Ask Alisha: Your English Questions Answered #223 - Difference between KEEP AWAY vs KEEP OFF | English Grammar for Beginners
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Hi, everybody. Welcome back to Ask Alisha, the weekly series where you ask me questions and I answer them. Maybe. Let's get to your first question this week. First question this week comes from Laura. Hi, Laura. Laura asked, what's the difference between keep away and keep on?

They seem like the same. Yeah, great question. What is the difference between keep away and keep off? They do have kind of a very similar meaning, but let's break down that tiny little difference that we have here. So first, let's talk about keep away.

To keep something off of something else means to do something to prevent something else from like landing on it or going on top of it in some way. So maybe a great example for this might be if you have a picnic outside somewhere and you have your food on the table, but there are lots of flies or bugs or something like that and they want to land on the food, you might say, "Ugh, we need to keep the flies off the food," or "We need to keep the bees off the food."

So, off in this way is like the opposite of on, right? So, the bugs want to go on the food. We want to keep them off. So, this keep doesn't mean like hold, but rather it means prevent something from landing in this case. So, we want to keep the flies or keep the bugs off the food.

the food. So we use this in situations where we're trying to prevent something from happening. So keep that thing off that other thing is the pattern that you will see. On the other hand, keep away can be used in a couple of different situations. There's one situation that's like a little bit of a dangerous situation. Like you find something that's really scary, maybe like a snake, or maybe you find a really, I don't know, dangerous person. You might say keep

away from the snake or like keep away from the tiger, keep away from that guy. It means that thing is dangerous or that thing is bad so that means don't go over there, don't go near that thing. So again this keep doesn't mean like hold or carry, it means like prevent you from going somewhere in this case. So in this case like keep away you could kind of think of it as like maintain a position away

away from that thing or maintain a position that is far from that thing. So, this is the first use of keep away.

So this is one way that we use keep away, like saying don't go near that thing. The other way is the one that's a little bit similar to the keep off meaning that we talked about earlier, but the grammatical structure of this is different. So we might use keep away when we're talking about like that picnic situation earlier. So earlier I said something like make sure that we keep the bugs off the food, right?

We might also use keep away in this situation. Like we might say, we need to keep the flies away from the food. That's an example that we might use to talk about the same situation, but just with a slightly different nuance, yeah? So instead of keep the bugs off,

the food, we might say keep the bugs away. So the difference here is not landing, but also having distance from the food. So it's not just being on top of the food, as in keep off, but it's also creating distance from that thing, from the bugs, in this example sentence.

So this is the difference between keep away and keep off. They do have a very, very close meaning in that we're trying to prevent something from coming maybe onto something else or coming near to something else. But the difference here is whether it's like directly on top of that thing or just

somewhere in the area. So I hope that this answers your interesting question. Thanks very much for sending it along. Okay, let's move on to your next question. Next question comes from Sophia. Hi, Sophia. Sophia asked, what's the difference between intervene and interfere? Oh, this is a super good question. Okay, let's begin by talking about the verb to interfere. So to interfere with something.

Something is usually the grammar pattern that we use when we use this verb, to interfere with something. Like to interfere with an election, for example, or to interfere with data processing or data collection. So this means something is going on, some kind of activity, some kind of process is happening now. So in this example sentence they gave, an election. So that means, for example, a country is choosing their new leader. So let's use this as our example situation.

If we use the sentence "to interfere in an election" or "to interfere with an election," it means that some outside force, like some group or some organization, did something to change the results of that situation. So in this example sentence, "to interfere with an election," it means maybe somebody tried to change the votes, or maybe somebody tried to change the information available in that country

to change the outcome of that election. So to interfere with something is like you're interrupting something or you're changing something that is currently in process. So we'll use typically, like I said, to interfere with something, though you might also hear what I used very, very briefly earlier, once to interfere in. I think I tend to say interfere with a little bit more commonly, but you might hear both of those. So to interfere with something also has this feeling that it's not

supposed to happen or it's maybe an outside force that is not a good force. So it sounds like some interruption or some change is happening that's not originally supposed to be there. So this is really, really interesting when we compare this then to intervene. So when we intervene in something,

We have the same idea of some situation that's going forward. Like let's say, for example, a class. Someone is teaching a class. Or maybe we could even use the election process, I suppose, here. But the deal with intervene is that something is wrong in the process that is happening right

So we might say like, "This teacher is really not doing a good job in the class. They're drunk." Who knows? It's something really crazy that's happening, right? That's a crazy, shocking situation. So when we intervene in a situation, we come into a situation to stop something bad from happening.

So in this example, this really crazy example of like a drunk teacher, oh my gosh, we have to stop that, right? So we might say the principal intervened in the situation or the principal intervened in the class to stop the lecture. So this is an example of how we might use intervene. When we intervene in something, we enter the situation that is happening now in order to change it or in order to stop it because it is bad or because something is wrong.

So with interfere, we don't have this feeling that the situation is wrong or the situation is bad. Rather, the outside force is doing something that might not be good. It might not be the original intent of the situation, but something else is entering and it's changing the outcome in some way.

With intervene, something is wrong or something is not supposed to happen. And so someone enters the situation in order to change it. So this is the difference between intervene and interfere. Super interesting, right? They're very, very close, but the intent is quite different. And the situation before the change in behavior is also really important to consider here.

Very interesting question. Thanks so much for sending it along. I hope that answers it. Okay, let's move on to your next question. Next question comes from Tian. Hi, Tian. Tian asked, "How can I explain something if I don't know the exact word?" Really good question. So this is an important communication skill. So I want everybody to think about how they do this in their native language, because we all forget words from time to time, right? We all forget.

What was that word I just learned? I forgot it. Or just sometimes we just forget a stupid thing, right? Like how do I say fork, right? Every once in a while you just forget

forget things, right? So I want you to think about how you express that when you don't remember a word or when you don't know a word in your native language. There are a lot of different ways that we can do this. We can use our body language, right? We can act out the thing that we're trying to describe. We can use our hands, we can use our faces to express that thing and then someone will hopefully tell us the word, right? So this is one thing we can do. Another thing we can do is give examples. We can say, it's

"It's the thing that you use to do this." Or, "It's the thing that you sometimes need when you go to this place." Right? You can give example situations or example uses of that word. You can give other types of examples depending on the word that you're looking for. You can maybe explain where you heard the word or who used the word or something like that to give the listener a hint. Like, "What was that word again? I forgot." So you can do this to ask for help and to hopefully get the answer from your audience in this way.

The third way that I might suggest to do this, to try to come up with a word you don't know, or to get someone maybe to teach you a word that you don't know, is something that I might call like making it a comparison or creating a comparison with this word. So here's an example of when I needed to do this. I needed to do this for a word I didn't know in the language that I'm studying recently. So I needed to know the verb. The verb that I wanted to use in English was

ooze. This is a true story. So I didn't know how to express that in the language that I'm studying and I thought, gosh, what could I do? I can't think of like an example so clearly but I wanted to try to think of something so that the listener could understand what the situation was at least so that they could suggest something for me. So in my case I thought, gosh, what is something

else that does this verb. So in my case, I thought, okay, when you push down on a sponge and the water comes out of it, that is, in English, oozing. So the sponge is oozing water. And I said, this is the verb I'm trying to say. I don't know how to say this. And then my friend was like,

Oh, I know what you mean now. I've got it. So in that situation, I didn't really have an example and I didn't really have a way to act it out with my body, but I just had to compare it to something that I could explain. Like I knew how to explain the sponge and the water in this case, but I didn't know how to give any other kinds of examples. So I chose to compare it to something that I could explain and then asked my friend,

Does this make sense to you? Can you tell me the word? So in that way, we were able to communicate. I finally got the word that I needed to use, and my friend also understood what I meant right away by using this kind of comparison. So I think that it takes a little bit of training, right? Because when we're in our native languages, it's very easy to just think of the word, right? And then you don't

really have to try after a while when we become fluent in languages, right? But when we're studying another language, we have to sometimes get creative and think of different ways to explain the kinds of things that we want to say. So if you are ever in that situation where you're like, I don't know how to explain this, give yourself kind of like the option to be a little bit creative. Like, oh, what's another way that I could express this same idea? Or what's another way that I could get this person to

think about what I'm trying to say. So you can get a little bit creative with this. These are kind of the three things, the three types of ways that I might try to express an idea if I don't know the word. So I hope that those ideas help you and I hope that that is a helpful and fun way to kind of try to express new ideas or even just ideas that you have forgotten. So thanks very much for sending this interesting question along.

All right, that is everything that I have for this week. So thank you as always for sending your great questions. Remember, you can send them to me at englishclass101.com/ask-alisha. That's a very long URL, so please find the link for this in the YouTube video description. Please send your questions to me

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