Lesson Transcript

Hi, everybody! My name is Alisha.
In this lesson, I'm going to talk about the differences between "other," "the other" and "the others," and "another."
Let's get started.
I want to begin by talking first about "other."
Let's look at two uses of "other."
The first use is to mean "additional," additional.
So that means something extra.
For example:
"This year, I studied English and two other languages."
In this sentence, we can replace "other" with "additional."
So this means two languages in addition to English.
So to see this visually, we can imagine this year's lessons or this year's classes were English, which we know from the sentence, "I studied English" and two other languages. So that means two languages that are additional, in addition to English. So they are not English, but English plus, in this case, two more. So we can use "other" to mean "additional."
One more use of "other" that actually is quite similar to this first use is to mean "different," different.
So, for example, if we go to an ice cream shop and this is the menu, the menu is chocolate ice cream and vanilla ice cream, a person might ask…
"Do you have other ice cream flavors?"
Do you have other ice cream flavors?
So, this means different from this menu.
For example:
"Do you have strawberry?"
"Do you have mint?"
And so on…
"Do you have other ice cream flavors?"
So that means different flavors from the ones here, the ones we can see, the ones that we know.
You'll notice, in this sentence, "other ice cream flavors," we're using the plural form here, "other ice cream flavors." You might see the article (a) or...I'm sorry, you might see the article "AN-" before "other," as in "Do you have another ice cream flavor?" I'm going to cover this a little bit later, but this means outside the situation. So yes, you may hear "an...other," but in those cases, we'll use "another" connected with "other." So, please keep that in mind.
Okay. Let's look at one more example that uses "other."
"What other services do you have?"
What other services do you have?
So again, if we imagine, we're looking at a mobile company or a cellphone company and we're looking at the services they have available. We see they have calling service and Wi-Fi service, but we want to know, what other services do you have? Do you have some kind of smartphone data plan? Do you have insurance for smartphones and so on?
When you want to ask for more information, you can say:
"What other services do you have?"
So again, notice, we're using "other" plus this countable noun "services."
"What other services do you have?" just as we did with this countable noun here.
So notice as well, "Do you have other ice creams?" is not quite so natural. We would not say that. We're looking specifically for "ice cream flavors," so that's why we use "flavors" in the plural.
If you want, you could drop "ice cream." "Do you have other flavors?" because it's understood that this is an ice cream shop.
So again, you may hear questions, which use "another" as I said in this one.
And in this case, like "Do you have another service?" you might hear it in that sense, but I'll talk a little bit more about that later.
For now, let's continue on to part no.2.
In part no.2, I want to focus on "the other" and "the others."
So, for this practice, I've made a sample family picture. So, I'm going to imagine we're looking at a family picture for this one. So, we use "the other" or "the others" to refer to something, some things as well or someone or some people, something or someone known in the situation that is additional.
So, in this situation, this is me. Here is me, in the picture, in this family picture. Let's imagine this is me. And so, all of these people in the picture are known. We can see these people in the picture, but we don't know their details yet. So someone or something known in that case, we know these things, these people and they're in this situation, it's all very clear. So, how can we describe these people using "the other"?
Let's begin with example sentence no.1 here:
"This is my brother."
This is my brother.
So no "other" here, just a simple statement.
Two, though:
"This is my other brother."
This is my other brother.
So here, we're using "other" to show that it's an addition inside this situation. So we can probably guess, because we know this is a family picture, we can probably guess this is the speaker's brother, but the speaker wants to be very clear.
"This is my brother."
"This is my other brother."
So that means, from within this situation, this known situation, this is the person's details. Of course, the speaker could say, "These are my brothers" if they want to, but for this practice, we're showing specifically the relationship here with "other."
Then, after point no.2, after example sentence no.2, we have these people remaining. We could say, "the others." In this case, "others" refers to two people, the two remaining people that we know in this situation.
"The others are my parents."
Or, you might also hear:
"The other people (in the picture) are my parents."
So that means the remaining people we know in this situation are my parents.
So, to recap this part, "the other" or "the others" is used to refer to someone or something that is in the situation that we know about. So, it's not coming from outside the situation, it's something specific in the situation. This is why we use "the" here.
So this is also why we cannot use "the" with one of these example sentences I talked about earlier.
For example, in a question like this:
"Do you have (the) other ice cream flavors?"
"The other ice cream flavors" suggests that there's a specific list of ice cream flavors that all stores know about. "Do you have (the) other ice cream flavors?" would not be natural.
So, make sure that if you're just asking about additional or different possibilities from within the situation, you use "other." If you want to ask about something known in a situation, use "the other," the other.
So, with that in mind, let's continue on to the last point, "another."
No.3, "another."
So, I talked a little bit about using "another" earlier for questions.
But here, let's talk about using "another" for statements. So, we use "another" for something additional, but from outside the current situation.
So, as I talked about over here:
"Do you have another ice cream flavor?"
We could say that, instead of other and the plural (flavors) here.
"Do you have another ice cream flavor?"
As a question, we're asking about something additional from outside the situation.
This is the situation.
"Do you have another ice cream flavor?"
Or…
"Do you have another service?"
So in those cases, we can use "other" and we need to use the singular form of a noun, so for questions.
When we're making statements, however, we need to refer to something additional from outside the situation. So, in our example, looking at a family picture, let's imagine, I want to show, this is me, I'm showing you my picture. I want to show you the next picture. I have many pictures and I say, "Okay, here's another picture."
"Here's another picture."
So first, I'm showing you this picture.
First, I show you this picture, then next, I say:
"Ah! Here's another picture."
So in other words, this is a new picture, here's another picture, different from the one I just showed you, this one. Here's another picture, it's new so please look at this.
We would not say:
"Here is other picture."
We would not say that, "Here is other picture." We cannot say that. It is grammatically incorrect.
You could say:
"Here is the other picture."
However, you must establish a situation in which it is known that there are two or more pictures. For example, if you are in a police situation and you are watching a suspicious person, and you get two pictures of a suspicious person, you look at the first picture to see the suspicious person and then you say, "Let's look at the other picture" for the suspicious person's car details. So in that case, it is known that there are two pictures. In that case, "Here's the other picture" or "Let's look at the other picture." In that case, it is okay.
If, however, you are introducing something totally new, use "another."
"Here's another picture."
One more example is this sentence:
"I want another ice cream."
I want another ice cream.
Depending on the situation, this could have two different meanings.
The first could be, the speaker ate one ice cream already and the speaker wants to eat one more ice cream.
"I want another ice cream."
Or the speaker received an ice cream, but the speaker doesn't want this one. Maybe the speaker wants a different flavor, for example. So the speaker wants one that is different, wants an additional ice cream that is different from the first ice cream they received. So depending on the situation, it's a little bit, it's kind of up to the situation, really.
So, "I want another ice cream."
Again, an addition from outside the situation.
But keep in mind, the noun, in both of these cases, is referring to something maybe earlier in the conversation. So in this case, in this part, I talked about a family picture, so we know the conversation is about pictures and we keep the same noun into the next part. Here's another picture.
In this situation, moving from here, talking about ice cream, if the speaker says, "I want another ice cream," we can guess that it's probably in relationship to the first ice cream the speaker ate, or maybe a different flavor that the speaker wants to eat.
So, please keep in mind that the nouns are maintained from sentence to sentence, and it's very common to use "other, "the other," and "another," in sequence in this way, to introduce new information, to talk about known information in a situation as well.
So, this is a quick introduction to how we use these words and some examples of the ways in which we use these words. As I said, remember, you can use another with patterns such as these, but you do need to be careful to use the singular form of a noun. This is a point that's different from using simply "other."
Thanks very much for watching this lesson and I will see you again soon. Bye-bye!

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