want to speed up your language learning get access to all of our best pdf cheat sheets for free just click the link in the description and sign up for your free lifetime account right now hi everybody welcome back to ask alicia 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 muhammad hi muhammad mohammed says hey alicia do you have any tips for remembering vocabulary words that you don't use very often i'm learning new words through reading and watching tv and movies but i can't remember the words very well what should i do nice question yeah so those words that you pick up like one time from a book or from a movie or something like that and you think oh that's an interesting word i should try to remember that word maybe i'll need it for the future how do you remember those because it's like i only need it at this one time so far it's really tough for sure here are a couple of ideas hopefully one of them will help you to kind of keep these words in your mind first if you use flashcards put that word in your flashcard deck so if you find a new word in your book the book that you're reading or if you find a new word in a podcast or movie whatever if you use flashcards if you have like online flashcards if you use physical flash cards take five seconds and put that in your flash card deck so that you have that in your review pile or so that you know that you're going to review that word in the future that can be one really good way to immediately put it into your study queue or your study lineup so if you use flashcards physical or digital you can do that second you can keep a list of vocabulary words uh in like a notebook or maybe on your phone and a list in your phone and you can pull that up every once in a while to look at that if you like so maybe that can work for some people third is of course to just review the thing that you found the word in so if you found the word in a book you can review that book again and you can look at that topic again and kind of try to remember the word through context that's another way or with tv and movies make sure you come back to that and review it again in context that way that's another thing that you can do a fourth thing that you can do is try creating things with that new vocabulary word so when you pick up a new vocabulary word try to make a sentence with it so maybe you have a journal or something like that and you try to make a sentence that uses that new word so you try to apply it right away so this can kind of help you to get it in your head and thinking about how you can use that word instead of just seeing that word in another context i tend to like to use this strategy i try to use the new vocabulary words that i find like in books usually and i try to make sentences with those i try to look at that and see how i can use it in my own words and then i tend to review those sentences sometimes i'm not super great about it but i keep a notebook so i can at least go back in the pages and see the words that i've learned so those are four tips that i hope can help you to remember those vocabulary words that you maybe just hear one time or two times that are kind of hard to remember so i hope that one of those strategies will work for you thanks very much for the question okay let's move on to our next question next question comes from raul says hi alicia i want to ask if english has a formal way of speaking some languages have a polite style grammar to use when speaking to older people or at work does english have this for example in business english thanks nice question so when we talk about like a formal way of speaking we don't have like a specific kind of grammar that we use no english doesn't follow like a specific grammar rule to make things more formal instead what we do with english is we use vocabulary words and we have set phrases that sound more formal or more polite so it's not that we follow a certain grammar rule or like a manner of speaking in that sense rather we make choices with our vocabulary words that sound more formal or that sound more business-like so for example when we apologize in a casual situation we would say i'm sorry right or i'm very sorry right when we apologize to someone we're close to but in a business situation when you need to say i'm sorry you probably won't say i'm sorry because it sounds too casual instead you would probably say i apologize or i deeply apologize or we sincerely apologize for the mistake so these are not grammar choices but rather these are vocabulary choices and set phrases that we use to elevate our sentences which means to make the level higher yeah so i'm sorry it's great it totally communicates everything perfectly and so does i apologize right but one sounds more formal than the other so in this way english makes distinctions or we can find the different levels of english so vocabulary is what really matters here okay so let's look at another example of this when you want to make a request from someone like you want to have a meeting with them for example or meet up with them in a casual situation you might say to a friend or family member hey are you free tomorrow so it's a very quick easy sentence yeah but in a business situation or work situation or other formal situation if you say hey are you free tomorrow no good it sounds way too casual and it sounds like you don't care that much right it's too close in a business situation you might say something like would you be free tomorrow at about 3 p.m or if it's a more open-ended situation you might say could i have a moment of your time like if you want to ask someone for time right at that moment so using these kinds of expressions is what creates formalities what creates that level of politeness so would it be possible to is a really common kind of formal pattern that we use would it be possible for you to look at this would it be possible for you to attend would it be possible for you to blah blah so the verb comes at the end of that would it be possible for you to verb in a casual setting we would just say can you verb can you do this can you look at this but would it be possible to so these kinds of set phrases and vocabulary choices really make your speech sound more formal or more polite and this is also why it's very important to keep in mind the level of formality of vocabulary words when you're using them because if you learn a kind of more formal or business-like vocabulary word and you use it in a casual situation because you want to sound polite it's going to sound really unnatural like if you say to your friend would it be possible for you to meet me for coffee at 3 pm tomorrow it's going to sound funny because it sounds way too formal you can use it if you want to sound like you're silly if you want to make a joke or something like that but it's gonna sound weird so that's why it's really important to know the differences in formality levels so that you can make sure you express yourself naturally and appropriately yeah so i hope that this answers your question thanks very much for a super interesting one okay great let's move on to your next question next question comes from handsome hi handsome hanzo says when do you use two had or even three had in a row great question yeah i think this is in reference to past perfect tense so had is used in a number of different ways but there are some grammar patterns where we see had had in a row like this and this confuses people so why does this happen this happens because the past perfect tense requires that we use had plus the past participle form of a verb so the first had is that helping verb had in the past perfect grammar structure and then the second had is the past participle form of the verb have so i had had way too much to eat for dinner or he had had too much to drink that night so these sentences are 100 correct you might look at it and think is that really okay to use had had two times in a row regarding the second part of your question about using three hands or four hands or more something like that it's very rare to see a sentence that has three hads in a row but here's one example and a breakdown of what's happening here all the food that she had had had a negative effect on her stomach so what is happening here first let's take a quick step back and remember that we use past perfect tense and simple past tense to show a sequence of actions we use past perfect tense to show that a past action happened before another past action the other past action the one that happened closer to the present is used in simple past tense we use simple past tense to express that so in this example sentence all the food that she had had had a negative effect on her stomach this means all the food that she had had so this is the past perfect structure the first had is the helping verb had the second had is the verb have in the past participle form all the food that she had had that's our past past past past situation or our past condition yeah this thing happened first then the second part had a negative effect on her stomach this had is the simple past tense had we know this because this is the action that happened after the first action so all the food that she had had had a negative effect on her stomach this sentence is grammatically correct but again it's quite rare so you probably won't see this very often but i hope that this helps you understand the differences between had had and had had had thanks very much for an interesting question all right that is everything that i have for this week thank you as always for sending your great questions remember you can send them to me at englishclass101.com ask hyphen alicia there's also a link to this in the description so you can check that out too if you haven't already please make sure to give this video a thumbs up and 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