Subtitles section Play video Print subtitles Are you surprised? I'm surprised. Every day, I'm surprised. I wake up and I'm like "Wow, I didn't die. I'm surprised I'm still here." I'm more surprised that you haven't given me a donation. Come on, what's going on? Open your pockets, open your wallet, give me some money. I'm dying here! Today, I'm going to surprise you with some surprising plurals. Now, plurals means that something has an "s", the opposite of plural is singular, and I tell you all the time, English does not really follow a logical pattern, and this is a very wonderful exception to this, and the reason why you make these mistakes - it's not your fault. It's English's fault. I always tell you; I think when they were making my language, they were drunk, mmhmm. They were just drinking and said let's just put an "s" here, but don't put one here, because that'll be too easy and follow a pattern. So, today's lesson is on surprising plurals. You're going to be so surprised because I have a green thing. Isn't that surprising enough? So, the first one that I always want to exemplify and tell people is that people, yeah, are always plural. This means one is a person, and we do have the word "persons" in English, but we don't say that. Maybe your textbook says that. Your textbook's stupid, because we don't say that, so people are always plural. So, when you're taking about people, we need to use the verb "to be" in the plural sense. We can't say "people is", we're going to say "people are". So, people are always plural. People are always going to work. People are always buying things they don't need. People are always copying other people. Huh. The next one is everyone. So, logically in your brain, we have everyone or everybody, and these are the same, okay? Everyone and everybody is the same word. We think that everyone and everybody must be many people. You're right, it is many people, but guess what? This is actually not a plural! This - for some strange reason, we treat as a singular. So, if we have a verb here in the present tense, we have to say "everyone likes" or "everybody feels". I hear people say, "Everyone like me". Hm, no, no, they don't actually. Oh, ahem, of course they do, but you have to say, "Everyone likes me." So, everyone and everybody, we treat this as a singular, so you need to put the "s" on the base verb. It's the same for no one and nobody. Logically, in your brain, no one, not one, oh, that might work, but nobody, eh, one. It has - it might make a little bit more sense, because these are actually singular, so you need to put the "s", but again, I hear people say, "No one care", but you have to say "No one cares", or "Nobody wants", okay? And again, no one and nobody have the exact same meaning. Everyone and everybody is the exact same. It doesn't matter, choose your favorite, but remember, these ones are singular. You must put the "s" on the verb. And this might be probably the strangest one of all. All of the. So you're thinking, so, "all of the..." means "every", okay, which means more than one. Not in English. We have to say, "All of the hamburgers", so our noun here has to be a plural noun if it's plural. Now, if it's a singular noun, it's cool, but some of the, so, some of the people, we don't need an "s", remember, but some of the dogs, we can't say "Some of the dog". That would be a portion of the dog. Some of the dog is delicious to eat, but other parts - no! No, don't eat the dogs! Come on! Some of the dogs are cute. Again, we have the negative "none of the", none of the pizzas are delicious, unfortunately. So, when we have "All of the", "Some of the" and "None of the" with a noun that's plural, we have to make sure that we put an "s" on the plural noun. So, these are words that I hear frequently people who do not speak English as their native language make mistakes on, and it's cool. Just try and remember these guys always get an "s", yay for the "s". And then, we have words that - hey, guess what, these ones don't need an "s" at all, and the first one is the word vocabulary. It is actually not vocabularies. Now, I have a funny story. I was sent an offer for a job and they said "Ronnie, please make a scenario about" now, this is an English school, okay, this is an English school, "Please make a scenario about a child who knows many vocabularies." What? I'm sorry, you're an English school, and you're sending me this as "vocabularies"? Guess what? Ronnie doesn't want this. Ronnie's not taking this because "vocabulary" is what we see in English is uncountable. You can't have vocabularies, you can only have vocabulary. It is an uncountable noun, okay. So, most of these ones I'm going to tell you about, we call uncountable nouns, and there's an "s" just to make your life more confusing. The other one, so, I know this website, yeah, maybe two of the websites, and they like to pretend to teach English as well. And when I look at their websites, they have things like "slangs". And I think wow, in India, do all of the people learning English learn incorrectly that it's "slangs"? And I go "Oh, Lord Jesus, crazy people.", because it's not "slangs", it's "slang". So, be careful. Be careful what you're learning, be careful about the knowledge that people are giving you, because it could be wrong! Ah, go figure. We don't have "informations", we only have one, and it's called "information", so you can get a lot of wrong information on the internet. Be careful. Does your friend try to help you and give you encouragement and tell you what to do? Actually, this word is "advice", and it's not plural. You can't have "advices", even if it's from many people, it's just "advice, so you can say, "My five friends gave me advice.". They can't give you advices. I like this one, this is my favorite. I go to a restaurant sometimes. Sometimes, I go to a restaurant because I eat food, wow, and I see on the menu "shrimps" and I go "Oh, that's so cute, shrimps". Ah, no, it's just "shrimp". I know you want more than one shrimp, this is where English doesn't make sense, so I'm going to walk up to a restaurant and I'll be like "Oh, I would like the shrimp, please." And they're like "One shrimp!". Waah! I want more! But, again, shrimp for some reason is uncountable. I don't know why. Now, as I told you, the reason why you make these mistakes is because maybe in your language, these words are in plural. Spanish, Portuguese, "vacaciones", I don't know how to say the word in your language, but you guys say "vacations". Guess what, "vacations" we don't use. We don't say "I went on vacations.", but in your language, you say "vacaciones" and there's an "s", so you go, "There must be an 's' in English." Sorry, there's not. So just be careful. Furniture, we don't have furnitures. What's furniture? Furniture are things like desks, tables, chairs, beds, those all have "s", but generally as a group, it's just furniture. Oh, do you have knowledge? Or knowledges? Because if you have knowledges, you'd better check yourself because you can only have one. This is, again, another uncountable noun. Some animals - we say in the plural, dog - dogs, cat - cats, some we don't. So, for example, sheep, we don't say sheeps, they're just sheep. One sheep, seven sheep. Fish as well, when the fish are all hanging out together and they're the same fish, we just call them fish. If we have many different kinds of fish, then we can get into the plural, but we're not going there right now, and the delicious animal that Santa Claus uses for his sleigh, deer. We don't say deers, we call them deer, so some animals in English are uncountable. And, again, I think that when they were deciding this, the guy's like, or the girl's like "Okay, so let's make sheep uncountable, but let's make dogs countable because I don't know." I still haven't figured that out. Then we have words that you guys are going to say the singular and then put an "s" on it, or you're going to say the plural and put an "s" on it. Example: "Teacher, when I was a childrens..." Oh wow, hold on. You, at some point in your life, were more than one person collectively? So, when you were young, you were five different people and you became into one entity? This is interesting. Let's have a chat, okay? Are you mutated? So, we have to be careful. All of these words do not have an "s", because we have specifically words for the singular and the plural. And again, with the pronunciation of this crazy language, let's go through this. So, when you look at this word, it looks like "woah-man", "woah-man!", but it's actually woman. Woman. Woman. So, this one is singular. And in the plural, we say women. The best way for me to teach you this is swimming. So, swimming women, it's going to sound like this - "wimmin", and this one is going to sound like "wo-min". So, singular we have "wo-min", I am a woman. And plural, we have "wimmin", there are many women. You can't say "There are many womans." That's wrong. Tooth, okay, one of these guys, only one, is called a tooth. More than one are called teeth. So, you can't say "teeths" and you can't say "tooths", but you might have known a lesson I did about crazy English. If not, go check it out because there's a thing that still doesn't make sense to me. The thing that we use to brush our teeth, yeah, it's called a toothbrush, and the liquid or the gel that we put on our toothbrush is called toothpaste. So, I can just blame alcohol for this. I don't know what else to say, I have no other excuse for the people that made this language than "Were you loaded? What's going on?" So, tooth is singular, teeth is plural. Toothbrush - check out that lesson, it's kind of funny. And then we have man, which is one guy, and then we have men, which is more than one guy. I'd like to give you one super amazing special tip, and this is going out to Rika, because you're a brilliant girl. My friend has decided a way to avoid saying words that are confusing for her. So, instead of saying "woman" or "women" and getting this confused, smart girl, or she says "ladies". Ah, she said "Where's that lady?" Now, the difference in English between woman or women and lady and ladies is a little bit different. Lady refers to someone who is well educated, maybe very beautiful, kind of a higher class than women. It's not 100% true, you can use these words interchangeably, it doesn't matter, but when I think of the word "lady", I think of a kind of a higher class of a lady. So, my friend has made this brilliant way, instead of mixing up woman or women, she just says lady and ladies. Woah, nice! Now, you can do the same thing with man and men. You can say guy and guys. You can say dude and dudes. So, if there's a word in English that you hate, first of all, try and say it, try and pronounce it, but if you can't, choose another word, because hey, why not? Makes your life easier. This is a huge thing as well that I hear a lot of people saying. Child - I have five childs. Cool, so you have one child that becomes five - oh yeah, but you're the mother, you're the one who was five children when you were younger, and now you're one, it doesn't make sense still, so. If you have one, it's a child. If you have more than one, it's children. The easy way around this is kid and kids. You will probably get to understand that when we speak English naturally, we don't use the world child and children. It's too long, we usually say kid and kids. Even in advertising, why? How many letters do I have to print here? How many letters do I have to print here? So, most of the time, signs in English are going to read kid and kids instead of child and children simply because of the fact because it's shorter. It saves you time, saves me money. So, I want you to think about your language and I want you to understand that just because you have a plural word, it doesn't always happen that way in English. So, we have words that actually have different singulars and plurals, these words here are called uncountable nouns, which means you cannot use a plural. Well, you can, but it's wrong, and then we have the word like "people", people are always plural, and words like this where you have to put the "s" on the verb. I'm just going to leave now, because it's just too much! Bye!
A2 plural singular uncountable people noun language I HATE English! Surprising plurals and singulars ? 9 1 Summer posted on 2020/07/30 More Share Save Report Video vocabulary