[Music] hey everyone my name is wes this is interactive english the channel is just all about trying to help you practice and improve your english skills and today i have a grammar lesson for you i want to talk to you about five tricky grammar rules that i think you should remember because this is just going to help you improve your overall english fluency so let's begin with these two tricky words right here who vs whom so the first thing that you should know is that who refers to the subject and whom refers to the object of the verb or preposition so a simple little trick that i want to teach you right now to help you determine okay which one should you use who or whom is that if you are going to take make a sentence using the unknown word if you can use he or she then you are going to use who if you make a sentence and you can complete it with him or her then you will use whom so let's look at these sentences right here these questions and we're going to change these questions around and i can take the first one and i can make the sentence he would like some ice cream i'm going to use he which is the subject so you would use who who would like some ice cream in the next question let's change it again we'll make a sentence and we could say i should ask her for help her is the object so now i'm going to use whom whom should i ask for help so i think this can get pretty confusing when you have sentences like these and you are going to have a noun clause and a noun clause will have a subject a verb and maybe an object and you're trying to determine whether or not you're going to use who or whom so let's get rid of the first part of this sentence and let's just focus on that noun clause and i can change it around and make a sentence and say he wrote the email so again i'm talking about the subject so i'm going to use who i don't know who wrote the email in the next sentence again let's forget about the first part focus on that noun clause and again we can make the following sentence the email is about him him is an object so now you know that you're going to use whom i don't know whom the email is about another reason why this can be tricky is because in spoken english especially in places like the united states which is where i am from people will often use who instead of whom every time you get into the ring that's who you're going against you're going up against him the objects so it really should be that's whom you're going up against oh i'm sorry but who else can i talk to about this i can talk to her about this so it really should be but who else can i talk to about this so you can see that it's it's pretty common that in places like the us people will use who instead of whom in spoken english that's just something that i want you to be aware of i'm not saying that you should do this i would always encourage you to try to follow the rules as best as you can but this is another reason why this is this is pretty tricky grammar now before 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which one is correct because i've seen it spelled two different ways and often the difference that they're talking about is the difference in spelling between american english and british english and there are some notable differences one example would be the er versus re in words like theater or center there are also differences with the single l versus the double l in words like traveled and counselor and of course there are differences between the o and o u in words like color and favorite so let's let's go back to what you should do the one thing that i would say is that i either form is acceptable you can you can spell the words either way the only thing i would say is that you are consistent and that you're not switching back and forth between the american spelling and the british spelling if you're going to say some sentence like this and say blue is my favorite color and you are going to spell favorite like you would in the united states but then you're going to spell color like you would in the uk that may look a little strange so what i would recommend is that you just try to be consistent and follow one of the spelling forms whether it is american english or british english just just be aware there are some differences when it comes to spelling then we come to gender neutral pronouns or some people may refer to them as third person personal pronouns i just like to say gender-neutral pronouns but well what i'm talking about is this i once had someone write to me and they said that their friend is getting ready to have a baby but they're not sure whether it's a boy or a girl and they were wanting to know well well how should i refer to the baby and my advice was that if if they don't know then you could just say the baby but this brings us to a problem in english because there's not a gender neutral pronoun that is widely accepted think about this situation perhaps you have a friend and you tell me like oh my my friend is traveling to the u.s and i ask well why is your friend traveling to the u.s is he or she taking a vacation people may use he or she when you don't know the gender of a person you're talking about your friend but you don't say if it's a man or a woman and i don't know so if i want to refer to your friend i would have to say he or she that is it's it's a problem in english because sometimes when you're talking about an unknown gender you you might do it quite often and it gets a little tedious and a little i guess weird to keep saying he or she he or she he or she so instead of using he or she i would say that you can use they all right i'm gonna go ahead and tell you that you can use it because i do think nowadays it's more accepted to use they as a gender-neutral pronoun and i know that you're probably thinking wait a second in class i've always learned that they refers to more than one person it is a plural pronoun yes that is true however in this situation when you're talking about a gender that you don't know i think it's very common i do it all the time i would use they instead of he or she i'm not always going to say he or she so let's go back to that example if you told me that your friend is traveling to the u.s it's very natural for me to say oh why is your friend traveling to the u.s uh are they taking a vacation so i'm going to use they the pronoun but i'm going to use it as a singular pronoun that is gender neutral because i do not know if your friend is a man or woman this is definitely becoming more accepted nowadays you will even find this in some very well-known online dictionaries cambridge says that you can use this to avoid saying he or she told you i don't really like to continuously say he or she and meriam webster actually gives you a lot of specific information about the singular they one thing i would say is that if you are writing and writing is a bit more formal i i think it is appropriate to use he or she when you're writing in a formal context and when you're speaking i think quite often you will hear the singular they and i think you can use it as well if you're talking about an unknown gender it's a singular gender-neutral pronoun now let's talk about crazy plural nouns and i say crazy because they are irregular and i think most of you are probably familiar with the rules if you want to change a noun from singular and make it plural then perhaps you're going to add an s like shares or e-s in boxes or i-e-s such as stories those are the general rules when you want to change a noun from singular to plural now the good news is there there's even a rule that you could follow with some irregular plural nouns for example if a noun ends with an f or fe then when you change it to plural you're going to add v e s so wolf becomes wolves or leaf becomes leaves for other irregular plural nouns you you really just need to memorize like you're learning new vocabulary but the there are many of them that we use frequently and you probably already know for example child becomes children that's a pretty common word or foot becomes feet these are some common irregular plural nouns there are others that well are not very common you're probably not going to use them in everyday conversation and you would just really try to learn them over time for example ox the plural is oxen or the plural of index is indices or octopus is octopi because you never know maybe you're out swimming in the ocean and you are surrounded by some octopi it could happen and now let's talk about pronouncing silent letters because in english there are many words that have silent letters like this one knee and you might be wondering well wait why why is that k silent well pronunciation is something that has changed over time so this word actually i think we got it from german and if you look up the german word for knee you have it right here and then if we have google pronounce it for us it's going to sound like this knee knee many german speakers out there can tell me if that's if that's close the pronunciation but you hear that k sound and in old english a long time ago people would pronounce the k and then over time i think they they think maybe in the 16th and 17th century because of the influence of latin and french the k just got dropped and people stopped pronouncing it so how do you solve this puzzle because you might want to know well how can you avoid pronouncing these silent letters so that you don't uh misspeak and perhaps cause a little confusion if you're having a conversation well there's not really a general rule that you can follow i think the best thing you can do is just try to understand which letter combinations may have a silent letter like k n and knee you also have the w r combination where the w is silent in words like right and then there is the g n combination where the g is silent in words like foreign so in my opinion if you want to learn how to pronounce these words with silent letters i'm going to give you three suggestions the first one is use subtitles if you're watching a tv show or a movie turn on those subtitles you're able to see the word see the spelling and listen to the correct pronunciation something similar to that and it's my next suggestion is audiobooks when you're reading a story you're reading a book listen to the audiobook and follow along because again you see the words you see the spelling and you're listening to the correct pronunciation and my final suggestion and personally i think this is the best one of all and that is to watch some of my video lessons i have created a playlist just for you that has a lot of different pronunciation video lessons in which i'm talking about commonly mispronounced words many of them have silent letters so you can check that out if you want to practice and improve your pronunciation if you enjoyed this lesson please hit that like button and as always thanks so much for watching and i'll see you next time