What’s the difference? 5 confusing word pairs for work

Doo-doo-doo, doo-doo-doo, doo-doo-doo, doo-doo-doo, doo-doo-doo, doo-doo-doo, doo-doo-doo, doo-doo-doo.

Hi, James from...

E, no, no, sorry, guys.

E, meeting is correct.

Why did you even put "reunion" up there?

That's incorrect.

Oh, yeah.

Today's lesson is on confused pairs.

This can happen for native speakers, even, but a lot of times students get confused.

And E is trying to demonstrate here that the person saying this at reunion, which is when

people who haven't met in a long time come together, like a family reunion or, I don't

know, a school reunion when you graduate, it's not the same as a meeting where people

they've met regularly, but they meet at this time for an important conversation, very different.

This is a confused pair, and today I'm going to give you five other confused pairs that

you may find in business, alright, in business situations.

So, let's go to the board and we're going to take a look at a story.

Now, I want you to read along with the story and see if you can spot the confused word

or the word that shouldn't be there.

Sometimes these are homophones or homonyms, which means they sound like the word, very

similar to it, and sometimes they're written similar to the word, but they don't actually

mean the same thing.

Your job today or right now is with me just to read along with me, see if you can spot

those words, then afterwards what we're going to do is we're going to take a quick break,

I'm going to go through some vocabulary and show you the word that this word may be confused

with, explain it to make sure you understand, give you some little hints that will help

you to make sure you know the difference, and then we'll come back at the end and we'll

go over the story again and we'll replace the words that should be there.

All right?

It's going to be fun.

I know you're going to enjoy it.

Let's go to the board and get started.

First thing we have here is - let me go on this side, make sure you can see it properly.

Here's E and here's James, myself and E. We're playing characters in this one, okay?

So, I call this one "business as usual".

When people normally in North America say "business as usual", it means the way things

normally go.

All right?

It's business as usual.

Nothing has changed.

"Hey, James, can you give me some advice?"

"Sure, E. What do you need?"

"What's the best way to get a pay raise from my boss?"

"James."

"Well, besides going to work, how do you help the company?"

"E."

"I stay latter than everyone else."

"J."

"That is good, E, but that hard means you should get more money when you don't do a

lot of work."

"E."

"Are you trying to infer that I am lazy?"

Interesting.

You read the story?

Take a quick look.

Now, we're going to take a quick break and we're going to come back and we'll do the

vocabulary that goes with this.

Ready?

Okay.

So, let us go to the board and take a look at what we have here, because this is about

confused words that can be used in English, business English, to be specific, business

English.

All right?

So, some of these words, I'll be honest with you, a lot of native speakers don't even use

regularly.

So, aren't you going to be the special one when you pull this word out, like, from your

back pocket, like, "Badam", and they're like, "I haven't used that in a word in a while."

And here's this foreign person using it.

Okay.

So, the first one we look at is "advise", and when you advise someone is to suggest,

as in a verb form.

So, you see it's a verb.

Advise someone, you suggest something to help them.

"I advise you to take the medicine the doctor gave you.

I think this is going to be helpful for you."

This "advise" has a "z" sound.

This is different than "advice", and you're going to notice they almost look the same,

except when we say "advice", it has more of an "s" sound, okay?

That's a beautiful "u" I'm doing for you because you're special, "u", alright?

So, it has more of an "s" sound, right?

It is "s", soft.

And that is actually the noun form of this, so you want to advise someone and you give

them advice, a suggestion to help.

Notice we have the singular article, right?

Next, "infer".

"Infer" means to come to a conclusion based on evidence.

Think of Sherlock Holmes.

"Well, Watson, it's obvious.

The man with the candlestick did it, because there are wax drippings on the floor."

In other words, I see evidence or information, and that brings me to come to a conclusion.

"Infer".

"Inference", that's a longer word than noun for it, right?

So, that's a verb.

But then we go over here to "imply".

"Implying" seems to be the same thing, but it's not, because you might have something

you want to say, but you don't say it directly.

So, you see - let me see now.

You see a friend of yours eating a lot of donuts, and you see him a couple months later

and he's a bit bigger, and you'd say, "Hey, Tom, you're enjoying those donuts, aren't

you?"

Now, how would you do that?

Now, we could say you're inferring that because he's eaten donuts, he's gained a lot of weight.

That's because of the evidence, "infer".

But if you don't say anything, you just say, "Hey, Tom, I see you really like them donuts",

you're implying - you're not saying Tom is fat, but he probably is, and you don't say

it directly, so you're implying, okay?

Now, the next one we're going to look at are prepositions.

They both have a preposition use, and that's from "apart from".

You can say "apart from" for both of these, okay?

However, this one is - usually we say "next to" or "at the side of" something.

An example - the marker is beside the bottle.

Preposition use.

Marker's beside, right?

Or "next to".

Different word for "next to".

When we use "this besides", it means in addition, added on, right?

So, you could say "addition" or "as well", and, you know, besides Tom, who knows about

this?

In addition to Tom, who knows about this, right?

And you can get money besides.

That would be "as well".

You get money besides.

So, it's like, not just this, you can get this as well.

And that's how they're different, okay?

So, be careful when you're looking at these because sometimes when they're talking about

"apart from", you can use this one or this one.

So, when you're talking about "in addition" or "as well", you have to use this one, the

"s".

And you can say - the "s" one has, like, two meanings, plural.

Plura...

Plura...

Plura...

I can't even say it.

Plurality.

There you go.

Okay?

And I'm taking English from that guy, and he can't even say a word, and I'm like, "It

was hard, okay?

It's a difficult word."

Next, "hard".

Hard is both an adverb and an adjective.

What do I mean by that?

As an adverb, we can use it to say something is very difficult.

That test was hard.

Difficult.

But when I want to talk about the density or when something's hard, it can hurt your

hand when you hit it, we're talking about the density of it.

James has a hard head.

Hard.

Hold on.

Like wood.

Hard.

Right?

Very dense.

Versus difficult.

James has a difficult head, makes no sense.

But depending on the context of the sentence, it will make sense to you.

This is different from "hardly".

Yes, it's an adverb, but "hardly" means it's not important or significant.

Right?

So, I hardly notice the motorcycles going by.

Can you?

All right.

But it's hard to ignore them.

Ooh.

Oh, look at that.

Oh, I use both.

And you will, too, because you're going to learn this lesson well.

So, "hardly" means not important or significant.

Different than "hard", even though they both have adverb uses.

And the last one I want to talk about, when we say "latter", it has two t's.

I want you to remember the two t's for a reason, okay?

So, "latter" means the second of a group of people.

So, if you said two people, if you said, "James and I are coming to the party", and you say,

"I never really liked the latter one", it's the second one, not the first one.

And this is similar to the part when we say the latter part of something, it means the

end part.

So, if you were watching a movie in the beginning, like, okay, truth here, I'm going to give

you truth, so let's just - we're not an engVid, we're not doing a video, I just need to speak

about this.

John Wick 1 rules.

If you're not watching it, please go watch John Wick 1.

It rules.

John Wick 2, well, the beginning was okay, but the latter half, the end part, see?

Sorry.

I love you, my man, but you really didn't pull out the stops on that one.

Okay?

So, the latter half means the end part.

And you can see how it's tied into the second of, when we talk about the latter of something

is the second part of it, and then it's the end part, because there's a beginning and

an end, two parts.

And I usually say, if you want to remember this one, think of this one has two t's, two

meanings, the second or the end part, of two parts.

You like that?

I know you do.

Well, "later" is an adverb or an adjective, and it basically means not now, later.

To make it easy for you, it's the comparative of late.

If something's late, and you know what late means?

On time is here.

If you're late, you're here, on the other side.

Early is here.

What does that mean?

Early is before this time, late is after this time.

Later is even after this time.

Okay?

I will see you later.

All right?

So, it's a comparative, it can be a comparative of late, he is late, she is later, but it

also can be just to describe something.

It was a late movie.

Cool?

All right.

So, now that we know all of these, I would like to go back to the board, go back to our

original story, "Business as Usual", and see how we can correct E's use of words.

Are you ready?

Let's go.

And it is time for us to do "Business as Usual" and go to the board.

Now, it's our test time, and as you can see, I have done our bonus work, our quiz for the

end, or our homework, and we're going to fill in the gaps here.

Gaps means spaces.

So, let's see, from looking at the original story, what word do you think should go here

now?

James.

I'm sorry.

Hey, James, can you give me some - yes.

The C is with a soft S sound, advice, a noun.

Give me some advice.

We can see this is telling us - a determiner telling us how much advice, some advice.

Next.

Sure E, what do you need?

Next.

What's the best way to get a pay raise from my boss?

Well...

The hint I will give you here is we added an S to tell you there are two meanings for

this one.

That's right.

So, besides, apart from - see, apart from is one of them - it means in addition, and

that S told us there's more than one meaning.

Well, besides going to work, how do you help the company?

So, in addition to that.

I stay something than everyone else.

What would that be?

That's right.

Later.

There's late and later.

Now, do you remember the hint I gave you for the other word that was "later"?

It has two Ts, right?

And it would be the second half or the second thing.

In this case, we're just comparing it to everyone stays late while I stay later than everyone

else.

That is goodie, but that something means you should get more money when you don't do a

lot of work.

What would that be?

We talked about "hard" being difficult and "hard" being the density of something.

My head, remember?

But in this case, we're going to use "hardly".

Remember what "hardly" means?

Not significant.

And that really means something when we say that staying late doesn't mean anything if

you're not doing any work.

That's hardly important, right?

So we have to use "hardly" here.

Now finally, we're going to go to the last one, and what do you think that is?

Well we said "infer" comes from "evidence", and when you infer something, you're going

to probably say it directly because you have evidence to say this is why I believe.

But when you don't say something directly and you kind of hint at it, you are...

Well I'm going to say "implying" because that's appropriate in this case, but are you trying

to imply that I'm lazy?

He's not saying it directly, saying it in a round way, roundabout way.

"Well, you don't really work hard, so staying late doesn't matter because you're lazy."

And then he's like, "Damn it, how can you do that to me?"

Yeah, that's what happens.

So this is our little test, and if you go back over the video, you can see what words

I had there instead, and what words you have there now, correct?

Alright.

Now, I'm going to go over our bonus.

A lot of times you'll hear people say "made with", "made of", or "made by", and that might

be confusing for you because the main word they're using, a verb, is "made", and they're

simply changing the preposition.

So how am I going to make it easy for you?

I'm going to give you a quick guide, because these are, remember, confused words, where

you might think "made of" is "made with" or "made by", and I'm going to help you.

So "made with", so "with" means comes together, and ingredients.

When you make a cake, you say it's made with eggs, milk, and butter, because these things

come together.

"Made with", those are the ingredients.

But what happens if you have something like my sweater here?

Do you say "made with"?

Well, you can say it's made with cotton, but that doesn't make sense.

When you want to talk about the actual material itself, the object, you can say it's made

of, and it means this is the stuff that it comes from.

So it's - here's an example.

Cheese is made with or made of milk?

Yeah, it's made of milk.

That's the material that goes into making cheese.

Yeah, you can make cheese or you made cheese with different things, but the material it

is has to be made of.

"Made by" is how is it made, right?

Made by fairy hands, or made by, I don't know, adding this or that, and that's how you did

it.

Cool?

All right, so now that we've got those done, so you've got your bonus section saying how

you use "made" in English, and we can modify "made" to tell you the ingredients of something,

the materials of something, or how it's made.

Let's look at your homework.

In this particular case, I'm going to say there are two words that I have taught you

today in Confused Words that you are now clear on, that you can answer these two questions

for me.

Okay?

So, number one is "Something James, who else was in the story?"

Something James, who else was in the story?

And the second one is, "What something would you give an English student?"

Okay?

Now, these ones are particularly hard because they can be used for business, and some of

these words even native speakers don't use that often.

So, I'm going to offer you 100,000 points for every one you get correct.

What does that mean?

Whether you're watching this video at engVid or whether you're watching this video on YouTube,

what I'd like you to do is if you see a student get these correct, give them a thumbs up or

a check or whatever it is on the platform you're using to tell them they got it correct.

And we're looking at...

You know, we can look back and see if someone's got 15.

They got 15,000...

Oh, I said 100,000.

That'd be 1.5 million points.

So, help your other students know that they're learning English by checking it off.

Okay?

And test yourself.

I've seen many times many students put down responses, so it becomes a community thing.

All right?

I also want you to go to www.engvid.com where we have the quiz that follows this and many

other amazing teachers I'm sure you're going to enjoy.

And I'm going to ask you two things before I go, and then I've got a little something

special for you.

Like me.

Like me.

Love me.

Please like me.

If you're not going to love me, like me.

Please.

You've watched...

This is a video.

This is a video, which means you liked the video enough to see what I was going to show

you.

So, press "like".

And while you're at it, please be honest with yourself.

Is this the first video you watched?

The 10th?

The 11th?

Subscribe.

It helps with the YouTube algorithm, and that means I can get to you faster, which is, I

think, what you want because you keep coming back.

Right?

It's like I'm your...

I'm your pusher.

That'll be for another video.

Anyway, I want to leave you with a quote.

I told you this was about business, so I'm going to give you one of the best business

quotes ever.

"I'm going to make him an offer that he can't refuse."

Okay, that's a terrible impersonation of...

If I can remember his name, a great actor, he was in a streetcar named Desire, I can

remember the character he played, but Marlon Brando.

And this is from the movie The Godfather.

Okay?

And the movie was by Francis Ford Coppola.

Great movie, one of the best movies ever produced, you should watch it.

And if you don't know, "I'm going to make him an offer that he can't refuse", you'll

watch the movie and you'll laugh.

You'll go, "That James is a funny guy, he's a very funny guy, you know?"

If you don't watch the movie, I just sound like an idiot, but I can take that.

It's a great line.

Anyway, so you got my quote, you got what I'm asking you to do, you're going to go visit

the website.

Have a great day, and I look forward to seeing you later.

Okay?

I'm not trying to imply anything, but I'm inferring that you got knowledge, you stayed

here this long, you should subscribe and come back.

See you later.