Adverbs of Frequency

Hello and welcome to today's episode of the Gold Forest English podcast. My name is Jordan and today I want to talk about adverbs of frequency.

So what are adverbs of frequency? You probably know many of them already. Adverbs of frequency are words like always, sometimes, never. It's these words that talk about how often we do something.

So, for English students, this vocabulary, this type of language, these adverbs of frequency, is often learned quite early. It's quite …umm…quite an early stage thing for students to learn. So it can be a bit basic. However, it can be quite confusing, even for advanced students - often get some confusion about which ones to use. So I thought we'd talk about them today. It's always good to review basic things to help keep the ideas fresh and clear in our minds.

So, I'll start off with some of the more common adverbs of frequency. Of course, we've got the word always, which means 100% of the time . So, for example, she always remembers my birthday. She has never forgotten my birthday, every year she will remember. It's great. She always remembers my birthday.

Two words which are very commonly confused are the words usually and often, usually and often have quite similar meanings, but one of them is slightly more frequent than the other. If we look at the word usually, usually. He usually finishes work at 6 p.m. The word usually means approximately 80% of the time, 80%. The word often is around 60 or 70%, often. We often go out on weekends, - around 60 or 70% of the time, so this means that the word usually talks about actions which are more common, more frequent. Usually is more frequent than often.

Below these words, we've got the middle words, sometimes, around 50%. Sometimes, I sometimes eat lunch at my desk. This is 50% of the time, approximately.

Down in the lower percentages, the less frequent words, we've got things like occasionally. Now, occasionally can be a confusing one for students, because some people feel that occasionally is more than sometimes. But it's not occasionally is less than sometimes. Sometimes is around 50%, and occasionally is around 30%. Occasionally is below sometimes.

And below occasionally we've got words like rarely and seldom, rarely and seldom, these are around 10 or 20% of the time. Seldom is more formal than rarely. but the meaning is the same. It's just a feeling, seldom is more formal feeling, more business or more professional. In casual conversation, we can use the word rarely, and that's around 10 or 20%. He rarely watches TV, he prefers to read books.

So, adverbs of frequency can be a bit confusing, thinking about where they where they rank on the scale, what percentage they have. The only ones that are definite, the only words that are fixed and definite, are always, which is 100%, and never, which is zero percent, all of the other words like usually sometimes rarely seldom, all of these words are approximately. They are around a certain percentage, but not exact numbers, only the words always and never are exact fixed numbers.

So I've got a blog post on the website, goldforestacademy.com, which talks about all of these words and the percentages, as well as some other vocabulary and phrases that can relate to this topic. And I've also put an infographic image on the the Instagram, which is @goldforestacademy. So if you want to, you can save that image to your phone to have a reference of the scale of the these words, these adverbs of frequency.

All right. Well, I hope this little podcast is a bit helpful for you, and I hope you've had a very good day so far. I will talk to you next week. Thank you very much for listening. Goodbye.