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 Yuri. Hi, Yuri.
Yuri asked, hi, please tell me what's the difference between to bring and to fetch? Thanks in advance.
Cool. Okay. So bring and fetch. The basic answer when we're talking about carrying something to someone else is that bring is the word
we use much more commonly in today's American English and fetch tends to sound much more old fashioned.
They are both 100 percent correct and they have the meaning of carry something to another person.
Like we could say, for example, hey, can you bring me my coffee or why don't you bring your computer over and we'll study together?
So we can use these two words in the same way in the sense that they both mean to carry something to someone else,
like after they ask for it. That's the idea here. So we could say, for example, hey, will you bring me my coffee or can you please fetch me my coffee?
It's like we're requesting that someone do something, requesting that someone carry something to us.
So both of those example sentences are 100 percent correct. But fetch sounds a lot more old fashioned.
We probably would not use fetch in American English in this situation. We probably would not use fetch in today's English.
Instead, we would definitely use bring. We would say, hey, can you bring me my coffee?
So again, we use these two verbs when we're asking someone to carry something to us.
So like when we're making a request for something, we can't use fetch when we're just talking about carrying something to a location.
Like if I said, for example, hey, why don't you bring your computer over and we'll study together?
We wouldn't use fetch in that situation because the idea with fetch is that you're asking someone to do that thing for you.
You're asking someone to carry that thing to you. It's like kind of a goal. There's sort of a purpose behind it.
With the second example sentence, hey, bring your computer over, it sounds like it's not for me.
It's not like something I'm asking you to do for me. It's a suggestion for you to carry your computer somewhere.
So that's another kind of nuance of fetch is that there's a goal or I'm asking you to do that thing for me.
So this is the difference between to bring and to fetch in the sense of doing something like carrying something for someone.
There is a second more common use of fetch that we do see in today's American English.
And that is when we are playing usually with dogs. So a very, very popular game to play with a dog is a game that is called fetch.
So as you can probably guess, it means the dog goes to get something and brings it back to you.
So in this situation, we might use the verb to fetch to talk about playing the game with a dog.
So we might say the dog fetched the ball, which means the dog ran out, got the ball and brought it back to me.
So in this situation, we would use the verb fetch probably a lot more than the verb bring.
We could say the dog brought the ball back to me if we wanted to, but we might hear fetch used more commonly because the name of the game is fetch.
We might also use it in the sense that we talk about the game as in I'm going to go play fetch with my dog or I love playing fetch with my dog.
So we only use this when we're talking about animals. And we usually play this game with dogs because dogs typically do this kind of thing.
We don't talk about doing this sort of thing when we play with kids, like when we play the game of catch, we use catch instead.
We don't say fetch. Fetch tends to have this feeling of like something lower than you giving you something that you asked for.
So again, we use fetch when we're asking someone to carry something to us.
And as a result, that might have kind of the feeling of asking someone lower than us or lower in status, like maybe an employee or maybe a staff person or something like that.
It might sound like the other person is maybe a little bit below us if we use fetch.
So that's the reason that it sounds kind of more natural to use it when we're talking about playing with a dog.
So again, we can use fetch to talk about the game that we play with our dog and we can use it to talk about asking someone to carry us something.
But in today's modern English, we tend to use bring a lot more. Bring me that thing, you should bring that, why don't you bring this and so on.
So if you don't want to have that feeling of asking someone else to do something for you, don't use fetch, use bring instead.
So I hope that this answers your question about the differences between to bring and to fetch and we got a little bonus information about the game of fetch do.
Thanks very much for sending in this question.
Okay, let's move on to your next question.
Next question comes from Victor Vidal. Hi, Victor.
Victor asked, could you explain what the expression you turned the tables on me means?
Because it's an old song. Thanks, Alicia.
Awesome. Interesting question.
So to turn the tables on someone is like an expression that we use to express betrayal when someone does something that hurts us or that changes our expectation.
So the history of this expression is super, super interesting.
It comes from around the year 1600 or so and it was used in board games.
So when you're playing a board game with someone, one other person and you're losing in the board game, you would turn the table or someone who wanted to do this would turn the board game on the table.
So the person who was winning before was now playing for the losing side. So it's not a very nice thing to do.
So this is a super, super interesting word history that we still use today to mean that someone betrayed us or that our expectations shifted in some way.
So for example, if you thought that you were going to get a promotion at work and your manager said, I'm going to give you a promotion at work and you expect that and then your manager gives the promotion to someone else, you might say, my manager turned the tables on me.
They betrayed me or they put me in a losing position in some manner.
So this expression means that somebody did something to change the situation in a way that is negative for the person receiving that.
In this case, me. You turned the tables on me.
So we can use this when we're talking about betrayal situations and we tend to use this in situations that involve some kind of strategy, some kind of planning like management of personal expectations like in the work example.
But when we use this to talk about shifting expectations, it doesn't always have the feel of betraying someone else.
Rather, it's just that the situation has changed significantly in favor of another person.
So for example, if you're watching like some football game or soccer game or something like that and one team is not doing so well in the first part of the game and another team is doing much better.
And then after that, at the second half of the game, maybe the other team starts to do much better.
We might hear that expression used in that situation.
They might say like team A was really struggling in the first half, but they turned the tables in the second half and came through to take away a victory or something like that.
So that's an expression that you might hear when something unexpected happens to change the situation or to shift the expectations of the situation.
So in your example, you turn the tables on me might be a betrayal expression. I'm not sure what this song is.
So you have to kind of listen to the context or read the context to see if this is a betrayal use of turn the tables or just a shifting expectation.
Something that was not there before that is there now that benefits a different person or a different group of people.
So thanks very much for this interesting question. I hope that that answers it.
All right, let's move on to your next question. Next question comes from Long. Hi Long. Long says, Can you tell me the difference between study something and study for something?
Yeah, great question. That little preposition makes a big difference. So I'm going to start with study for something.
When we study for something, we are studying with a purpose. We have a goal in mind.
For example, we study for a test. We study for a certification. We study for an exam. We study for a specific purpose.
We study to get something at the end of it like you get a diploma or you get a certificate or you get some kind of license, something like that.
So when we use the expression study for something, we are talking about the goal of that study, right?
So when we say I want to study for my test later, it means I'm going to study specifically with the goal of my test in my mind or I'm going to study for my diving certification, whatever.
So when we want to talk about the specific goal we have for our learning, we use the study for pattern.
On the other hand, when we say study something, we're just talking about it more generally, more openly like I have been studying English for five years or I've been studying cooking lately.
It's been really, really fun. So these kinds of things are more open. We're not talking about a goal. We're not talking about some specific purpose that we have.
We don't use that study for. We just want to express that that is something that we are learning how to do or that we are gaining knowledge in that topic for some reason.
So again, if you want to talk about a specific thing you are doing like I'm really, really stressed. I've been studying for my cooking exam or whatever, you can use that to be more specific about what you're doing with your general studies.
But this is the difference between the two. So again, to study something just refers to generally accumulating knowledge, learning things, gaining information about something.
And to study for something means to study or to work on learning something with a specific goal in mind. And we use the goal after the study for pattern, study for an exam, study for a test, study for a license.
So I hope that this helps you understand the differences between these two. Thanks for that interesting question.
Alright, 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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