LOOK, WATCH or SEE?

LOOK, WATCH or SEE?

Hello everyone and welcome back to English with Lucy.

Today I’ve got a grammar lesson for you, well, sort of a grammar and vocabulary lesson. It’s all about “watch, look and see,” three words that seem to be very, very similar. They are similar, they’re really similar words, but we use them in different situations and they cause a lot of my darling students a lot of difficulty and a lot of confusion. So, let’s get started. I’m first going to break down, word by word and then we’re going to compare them to make sure that you’ve really got it in your head.

I swear down, if people I don’t know don’t stop sending me Skype requests, I’m going to go bananas. OK, firstly “to look”. “Look” can be an exclamation. In a sentence, we use it with the preposition, “at,” “to look at something”. When we “look at something”, we direct our eyes to the object, so “I’m looking at you,” we’ve got that movement and then we pay attention to it. So we direct our eyes to something and pay attention to it, so when “look” has an object, we use “at”, “look at that dog”, for example, as opposed to “look over there”, so I can’t say, “look the dog”, it’s, “look at that dog”.

“To see” means to notice something using our eyes. So this one’s more by chance maybe. Remember, this verb is irregular, “see, saw, seen”. I’ve got a video about common, irregular verbs, that you can watch here, if you want more information, irregular verbs, their conjugations and their pronunciations. So, “to see something” is to notice something using our eyes, so, “I saw your Mum at the coffee shop”, I noticed her with my eyes. Now, “watch, to watch”, is very similar to “to look”, however, the way we use them, slightly different. “To watch” means we look at something for a longer period of time normally and normally the object is moving or changing, so, “I watch TV”, because the TV screen moves. I wouldn’t “look at the TV”, the TV, if I “looked at the TV”, it would just be a brief glance, a quick look, but “I watch it,” I’m fixated on it.

So one of my favourite things to do is to sit in a coffee shop window and do people watching and “I watch the people go by,” because they’re moving. I don’t just “look at them,” because that would just be a brief, shorter glance, and maybe they wouldn’t be moving, “I watch” and I see what they’re doing. However, talk about films, sports matches or concerts, we can also use “see”, so, “I saw Beyonce last year,” or “I went to see Chelsea play against Arsenal”, “I watched the football match”, but “I went to see a specific game”. However, with the television, we always “watch the television”. “See” we use more, when we go out with the intention of “watching something”. Cor, it is complicated, isn’t it? Don’t worry, we’re going to compare them all. OK, what’s my favourite film? I think my favourite film is The Shawshank Redemption.

Comment below, what’s your favourite film? I’m always looking for good film recommendations. So, if I say, “last night, “I saw The Shawshank Redemption”, and “last night I watched The Shawshank Redemption”, do they mean different things, or do they mean the same thing? They mean different things. If I say, “I watched it”, it means, “I was at home watching it”. If I say, “I saw it”, it means I went out and I went to the cinema and “I saw it there,” “I watched the film outside of my home”, I travelled with the intention of “seeing it”. OK, another one, “I watched a man digging a hole”, “I saw a man digging a hole”. What’s the difference here? It’s not about music or film or public performances, so the difference is quite stark, it’s quite a strong difference. If “I watched the man digging the hole”, it means I sat there and I observed the whole, or a large part of the process. If “I saw him digging the hole”, it means that I maybe walked down the street and I noticed that there was a man digging a hole.

Right, that’s it for today’s lesson. Your homework is to write three sentences using, “look, watch and see” correctly and I want you to try and make them as funny as possible, I want you to try and make me laugh, because I love reading your comments and the funny ones, the really funny ones will get a little love heart from me, when I see them.