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 Marilia.
Hi Marilia, I hope I said your name correctly.
Marilia says, hi Alisha, what's the difference between to bring and to take? In this sentence, which one is right? When you come to my place, bring or take your book with you.
Thanks a lot.
Nice question.
Bring and take in this kind of situation are of course very similar, but the feeling is that when you bring something, it sounds like you pick up something or you hold something from outside the location you are going to visit and you continue to hold that thing until you get there.
Take, on the other hand, sounds like the opposite.
You take something, pick something up and hold it in a location and remove it from that location to go somewhere else.
In this sentence, your example was when you come to my place, bring your book with you.
In that sentence, it sounds most natural to say bring your book with you.
When you come to my place, bring your book with you.
On the other hand, we would use take if we want to talk about the opposite situation.
When you leave my place, make sure to take your book with you.
That sounds most natural.
I do want to mention, of course, this is not a 100% perfect rule.
There are some situations in which we might use bring or take and these are generally when we're talking about something outside our home.
We're thinking about something from our home at the moment and we're thinking about going someplace.
In those situations, when we are thinking about our destination, we could use bring or take.
For example, I need to bring lunch to school today or I need to take lunch to school today.
We might use either one of those when we're talking about going to a destination.
On the other hand, when you are talking about someone else coming to you, coming to your destination as in your example sentence, it sounds more natural to say bring your book to my place or bring a lunch to my place.
We wouldn't say take because it sounds like that thing is starting where the speaker is and then going somewhere else.
This is kind of the feel with bring and take.
Bring sounds like something coming from outside to a destination and take tends to sound more like something from inside going outside.
For that reason, when you're talking about in my earlier example, bringing a lunch to school or taking a lunch to school, both of them sound pretty natural there.
But when you're talking about inviting someone else into your space, it sounds more natural to say bring blah, blah, blah to my place.
I hope that this helps break down the differences between bring and take in this situation.
I hope that this helps you understand the differences between bring and take.
As I hope you can see, it depends a lot on the place where the speaker begins or the speaker's location.
So thanks so much for sending this question along.
Okay, let's move on to our next question.
Next question comes from Cyril.
Hi Cyril.
Cyril says, hi Alisha.
Can you explain to me the difference between these two sentences? I meant to do that and I wanted to do that.
Do the two sentences mean the same thing? Thanks Alisha.
Okay, great question.
I meant to do that and I wanted to do that.
Great question.
They are a little bit different.
So to mean means to plan to do something.
If you say I meant to do that, it means I planned to do that.
So if you think about this as I plan to do that, maybe you can see the difference between I wanted to do that.
So when we say I wanted to do that, it doesn't always mean I planned.
Like maybe a movie, like oh, I wanted to see that movie.
We maybe didn't create a plan to see the movie.
If we say however, I meant to see that movie.
It sounds like you made a plan maybe in your mind.
You thought, oh Friday at six o'clock, I'm going to go and you didn't.
You forgot or you got busy or something like that.
Meant sounds more like there was an intention.
Sounds more like there was a plan in your mind or maybe you had some idea about that thing and it just didn't happen in some cases.
Wanted to do that sounds like there was no plan, just a desire to do something.
So I also want to talk about an interesting way that we use I meant to do that where we kind of try to cover up mistakes.
So for example, let's say you are playing some kind of sport like skateboarding or skiing or snowboarding or something.
And let's say you try to do a trick but you fall.
And so what sometimes people will do is after they fall, they'll say something like this as a joke.
They'll say, I meant to do that.
Which makes it sound like I planned to fall down.
This is a very, very joking way to say this was all part of my plan to make it seem cool and to make it funny.
Of course, we don't usually mean to fall down, right? But sometimes we like to use I meant to do that as a way to cover up a mistake.
Like this was planned.
This was my idea all along.
Yeah, this was my idea.
I meant to do that.
Sometimes people use it in this way.
We generally don't use I wanted to do that.
Maybe some people will use I wanted to do that.
Oh yeah, that's what I wanted to do.
People might use it in this way.
But we tend to use I meant to do that a bit more to cover up our mistakes in this way.
So this is the difference between I meant to do that and I wanted to do that.
Meant to sounds like there's some intention, some kind of plan behind that idea.
Even if it didn't happen, they just want to express some intention.
With wanted to do that, it just sounds like a desire but probably no plan there.
So that's the difference between these two sentences.
I hope this answers your question.
Thanks for sending it along.
Okay, let's move on to your next question.
Next question comes from Jovi Chavez.
Hi, Jovi.
I hope I said your name right.
Jovi says, Hello, Alicia.
What tense should I use to describe what happened in a dream? Great question.
Oh, that's such an interesting question.
So dreams, yeah.
When we go to sleep at night and we see those images in our head, how do we talk about them? So we usually use past tense to do this.
We'll say usually at the beginning, I had a dream about you last night.
Or I had a dream about this last night.
Or I saw this in a dream last night.
So those are some ways that we usually introduce like the beginning of the conversation or start the story.
We usually use past tense.
You know, I went to the supermarket with my mom or whatever.
I saw my favorite actor sitting in a diner, whatever it is.
We usually use simple past tense to talk about those dream situations because they're finished, they're done, they're over.
I suppose there are some people who might use like a present progressive or a similar grammar pattern if they want to talk about like an action scene that happened in their dream.
Like you might hear someone say like, Oh, I was fighting Ashton Kutcher at a gas station in my dream last night.
You might hear something like that with I was fighting in a gas station, right? So if you have some kind of like action scene, something like that, you might hear people using those kind of progressive forms as well.
But generally when we talk about our dreams, we just use simple past tense to do that.
So go crazy.
I know that everybody likes to share an interesting dream from time to time.
So usually we do that with simple past tense.
Thanks very much for this interesting question.
Okay, 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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