Hey again and welcome to a new day in the Top English Hacks mini course here at English Buzz.
Today I want to talk to you about the verb TO GET and how you should be using it all the time in order to sound more authentic and natural in English.
So, what the problem? Well, English IS a rich language with tons of different verbs and many different ways to say something, but unfortunately us native English speakers are quite lazy and we often, like almost always, just use the verb to GET instead of a more proper, formal sounding verb.
Lets look at some examples:
"I arrived home late last night." - This is the sort of thing that a textbook teaches you to say. But honestly, we don't often say that. Usually we'll just simply say: "I got home late last night."
And the meaning is going to be exactly the same as "I arrived home late last night."
So lets look at a some more examples where we do this:
Instead of saying: "I received a letter in the mail." we will often say "I got a letter in the mail."
Or you might ask someone: "Do you understand it?", but we might simply say "Do you get it?"
"I bought a new shirt last week" is the same as saying "I got a new shirt last week."
Now there is one thing to be careful about here. Let's look at this sentence:
A 16 year old girl says "I got a new car last month."
Here it's not entirely clear if the girl means that she bought a new car last month or if someone bought the car for her as a gift. After all, she's just 16 years old and likely can't afford to buy a car on her own, so its unlikely that by "Got a car" she actually means "Bought a car".
So, sometimes it's important to understand the context of how something happened. And in those situations you shouldn't use the verb "To get", but instead should use a proper verb.
However, more often than not the context isn't so important, we're just chatting with friends and the result of our actions (getting a new car, getting a letter, a text message) is the important part of the conversation, not HOW we got those things. And therefore usually it's perfectly fine and acceptable to use GET.
So keep this trick in mind next time you're having a conversation in English. By replacing verbs with GET you really are going to sound much more authentic and natural in English and as a result, you'll sound a lot more like a native English speaker.
That's it for today's lesson but tomorrow I'm going to send you another email with another awesome hack for you, so I'll see you in the next lesson!
