| 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 Muhammed Najimi. |
| Hi, Muhammed! |
| Muhammed says… |
| Oh, this is Najimi from India. |
| Hi, Najimi! |
| Najimi says… |
| Could you please explain the difference between “perhaps” and “probably.” |
| Sure! Okay, “perhaps” vs “probably.” |
| Let’s start by talking about “probably.” |
| We use “probably” before actions and conditions that we think have a pretty high chance of happening. We use this in positive sentences to express a high chance of something, and we can also use it in negative sentences to express a fairly low chance of something. |
| For example: |
| “For lunch today, I’ll probably have a salad.” |
| This expresses the speaker thinks there’s a high chance of having a salad for lunch. |
| On the other hand, if someone were to say: |
| “For lunch today, I think I probably won’t have something healthy.” |
| That expresses there’s a very low chance of something, so we express that with “I probably won’t” or “I probably will not” to use the non-reduced form. |
| So, we use “probably” to express these levels of certainty. So, this expresses a higher or lower level of certainty than a word like “may” or “might,” for example. Typically, we use “probably” with will patterns, as I used in these examples. I said, “I’ll probably have a salad for lunch” or “I probably won’t do something healthy for my lunch.” |
| So, we tend to use “probably” with “will” because “will” is a future tense form that we use when we’re kind of making guesses or we’re not quite sure about something. |
| “Probably” is also used to talk about something we’re not 100% sure about, right? We use “probably” to express that there’s a pretty good chance of something, but it’s not 100%. So you can think of probably as making your “will” or “won’t” statement a little bit stronger. |
| So, for example, we could compare these two sentences: |
| “I think I’ll have a salad for lunch today” versus “I think I’ll probably have a salad for lunch today.” |
| They’re both correct, but “probably” makes it sound like there’s a little bit of a higher chance than the sentence without “probably.” |
| So, to recap, we use “probably” with these kinds of future-tense statements to express a higher or a lower level of certainty. |
| Let’s compare this to “perhaps.” |
| So, we can use “perhaps” in similar situations to “probably,” but the sentence structure changes and the level of formality of the sentence also changes. |
| For example, if I wanted to use “perhaps” in a sentence expressing my thoughts about my lunch, I can do that, but it would sound like this: |
| “Perhaps, I’ll have a salad for lunch today.” |
| So, I used the same “I will” grammar point to express something I’m not sure about, but “perhaps” comes at the beginning of the sentence, and it makes the sentence sound a lot more formal. |
| “Perhaps” also doesn’t have, really, the same level of certainty as “probably” does. “Perhaps” is kind of like wondering out loud, like, “Hmm, perhaps I’ll have a salad for lunch today” or “Hmm, perhaps my co-worker is free and she can join me for lunch.” So, we’re kind of wondering out loud with “perhaps.” We’re not really expressing our level of certainty, we’re just kind of thinking about something. So, we don’t use this in the same position as “probably.” “Probably” is used to indicate a level of certainty. “Perhaps” is kind of like a formal way of saying maybe and it typically comes at the beginning of the sentence. So, I hope that this helps you understand the differences between “perhaps” and “probably.” Thanks very much for the question. |
| Okay, let’s move on to your next question. |
| Next question comes from Samuel Mendoza. |
| Hi, Samuel. |
| Samuel says… |
| What’s the difference between “about” and “regarding.” |
| Okay. So, “about” versus “regarding.” |
| “About” has a lot of different uses, so I want to focus on the use that “about” and “regarding” share, which is when you want to talk about a topic and things related to that topic. So, for example, we can use “about” when we want to introduce a topic for discussion. |
| Like, “Let’s talk about the project,” right? |
| We can start a discussion with something like that. |
| When we want to use “regarding,” however, we tend to use it in slightly different sentence patterns. So, we introduce the topic with “regarding” at the beginning of the sentence as in regarding this project or regarding this situation and then we give the details. We want to talk about that thing. So, it’s kind of like the introduction, our topic introduction, but the structures that we follow are different. |
| So, again, when we use “about” to start off a topic discussion, we might say something like “I’d like to talk about the project.” When we use “regarding,” we might follow a sentence structure like “regarding the project…” So it’s kind of like we’re introducing the ideas, but we do this in different ways. |
| Generally speaking, “regarding” sounds a lot more formal and a lot more polite, and it’s more appropriate in business context than about. So, you can also use “regarding” in the middle of sentences, much like you can with “about.” |
| For example, if you want to talk to a co-worker about a specific topic, you might write in an email: |
| “I’d like to speak to you about our project progress.” |
| You can also use “regarding” in this way. |
| “I’d like to speak to you regarding the project progress.” |
| In this case, both are appropriate because it’s a work situation, but “regarding” is going to sound more formal. |
| So you can use these two words interchangeably when you’re using them in a sentence like this. But when you’re using these words to introduce a topic like at the beginning of a meeting or at the beginning of a presentation, please keep in mind that there are two different sentence structures we typically follow - “I’d like to talk about (something)” and “Regarding (something)...” |
| So, I hope that this helps you understand the differences, some of the differences between “about” and “regarding.” Of course, there are many different uses of “about,” but today, I want to focus on this one that both “about” and “regarding” share. So, thanks very much for the question. Let’s move on to your next question. |
| Next question comes from Hasan. |
| Hi, Hasan. |
| Hasan says… |
| Hi, Alisha! What is the difference between “past perfect simple” and “past perfect continuous”? |
| Good question, okay! “Past perfect simple” versus “past perfect continuous.” |
| So, for example “I had eaten” versus “I had been eating.” What is the difference there? Yeah, it’s a good question. |
| So, we use these “past perfect” structures to talk about actions that happened in the past before some other past action. So, that’s the key point here that I hope people take away from this. We use “past perfect” structures that include past perfect continuous to talk about something that happened before another past action. |
| So, for example, one action happened here like yesterday and we want to describe another action that happened before that action. We use past perfect or past perfect continuous to do that. |
| Why do we choose between past perfect and past perfect continuous? |
| A continuous action, in this situation, represents an action that was continuing and was stopped by some other past action. Past perfect, not continuous, simply expresses that some action or condition happened before that action, so that’s the difference. |
| First, let’s look at an example sentence that uses a simple past tense verb and a past perfect verb. |
| For example: |
| “By the time I graduated college, I had already gotten three job offers.” |
| So, there are two actions here, “graduating college,” I said “by the time I graduated college,” so that’s my simple past action, that’s one action, the action that happened nearest to the present, “I had already gotten” or “I had already received three job offers.” So, we use past perfect to express one action or one condition, happened before or prior to this other past action, which is closer to the present. So, we used these two grammar points together to express the sequence of events. |
| Then, let’s compare this to a sentence that uses past perfect continuous in a similar manner. |
| “By the time I graduated from college, I had been studying my research topic for twelve years.” |
| So, in this sentence, we’re talking about the same point in time, right, graduating from college, but in this case, we’re talking about an action that was continuing. So we use past perfect to show that that action was continuing before some other past action. So, “by the time I graduated from college,” so this is my past action, simple past tense, “I had been studying.” So that shows that this thing was continuing in the past. |
| So, when we want to express or we want to emphasize that an action was continuing in the past, we use past perfect continuous. And keep in mind that that past perfect grammar structure is used to help us show the sequence of past tense events. So, I hope that this helps answer your question. Thanks very much and good luck using this grammar point. |
| 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 soon. Bye! |
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