English Vocabulary - LOST

Hello there. My name's Ronnie, and sorry to be a bit late there. I got lost. I have no

idea where I am. Oh, no, here I am. Okay, I'm good. Today I'm going to talk to you about,

or teach you more, about a word that a lot of people misuse, and I'm here to help you

to use it correctly. The word is "lose," or in the past tense of the verb, "lost." Does

anyone watch the American TV show "Lost"? Anyone? You do? Good. Yeah, awesome. Okay,

this is a lesson on how to use these correctly, okay? I hear this said incorrectly about 90%

of my day, so please listen to this. It'll help you. It'll be wonderful.

The first one as a verb, and we usually talk about this -- honk, honk -- in the past. We

usually say, for example -- oh, someone lost. "I lost my wallet." Oh, my God. But it's usually

like, "Oh, I lost my wallet. What am I going to do?" You're not calm about it. You go,

"Yeah, I lost my wallet." Doesn't happen, but that's the grammar, okay? "I lost my wallet."

You can basically put any noun you would like in the sentence. "I lost my wallet." "I lost

my cat." "I lost my dog." "I lost my train of thought." Means you lost what you were

going to say. The only one that's different is this.

I hear a lot of people say this -- "I lost my weight." Now, grammatically, this should

be all right. We should say, in theory, "I lost my weight." But unfortunately, English

is never that easy, and for this word "weight," you can never, ever, ever say "my." All you

say is, "I lost weight." Okay? So that's the only one that's different. Anything else is

cool with "my." So, "I lost my wallet." "I lost my job." It means you got fired. "I lost

my wife." "I lost my husband." I have no idea where they are. Okay?

The next one we're looking at is an adjective. Okay? This is when we talk about yourself,

and let's say you travel to a new big city, and you take some crazy bus, and you go on

an adventure, and you come out, and you have no idea where you are. Uh-oh. You're going

to say, "I am lost." Okay? As an adjective, we need to put "lost" here. People always

say, "I lost my way." This is more natural to say, "I am lost." "I lost my way" is not

wrong, but this is what we normally say in English. "I am lost," in the present form.

Or if you're talking about the past, you're going to say, "I was lost." So after the massive

train adventure or bus adventure, you finally find your friends again, and you say, "I was

lost for five hours." And now you're found. Okay.

And the very, very last one is a noun. It's a noun. It's a bad noun. It's "loser." So,

if you're trotting around, and you see someone do this to you, that means they think you

are a loser. "Loser" is a negative way to say that the person is not good, or they haven't

achieved anything in life. So this is a noun. The other way we use this word is in a game.

There's always a winner and a loser. Don't be a "loser." Go to www.engvid.com and do

the quiz. Bye-bye.