”, “photograph: one picture”. I hope that this helps you. Thanks very much for the question. Okay, let’s move on to your next question. |
| Next question comes from Uvani Amanda. |
| Hi, Uvani! |
| Uvani says… |
| “Hi, Alisha! If you can, would you please explain to me how we can use take out, take off, take over, and overtake, with examples?” |
| Sure. Okay, let’s begin with “take out.” |
| “To take out”, “to take (something) out” means to remove something from an indoor location and take it to an outdoor location. So, a very common use of this is, “take out the garbage.” “Please take out the garbage.” So to take something out of one location and put it outside that location, to take something out.” You might also hear, “take out” used to mean like “to kill someone” or like, “to injure someone” especially in like action movies or maybe in like sports, like, “Oh no, that soccer player took out our goalie.” So that means, that soccer player injured our goalie, so the person in charge of keeping the goal. Or, “We need to take out this person” in an action movie might mean, we need to kill this person or we need to remove this person from the situation. So that’s probably a less common one. In everyday, everyday English, we use “take out” to mean remove from a building, usually. |
| Your next one was “take off”. |
| “To take off” has a couple of different meanings as well. |
| “To take off” can mean remove like with clothing, like, “I need to take off my sweater” or “Please take off your shoes before you come in the house.” So to take off means to remove something as with clothing or maybe it’s just covering something else, like “Take the blanket off the computer.” So it means to remove something, usually, clothes or other covering. |
| “Take off” can also be used to talk about aircraft. So when a plane goes from land to flying, this process is called take off as a noun. But when you want to describe it using a verb, we can say, “The plane is going to take off.” “To take off” means to leave the ground as with a plane. |
| So, “take off” has these two meanings. |
| So, the next item on your list was “take over”. |
| “To take over” means to gain control of something. So, you might hear this in stories, you might also hear this in business, like “Company A took over company B” in past tense. That means company A gained control of company B, to take over something. Or maybe, “My work is taking over my life” means my work is gaining control of my life. So “to take over” means to gain control. |
| Finally, the expression “overtake”. |
| So, “overtake” means to pass someone or something else, especially in, like a competition or in a race. So, for example, “I was overtaken in the race by another runner.” So that means somebody else passed me in a race, so that was a passive form. Or you could use something like, “We need to overtake the competition next year.” So that means, we need to pass the competition in a year ahead. So, to overtake is not quite a phrasal verb. To overtake is one word on its own, but it does use take in there, yes. |
| So, I hope that this helps you. Thanks very much for the question. |
| All right. That is everything that I have for this week. Thank you, as always, for sending your great questions. Thanks very much for watching this week’s episode of Ask Alisha and I will see you again, next week. Bye-bye! |
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