| 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 Purnima. |
| Hi, Purnima. |
| Purnima asked, Hi, Alisha. |
| What is the difference between I'm told, I'm asked, and I am mistaken, I am prepared? Are these sentences in passive voice? It seems the first two sentences differ from the last two sentences. |
| Please explain. |
| Good question. |
| Okay. |
| So the deal here is that the last two examples that you gave, mistaken and prepared, can also be used as adjectives. |
| So in my mind, when I read those kinds of sentences, those are used as adjectives. |
| Like if I'm talking about maybe, say, like a meeting and I need to prepare for the meeting, I would say the sentence, I am prepared, which means I am ready to go, right? And that prepared would be used as an adjective. |
| So yes, I know that there is the verb to prepare and we can make different forms with that verb, but we would use it as an adjective in a sentence like that. |
| I am prepared or something like this. |
| So the bigger issue here is that there are some adjectives that share a spelling with the past participle form of a verb. |
| So prepare is a great example of this. |
| So prepare is both an adjective and the past participle form of the verb. |
| And there are other verbs that are like this. |
| So we know which is which depending on the context. |
| So there are some hints that we can use in the situation to help us determine which form is being used, whether it's an adjective or whether we're looking at, for example, a passive voice structure like you suggested, or whether it's a completely different grammar point altogether. |
| So we do this by looking for context clues. |
| So when I look at a sentence like I am prepared, I immediately think prepared is used as an adjective here. |
| But if I look at a sentence like this may have been prepared, I have some clues here. |
| The grammar clue here is have been prepared, right? And so we can guess that this is actually not the adjective use, but the verb use, because we see the grammar of the sentence have been prepared, have been is followed by the past participle form of the verb, right? So to answer your question, I would look at the context of the sentence. |
| So what other information is in the sentence? In the four examples that you provided, we just see like the subject and then like am and then the verb or the adjective in question, right? So it's really hard to say which is which if we don't have a little bit more information about that context. |
| But generally, when we are reading something and we're talking about our own feelings like I am prepared or like you are mistaken or something like that, it's pretty normal to associate those kinds of patterns with adjective uses, not with the past participle verb form. |
| So with those kinds of like passive structures, I can understand how that would be really, really confusing. |
| So yes, it's just good to be aware that the spelling sometimes is shared between the verb form, the past participle verb form, and the adjective form. |
| But my suggestion would be to look at the context and to consider that some patterns like that I am adjective pattern are almost always going to be adjectives. |
| So that's a bit of a long explanation. |
| I suggest again, look for context clues in the sentence. |
| And that means grammar clues and other information. |
| And also consider that there are some set patterns that are just kind of going to be adjectives most of the time. |
| So thanks for an interesting question. |
| I appreciate that. |
| Thanks for sending it along. |
| Okay, let's move on to your next question. |
| Next question comes from Javier. |
| Javier asked, what is the meaning of mind you and how can I use it? Is it commonly used? Interesting question. |
| Okay, so mind you is used typically at the end of a sentence when we want to make sure that someone doesn't misunderstand what we said previously. |
| So let's take a look at an example situation so we can look at how we might use this expression. |
| Let's say, for example, you're talking about your co-worker's behavior and you say something like, I don't think I like how he does this process. |
| I'm not criticizing him, mind you. |
| So we put that mind you at the end of that second sentence. |
| We put that after, I'm not criticizing him, right? So in the previous sentence, you said, I'm not sure I like how he does that thing. |
| And then you say, I'm not criticizing him. |
| So you might be just saying, I just want to express my opinion about that. |
| You're not criticizing. |
| So in this situation, mind you comes at the end of the sentence. |
| So this mind you is a way to clarify or to make it really, really clear to the other person that you don't want to express x feeling, but instead you want to express something else. |
| So in our example here, we say, I'm not criticizing him, mind you. |
| So you want to make it very, very clear that, oh, even though I said this thing, I want you to know that I'm not expressing this concept. |
| So this is how mind you can be used. |
| So let's take a look at another example. |
| Let's say you're looking for another place to move and you're moving with your partner and you're talking with your partner about the apartment agent. |
| And maybe you say something like, the places that our agent has found us, they haven't been so great just yet, but I don't have a problem with the agent, mind you. |
| So you might make it clear that you don't like something that has happened, but you don't have a problem with that person. |
| And then you add mind you at the end to show, like, I just want to make it clear that the way that maybe I phrased it initially is not how you might have understood it. |
| So it's a way to clarify something. |
| Another interesting point about this expression is that in British English, you might just hear mind instead of mind you. |
| So mind you isn't super common. |
| I feel in American English it comes up every once in a while. |
| I personally rarely use it, but this might just be again, a personal preference. |
| So you might hear it among certain groups of people or certain ages. |
| That might be just dependent on your experience, but we use mind you to make a clarifying statement about something that we said just a moment before. |
| So I hope that this helps you understand a couple of ways that we might use mind you. |
| Thanks very much for an interesting question. |
| Okay, let's move on to your next question. |
| Next question comes from Mehmet. |
| Hi Mehmet. |
| Mehmet asked, I can't understand the difference between imagine and estimate. |
| Can you please explain it very simply? Thank you. |
| Okay, I understand your confusion here. |
| So imagine and estimate, we have to do the same kind of mental exercise with both of these verbs, right? So we have to think of something that does not exist, right? The difference here is that when we imagine something, we often imagine an image or like a scene in our heads, we imagine a situation. |
| With estimate, we have to think about usually something related to numbers. |
| So that could be time, it could be money. |
| So we have to estimate how much money this vacation will cost, or we have to estimate how much time we need to finish a task. |
| So yes, we imagine. |
| So we could suggest that these two are related. |
| We have to imagine the scene, and we have to imagine the situation, and then make a guess about how much time that will take. |
| So maybe you could overlap the meanings a little bit in that way. |
| But when we estimate something, we are doing this with relation to some kind of numbers or data. |
| We need to tell somebody else how much time or how much money it will take to do something. |
| When we imagine something, we're just doing it maybe for fun, or maybe we are doing it because we want to like think about our goals, or something like that. |
| And we often don't really think so much about numbers when we imagine things. |
| We imagine like stories, like when you read a book, for example, you might imagine the story in your head. |
| We would not estimate in that situation. |
| So when we imagine, think more about that being like pictures and scenes and images and movies, and estimates are more about data. |
| I hope that this quick introduction helps you understand the differences between those two verbs. |
| Thanks very much for sending this question along. |
| Okay, that is everything that I have for this week. |
| So thank you, as always, for sending your great questions. |
| And remember, you can send them to me at englishclass101.com slash ask hyphen alicia. |
| Very long URL. |
| Find the link for that in the YouTube description. |
| Send your questions there, not in comment sections or DMs anywhere, please. |
| I probably will not see it. |
| Of course, if you liked this video, don't forget to give it a thumbs up, please. |
| So other people can find this video and subscribe to our channel if you haven't already. |
| Also come check us out at englishclass101.com for some other things that can help you with your English studies. |
| 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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