Learn the English Phrases HAVE IN MIND and DO YOU MIND

In this English lesson, I wanted to help you learn

the English phrase "have in mind."

We usually use this phrase in two questions.

You might hear the question, what do you have in mind?

And you might hear the question, who do you have in mind?

Here's an example.

Let's say Jen says,

"Hey, I think we should go out this Saturday night."

I can say to her, "What do you have in mind?"

What I'm asking is, what are you thinking we should do?

Or what are you planning?

What do you think would be fun for us to do?

So I would say to her, "What do you have in mind?"

Let's imagine another situation.

Maybe Jen wants to hire someone to work on our flower farm.

I could say, "Who do you have in mind?"

And basically what I'm asking her is,

who is the person you are thinking of hiring?

So when you say to someone, "What do you have in mind?"

It means, what are you thinking?

And when you say to someone, "Who do you have in mind?"

We're asking, who are you thinking about?

The second phrase I wanted to teach you today

is the phrase "Do you mind?"

This is a polite way to ask someone

if they can do something.

Sometimes in my classroom, I'll say to a students,

I'll say to a student, sorry,

"Do you mind closing the window?"

Or, "Do you mind opening the window?"

It's just a polite way to ask someone to do something.

Sometimes in the kitchen, Jen will say,

"Hey Bob, do you mind handing me a fork?"

Or, "While you're up, do you mind getting cups

for all of the children?"

So when you say to someone, "Do you mind?"

and then you ask them to do something,

it's just a polite way to ask them to do it.

So to review, when you use the phrase,

"Who do you have in mind?" or "What do you have in mind?"

you're asking basically what the person is thinking about

or who they are thinking about.

And when you say to someone, "Do you mind?"

and then you ask them to do something,

it's just a really polite way to ask them

to do something for you.

So I always say things like this,

"Do you mind clicking the thumbs up on this video?"

Or actually I usually say, "Would you mind?"

in that case, don't I?

Yeah, interesting, 'cause you can use both.

I could say to a student,

"Would you mind opening the window?"

And I could say, "Do you mind opening the window?"

Both work.

Hey, let's look at a comment from a previous video.

This comment is from Aleksey and Aleksey says,

"Thumbs up and only then watching the video over again.

Listening to Bob's voice, reading the subtitles,

and speaking aloud at the same time

'cause there's no time for farting around."

Great use of the phrase, by the way.

"Finally writing the comment.

This is my simple plan for learning English

which I follow step by step with my favorite teacher.

Thank you very much."

And my response to Aleksey is this,

"This is an awesome plan.

I'm glad you recognize the importance

of combining different modes of learning.

You've got reading, writing, listening, and speaking

all happening from one video.

Great job Aleksey."

So I do wanna talk about that for a bit.

Thanks for the comment, by the way, Aleksey.

Aleksey, you've kinda keyed into what I think

is a very important aspect of learning the English language

and I'm going to sound a bit like a broken record here

because I say this all the time,

you really need to work on all the areas.

You need to be reading. You need to be listening.

You need to be speaking. You need to be writing.

I hope I didn't forget one.

And then I always add at the end,

you need to be learning new vocabulary

which kind of happens when you're doing the first four

and lately I've been saying as well that you need to do,

you need to learn a little bit of grammar along the way.

I think it's important to learn just a tiny bit of grammar.

So anyways, Aleksey, great comment.

I'm glad you're taking a little four minute English lesson

that I'm creating and turning it into something more.

That's kind of the hallmark of a good learner.

A hallmark is like a sign of someone that's doing,

a sign of something someone is doing well.

So I'm really glad to see that

and I hope some of you can take that as a challenge.

Certainly, these videos can seem

like just a simple four minute video

of some English guy talking, teaching two phrases,

but they're also great for listening practice.

You can listen to them twice.

You can read the subtitles while you listen.

There's a transcript below if you need it.

This is more than just some crazy guy speaking English

for four minutes, see ya.