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| Hi, everybody! Welcome back to Ask Alisha, the weekly series where you ask me questions and I answer them, maybe. |
| First question this week comes from Alexander. |
| Hi, Alexander! |
| Alexander says… |
| “Hi, Alisha! What's the difference between error and mistake? Are these words interchangeable?” |
| Okay, “mistake” sounds like something a human did. “Error” sounds like something a machine did. That's the basic difference here. They have the same meaning like, “(something) made a mistake” or “(something) had an error.” We use those two expressions to mean roughly the same thing, but the feeling is a little different. |
| You'll also notice that the verbs I used with those expressions were different. When it's a human, we say, “I made a mistake” or in present tense, “to make a mistake.” When we use “error,” we use the expression “to have an error” as in, “My computer had an error.” So, these are some small differences in how we use these as verbs, but in general, the difference is that “mistake” is applied more to humans and “error” is applied more to computers and machines and so on. |
| You may also hear in certain situations where a person made a big mistake at like a company and it had a really, really bad effect. You might hear the company maybe write an official statement like, “We deeply apologize for the error,” something like that, which kind of removes the human feeling from the situation. So, I can't say whether that's good or not to do, but you may sometimes hear companies do that sort of thing in official statements where they need to make an apology. |
| So, in sum, they have the same meaning, but just “mistake” is for humans, “error” is for machines. I hope that this helps you. Thanks for the question. |
| Okay, let's move on to your next question. |
| Next question comes from Eliane. |
| Hello, Eliane. |
| Eliane says… |
| Should I say “have you received my message” or “did you receive my message?” |
| Ah, I think you may hear both, but in American English, we would probably use, “Did you receive my message?” Did you receive my message? It's a simple question, a simple yes-or-no question about a one-time action that happened in the past. So, did you receive my message? |
| You may hear, “Have you received my message?” but I feel that that's probably less common than, “Did you receive my message?” It's just a simple yes-or-no question, so I would probably use, “Did you receive my message?” Or to make it even more natural, I would probably say, “Did you get my message?” Receive sounds a little bit more polite. In most cases, I would say, “Did you get my message?” Did you get my message? Or if it's a text message, I would say, “Did you see my message?” Did you see my message? |
| Cases where I might use the “have” pattern are in like correspondence-sharing situations, like if a colleague is sending a group of people some information and I want to ask if they have seen the information, have checked everything, I might say, “Have you seen his message?” or “Have you seen her message?” That's a situation where I might use the “have” pattern as opposed to the “did” pattern. There's a bit of flexibility there, so it kind of depends a little bit on the situation, but if you just want to quickly confirm, if you just want to quickly check, I would suggest using the simple past form, “Did you see my message?” That sounds very natural. So, I hope that this helps answer your question. Thanks very much. |
| Okay, let's move on to your next question. |
| Next question comes from Mohamud Jayte. |
| Hello, Mohamud! |
| Mohamud says… |
| “What is the difference between resign and re-sign? Also, compliment and complement?” |
| Great. So, spelling is very important for this one especially for the second question. “Compliment,” the first one is spelled with an “I” and “complement,” the second one, is spelled with an “E.” Let's talk about the difference between “resign” and “re-sign” first. So, “to resign” means to quit as in to quit a job or to quit an official position. To “re-sign” something, the hyphen is important here, to “re-sign” something means to sign something again, so the prefix “RE” R-E, means to do something again or just again. So we see this as in redo or like reheat for when we're using a microwave or when we're using a computer. So “to re-sign” means to sign something again. |
| Some examples… |
| “He resigned as manager.” |
| “The CEO resigned yesterday.” |
| “Can you please re-sign your contract. There was a mistake in the previous version.” |
| “We need to re-sign our paperwork. There were some changes.” |
| So, I mentioned this hyphen in the second one here. So this hyphen between the R-E and the sign, helps prevent confusion between “resign” and “re-sign.” So, you don't see this kind of hyphenation in the other words that I mentioned like “redo,” for example because there's not another word to confuse it with. But in this case, “resign” and “re-sign” look very similar, so we use that hyphenated version to mean “re-sign” to sign something, again. |
| Let's continue on to “compliment” and “complement” which sound extremely similar in speech. Compliment with an “I” can be used as a noun and a verb and it means to say something nice. |
| So, for example, “Your shirt looks nice” is a compliment, as a noun. |
| To use it as a verb, I could say, “My coworker complimented my shirt.” |
| So to compliment with an “I” is to say something nice. |
| Complement with an “E,” however, means to improve something or to enhance something. So, it's something that goes well with something else or something that completes something else. |
| For example… |
| “Maple syrup is an excellent complement to pancakes.” |
| So that's used as a noun there, or to use it as a verb… |
| “I think that maple syrup complements pancakes wonderfully.” |
| So we can use that as a noun or a verb, but please keep in mind the spelling difference between these words. |
| Say something nice, “I.” |
| To enhance or improve or complete something, “E.” |
| So I hope that this helps you understand the differences between these words. Thanks very much for the question. |
| Okay, let's move on to your next question. |
| Next question comes from Ossé Etienne. I hope I said that right. |
| Hi, Ossé! |
| Ossé says… |
| “Hi, Alisha! When do I definitely know that I'm at the advanced level?” |
| Well, I would suggest you first consider what “advanced” means to you. So, to me at an advanced level, I think a person should be able to give a business presentation or to be able to write a research paper or to be able to participate in a business meeting as a key person. So, those are things that I think require an advanced level of linguistic capability to do, so you should ask yourself, “Can I do those things?” So once you can determine the things that you think are “advanced skills,” think about, “Can I do those things?” in English. Can I do those things in my target language? If the answer is yes, cool then you're advanced in terms of your judgment for what is advanced. If your answer is no, then you're not advanced. |
| So, I would suggest if you're having a little trouble determining your level, maybe, think about the things that you would like to be able to do and ask yourself, “Can I do those things?” and if the answer is no, then focus your studies on those things that you answered no to. If the answer is yes, cool, you can do those things. You can study something else. |
| So, maybe, begin by thinking about the kinds of things that you consider advanced. I don't necessarily think knowing like 3000 vocabulary words equals advanced, like maybe you know lots of vocabulary words, which is great, but that's different from like communication skills or like the ability to put all of your ideas together in a research paper. So, think about those sorts of advanced level things and ask yourself, “Can I do this or not?” Hopefully, asking yourself these questions of “Can I do this or not?” will help you to be able to, at any time, understand your level and the next thing that you need to be able to do, so I hope that this helps you. Thanks very much for the question. |
| Okay, let's move on to the next question for this week. |
| Next question comes from Numan. |
| Hello, Numan. |
| Numan says… |
| “When talking to teachers, do we say teacher, miss or mister?” |
| Oh yeah, good question. When you're talking with your instructors, at least in American English, we do not use teacher. We don't use that as a title for our teachers. If you are talking to a high school-level instructor or below, in most cases, we use “Mr.” for male teachers, we use “Mrs.” for married female teachers, and we use “Ms.” or miss for unmarried female teachers or for female teachers that we don't know their marital status, so we don't know if she is married or not. That's usually the guideline we use for instructors at high school level or lower. |
| If you are talking about a college university level instructor, sometimes they ask you to call them professor. If they have a PhD, then they prefer to be called “Dr.” Some people prefer to just be called “Mr.” or “Ms.” as we talked about earlier. Some people prefer you just use their first name, so it's actually very common for instructors to tell their students, please call me so and so. For example, in my lessons, I always want students to just call me Alisha because it's important to me to have a friendly and conversational feel, so I don't want my students to ever feel like I'm above them and they're below me somehow. That's not good, so it should be a friendly and open communication setting, so I prefer to use first names in my class. So that's my style, but each teacher has their own preferences and, usually, they'll tell their students. If you're ever not sure, just go with “Mr.” or “Ms.” or “Mrs.” That's a pretty good guideline to follow. |
| The only time we might use “teacher” is in like a very, very, like specific setting. It's like for a little kid who doesn't yet know the name of his or her teacher. They might just say teacher, teacher, like before they know the teacher's name. That's maybe the only situation I can think of where we use teacher as a title. So, once you're old enough to learn people's names, it's best to use those, so I hope that this helps you. Thanks very much for the question. |
| Okay, that is everything that I have for this week. Thank you, as always, for sending your questions. Remember, you can send them to me at EnglishClass101.com/ask-alisha. Thanks very much for watching this week's episode of Ask Alisha and I will see you again next week. Bye-bye! |
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