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 Marvin James Mamorno.
Hi, Marvin!
Marvin says…
Hello, I am from the Philippines. My question is with regard to the use of “an” and “a.” In a sentence, regularly, we use “an” or “a” depending on the next vowel used. For example, “an apple,” “a basketball game.” But how about, for example, “hour” which has a vowel sound when you speak it, but spelled with a consonant?
Yeah, great question! So, the question here is about using “an” and “a” when you have words that are spelled with consonant sounds, but that are pronounced with vowels. Great point!
So, to refresh everyone’s memory, we use “an” before vowel sounds and “a” before consonant sounds. This is the rule and the key in this rule is that sound is what’s really important.
So, in your example, you mentioned, for example, a basketball game. So, “a” basketball game. We have that /B/ sound that’s a consonant sound.
In your other example, “hour,” yes. It does start with an H on paper, which is a consonant. However, when we speak the sound, we say /au/, right? This is a vowel sound and this is what really matters.
This doesn’t mean that every word that starts with H needs to take the “an” article. We need to think about how the word is pronounced. For example, if we take the word “history” which begins with an H, we actually have to use “a” before it, not “an,” because the H in history is pronounced as a consonant. This is not true in your example of “hour.”
So, yes, as you’ve suggested, we do need to use that “an” article before words that have a vowel sound. So, when you’re writing something and you’re not sure whether you should use “a” or “an,” before the word, you need to take a second and try pronouncing that word. Does it begin with a vowel sound or does it begin with a consonant sound. If it starts with a consonant sound, use “a.” If it starts with a vowel sound, use “an.” So, “hour” is a perfect example of this. Keep an eye out for this when you’re writing. I hope that this answers your question. Thanks very much!
Okay, let’s move on to your next question.
Next question comes from Wenceslas.
Hi, Wenceslas!
Wenceslas says…
Hi, Alisha! I'm Wenceslas from Benin in west Africa. Benin is a French-speaking country, but I work in English on an American program with American colleagues. We often use the words: “checking” and “check in” and sometimes “checking in.” I'm confused. I know in one of your last lessons, you explained the meaning of “check in,” but could you talk a little more about the difference between them.
Sure, okay. So, our focus words here are “checking,” “check in,” and “checking in.” Yeah, we can use these three in very similar ways.
For example, you might hear somebody say:
“I’m just checking.”
Or “I’m just checking (on this thing)” which means I am currently in the process of confirming something. So, we can use “checking” and confirming in work and in study situations to mean kind of the same thing. I want to confirm something or I want to check the status of something. I want to learn any updates about something. So, we can use “checking” to do that.
So, you might get a message from someone that says “Just checking (this thing)” or “Just checking (on this thing)” which means I would like to get an update about this thing.
You also mentioned “check in.”
To “check in” also means to get an update. You can think of this as a set phrase, a phrasal verb. To “check in” means, in this case, to get an update about something.
So, “I want to check in about (this topic).”
“I want to check in with you.”
So, we typically follow “check in” with “with” to mean a person.
“I want to check in with you.”
“I want to check in with him.”
“I want to check in with the project manager.”
Or we use “check in” with “about.”
For example:
“I want to check in about the project status.”
Or “I want to check in about (this or that).”
So, we typically follow “check in” with one of those two words, “about” or “with.”
Finally, the last one that you asked about was “checking in.”
You might see this used just as a short phrase and a message somewhere like, “Hey, (your name), checking in!” which means I just want to say hi or I just want to send the message to remind you that I exist. That’s kind of the feel of “checking in.”
So, it sounds like maybe you haven’t heard from someone for a while and you want to see how they are or how they’re doing. You want a status update. Maybe you haven’t heard from that person for a while and you’d like a status update or you’d like to get some information about what they’re doing or what they’re working on.
You might get a message that says:
“Hey, (so and so), just checking in! I want to see what you’re up to these days” or “How is the project?”
So, we use “checking in” to do that.
So, “checking,” “check in,” and “checking in” all refer to this idea of getting an update about something or getting an update from someone.
Yes, of course, there are other uses of “checking” and “check in” too.
We can also use “check” as a verb to refer to confirming that something is correct.
For example:
“Can you check this paperwork?”
Or “I need to check this paperwork.”
Or “I have my paperwork checked and it seems it was okay.”
So, this has kind of that feeling of confirming something, like confirming that everything is correct. So, we also have this use of “check” which means making sure things are correct. It depends on the context, so you need to take a look at the kind of messages you’re getting from your co-workers or from other people in your life to determine whether they want an update from you or whether they’re talking about making sure that something is correct.
Aside from these topics, of course, “check in” can also be used to refer to, for example, arriving at a hotel or arriving at an airport to confirm your registration or to confirm your reservation there.
For example:
“Let’s check in at the airport two hours before the flight.”
Or “I checked in at my hotel this morning.”
So, these words do have lots of different uses, as you can see, but depending on the context, you can quickly understand which one, hopefully, your co-workers or the other people in your life are talking about. So, I hope that this helps clarify some of the differences between “check,” “check in,” and so on.
I’ll talk about one more use of “check” that might be kind of surprising.
We use “check” as a noun. It means a form of payment where someone can write an amount on a piece of paper and give it to another person as payment for something or as a gift as well. This is called a “check.” So this is a noun. We don’t say, “I’m checking you” or something like that. We can use this as a noun only. As a verb phrase, we say, “I’m going to write a check” for something.
So, this is perhaps a very American form of payment, something that’s used in the US to pay for things, like to pay for a rent, perhaps, or to provide someone with a lot of money, if they need to make a big purchase. So, this is another type of check that is used in American English and this might not be available in your country or it might not be something that’s used a lot in your country, but this is a very common type of payment in the USA. So, you might not run into this word so much, but in case you do, that’s what it means.
So, I hope that this answer covers a lot of different uses of “check” in verb and noun forms. Thanks very much for sending along an interesting question and good luck with your work.
Okay, let’s go on to your next question.
Next question comes from Margineanu.
Hello, Margineanu. I hope I said your name right.
Margineanu says…
Hi, Alisha! When do we use "no" and when do we use "not." I’m very confused.
Okay. Well, let’s just break this down into very, very simple sentence structures. Of course, we can use “no” to reject something, to say I don’t want that or I don’t like that, right? We cannot use “not” in this way. We have to use “no” to reject something or say we do not want something.
But when we make larger sentences like, for example, with an adjective or with nouns and so on, you need to think about the differences between these two words.
Let’s start with “not.”
We use “not” with adjectives.
For example, we can make a sentence like:
“I am happy,” right?
Or, “I am sad.”
To make this sentence negative, we use “not” before the adjective.
For example:
“I am not happy.”
Or “I am not sad.”
We cannot use “no” in this way. That would become “I am no happy” or “I am no said.” This is completely incorrect. We cannot use “no” in this way.
So, we use “not” before adjectives to make them negative.
We also use “not” with verbs.
For example:
“He eats dinner every day.” Okay, great!
But if we want to make that a negative sentence, we would say:
“He does not eat dinner every day.”
We use “not” along with verbs to make the verb negative. We cannot use “no” in this way.
For example, “He does no eat dinner” is incorrect.
So, we use “not” with adjectives and with verbs to make them negative.
When we use “no,” we use it typically with nouns, when we want to talk about how much of something we have. We use this when we want to talk about having zero of something.
For example, if I want to express that I have cookies in my house, I would say:
“I have cookies in my house,” right?
But, if I wanted to express zero cookies in my house, I would say:
“I have no cookies in my house.”
So, “no” comes before the noun, “cookies” in this case, to express that I have zero of something. I could not say “I have not cookies in my house.” This is grammatically incorrect.
Another example of this might be:
“I have time…”
Like “I have time for my projects.”
Or “I have time for my hobbies.”
If I want to express I have zero time, I would use “no” before “time.”
“I have no time.”
“I have no time for my projects.”
Or “I have no time for my hobbies.”
This expresses I have zero time.
I cannot use “not” in this position. “I have not time” is grammatically incorrect.
So, to recap really quickly, we use “not” to make verbs negative and to make adjectives negative. And we use “no” to reject things or say that we do not want them. And we also use “no” before nouns to express zero of something. So, I hope that this quick guide helps you understand the basics of the differences between “no” and “not.” 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 soon. Bye!

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