Lesson Transcript

Hi, everybody! Welcome back to Ask Alisha, the weekly series where you ask me questions and I answer them, maybe!
Let’s get to your first question this week.
First question this week comes from Maxime.
Hi, Maxime!
Maxime says...
Hi, Alisha! “I'm freezing” or “I'm frozen,” which one should I use? Thank you.
Good question! “I’m freezing” or “I’m frozen,” you can use these expressions to talk about feeling very cold. So, when you want to express that you feel cold now, typically, we use “I’m freezing.” So, you’re in a very cold room or you’re in a very cold place, you would typically say “I’m freezing.”
We typically use “I’m freezing” to talk about feeling very, very cold. I suppose some people might say “I’m frozen” as well, but in my experience, generally, we say “I’m freezing” to refer to our current physical state.
Please keep in my mind, you might also hear these words used to talk about computers. You might hear somebody saying, “My computer is frozen” or “My computer keeps freezing.” So, in this situation, “frozen” refers to a computer that is not moving. So, a frozen computer is a computer that you cannot use. You can’t move the mouse, you can’t type anything, nothing seems to work. You have to turn off the computer and turn it back on again in order to use it. So we use the word “frozen” to describe this.
And earlier, I used the expression, “My computer keeps freezing,” so that refers to a computer that continues to freeze, it continues to stop working. You might hear “freezing” used in this way.
“My computer keeps freezing!”
Or “My computer is frozen.”
So, you might also hear these expressions used to talk about computers and other kinds of machines that seemed to stop working for no reason. So, please keep in mind, these are quite different. So we use these words to talk about our physical sensation (feeling cold) or to talk about computers and other electronics no longer working. So, I hope that this answers your question. Thanks very much!
Okay, let’s move to your next question.
Next question comes from Hasan.
Hi, Hasan!
Hasan says...
What is the difference between “reach” and “arrive”?
Okay, great question! Yeah, “reach” versus “arrive.”
Let’s talk about “reach” first and two primary uses of the verb “to reach.”
So we can use “reach” to mean roughly the same thing as “arrive” to mean coming to a destination.
For example:
“I reached the airport on time.”
Or “I reached my friend’s house with no trouble.”
So this means I made it to my destination. This is how we can use “reach.”
We can also, of course, use “reach” to refer to stretching to get something.
Like:
“Can you reach that cup up there? I’m too short.”
Or “Can you please reach across the table to get the salt for me?”
So that refers to stretching to get something, to retrieve something.
So, “reach” can be used in sentence structures like the ones I mentioned earlier, “I’ve reached the airport on time” or “I reached my friend’s house.”
We can use “arrive” in the same sense as the first type of “reach” that I explained, to refer to making it to your destination.
So, you can say, for example:
“I arrived at the airport on time.”
Or “I arrived at my friend’s house with no trouble.”
So, again, this means you made it to your destination.
In terms of a difference in nuance, like a small difference in meaning between the words, “reach” can sometimes have the feel of doing something that was challenging, like you reached a challenging destination sounds kind of like you overcame some difficulties to get to that point. Or maybe there was something that was hard about it, but eventually, you were able to do it. Some people might use “reach” to describe that kind of feeling.
“Arrive” doesn’t have that idea associated with it. It just sounds like a simple statement of fact, really. “I arrived at the airport.” If you say, like, “I finally reached the airport!” it sounds like you might have overcome some kind of difficulties, like traffic or maybe some other problem in order to get there.
So, this is the difference between “reach” and “arrive” when we talk about going to a destination. And, of course, you can also use “reach,” as I described, to talk about stretching to get something. I hope that this helps answer your question. Thanks very much!
Okay, let’s go to your next question.
Next question comes from Ibrahem.
Hello, Ibrahem.
Ibrahem says...
Hi, Alisha!
My question is about the verb “rent” and the word “renter.” Does the verb “rent” mean to give one’s own house or car in exchange for money or to take somebody else’s house or car for a specific time in exchange for money?
Nice question! Actually, the answer is both. You can use the verb “rent” to talk about giving your house or your car or something to someone, and you could also use rent to talk about taking something from someone else in exchange for money.
So, I could say, for example:
“I rented my car to my neighborhood community service group for the weekend” or something like that.
So that would mean I provided my car to them in exchange for money or services or something like that.
You could also say:
“The neighborhood community service group rented my car from me.”
So that means they gave me money in exchange for my car. So, “rent” can be used in both ways, on both sides of this transaction. The key here is looking at the prepositions “from” and “to.” Those are what’s gonna tell you who is exchanging what.
So, in my earlier example, I said, “I rented my car (to) the neighborhood group.” So that shows I am the one giving the thing. In my second example sentence, I said, “The neighborhood group rented my car (from) me.”
However, there may be some cases where you don’t have a preposition in a sentence. For example, when you’re talking about accommodations.
Let’s look at this example:
“My parents are renting their house for the summer.”
Or “Someone rented my parent’s house for the summer.”
So, in these cases, we have to pay attention to the context. In the first example sentence, “My parents are renting their house for the summer,” the key here is that “their” - “My parents are renting (their) house for the summer.” So it sounds like a house that they own is up for rent, for someone to purchase or to use for the summer, to purchase some kind of rental agreement for the summer.
In the second sentence, “Someone is renting my parent’s house for the summer.” Again, the key there is the possessive, “my parent’s house.” So, these kinds of small details tell us about the nature of the exchange, who was receiving what here. We need to pay attention to these sorts of things. So yes, “rent” can be used for both sides of the transaction.
As far as the word “renter” goes, though, we don’t use this so much. Rather, we have some specific words that we typically use in rental situations. When we’re talking about accommodations, we typically use the word “tenant” to refer to a person who is renting a house or an apartment, like “She is the tenant in the place my parents own” or “I’m a tenant in my apartment building.” That means I’m the person who is renting something. We probably wouldn’t use the word “renter” in cases like these. We would typically use “tenant.”
Outside of the accommodation situation, if you’re talking about renting equipment or maybe renting media or something like that, we typically don’t really use the word “renter” to talk about this. Instead, we just use the word “customer,” so like, “I rented this to my customer” or “This product was rented to the customer” or given to the customer.
In these situations, we don’t really use the word “renter” much because they’re typically kinds of transactions, so we use the word “customer” in these cases. So, I hope that this helps you understand how to use “rent” as a verb and how to talk about the rental agreements that we make. Thanks very much for an interesting question.
All right! That is everything that I have for this week, so 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 soon. Bye!

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