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 Jasmin. Hi Jasmin!
Jasmin says, what is the difference between "must" and "have to"? I am often confused about which one to use.
All right, thanks Jasmin for this question. Yeah, let's do some review, we haven't talked about this topic in a while - "must" versus "have to." Let's start by talking about "must" and the negative form "must not." We use "must" and must not for things like official rules; so you'll see this in signs in like the airport or maybe in a police station, or perhaps in your workplace. In these very official or formal settings, "must" and must not is used to talk about rules. For example, You must show your passport at immigration. Or, "you must not wear blue jeans to work." These kinds of things express rules so "must" has this very official sound to it. We also use must for very very serious pieces of advice, for example, a doctor might tell a patient, you must stop smoking, your health is in danger, something like that expresses a very serious and a strong piece of advice, and we use "must" to do that. We can also use "must not" as well to express these kinds of serious types of advice.
Let's compare this to have to. "Have to" is a lot more flexible in terms of the situations in which we can use it. "Have to" can be used to express responsibility, something that we need to do. So yes, this is part of the confusion where it "must" and "have to" overlap; when we have to talk about something or when we want to talk about something, we have a responsibility to do, we have this choice between "must" and "have to."
For example, I might say, "I have to go to the bank today" and you might think, should I use "have to" here or "must"? Like, I must go to the bank today? So the problem here is that using "must" sounds way too formal. We talked about how "must" is used for things like official rules and strong advice, so if I say I "must" go to the bank today, it sounds a little too formal. You might hear this style of speaking in English speaking movies that are set maybe 100 or 200 years ago, but in today's English, we don't use "must" in this way, at least not in American English.
"Have to," on the other hand, sounds much more natural. We use "have to" to express our daily responsibilities - "I have to go to work today," I have to get up early tomorrow; and in the negative form "don't have to," we talk about things we do not have a responsibility to do. For example, I don't have to go to work tomorrow. I don't have to get up early in the morning. So we use "have to" for these daily responsibilities. There's another use of "have to" that parallels the "must" explanation I gave before. We also use "have to" to give advice. We use this to talk about things we recommend. For example, "you have to try this restaurant, it's so good" or "you have to see this movie, it's amazing." So when we want to express something that we really really really want the other person to do, we might use "have to" to express that advice. You "have to" try this or you "have to" see this, it sounds like something the person has a responsibility to do, you feel so strongly that you feel it's their responsibility to check this thing out, so we can use "have to" in these advice patterns as well.
So to recap, "must" is used for official rules and very strong, very serious advice; and "have to" is used to talk about our daily responsibilities and to give friendly but strong advice. So I hope that this helps answer your question. Thanks very much for sending it along.
Okay, let's move on to the next question. Next question comes from Bumsu Kim.
Hi, Bumsu Kim!
Bumsu Kim says, how can I learn to write or speak English like a poet or a storyteller?
Oh, interesting question! So how do you learn to write in a specific way? In this case, like a poet or as someone who tells stories. The first place I would start is to find writers, to find authors that you like, so try reading some poems, try reading books, try reading stories and see what kind of writing you enjoy. Maybe after a little bit of time doing some research and doing some reading, you find you have a favorite author or you find a certain writing style you really like, when you do that, think about why you like that person's writing. Do they have a specific rhythm to their words? Do they have some certain vocabulary choices that you really like? Do they have certain themes that they write about a lot that are interesting to you? So first identify or first find some people that you really like, find some authors, some storytellers, some poets, whoever that you really really enjoy and take a close look at their work. Try to understand why do I like this and then when you find that out, try writing some samples on your own. So try to use a similar style, so if you find that you like someone's vocabulary choices, they use lots of interesting vocabulary words, you can start by trying to write your own poem or your own short story with those vocabulary words in mind, or maybe you can use those vocabulary words as a theme. If you like a certain author's writing style or the rhythm of their words, you can try to write a sample that uses a similar rhythm. So there are all of these different kinds of practice exercises that you can do to try to mimic your favorite author and then, of course, when you feel comfortable, you can share it with other people and see what they think, too, maybe even share your favorite author and express, hey I tried to make it seem like this, what do you think? So there are lots of different ways to practice this, but I would say the first step would be to find someone you like and try to practice copying them or making something that seems quite similar to them, that would be a good place to start. And then you can develop your own style from there. So thanks for an interesting question, I hope that that helped you!
Okay, let's go to your next question.
Next question comes from Saraswathi.
Hi Saraswathi!
Saraswathi says, Hi, what is the difference between workout and "exercise"?
Nice question! "Workout" and exercise.
Okay, so "workout" and "exercise" have some overlap, yes absolutely, when we think about a workout as a noun, we typically think about it in terms of working our muscles so we're doing something to improve the strength of our muscles and maybe to improve our flexibility, to improve the flexibility of our body. When we talk about "exercise," we tend to think about getting the heart rate up playing sports, doing things that are very active. So we can sometimes use "workout" and exercise in a very similar way but the sentence structures that we use are a little bit different. We can use "workout" as a verb as in I try to work out three times a week, we can also use "exercise" as a verb, I try to exercise three times a week. We cannot, however, use these in the same way as nouns. For example, "I had a really hard workout this morning." This sentence is okay, we would not say "I had a really hard exercise this morning." Why is this? A workout, as a noun, refers to one session, one time in your day or one time in the week, in which you sweat and you work your muscles or you work your body really hard; we do not use exercise as a noun to mean the same thing. We don't say "an exercise," we don't do that to talk about our one daily session or our weekly sessions or whatever, so we cannot use "workout" and "exercise" in this way.
So the difference between "workout" and exercise is that "workout" can be used as a noun to talk about one session in your day or in your week but we cannot use "exercise" in this way. So keep this in mind when you are talking about your own workouts or your own exercise sessions.
So I hope that this helps answer your question. Thanks very much for sending it along.
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 time, bye!

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