Mostly and Almost

Hello and welcome to today's episode of the Gold Forest English podcast. My name is Jordan and today I want to talk about two words that are quite similar and they often get confused by language learners.

The two words that I want to talk about today are mostly and almost. These two words are quite often confused, so let's have a look at them together and individually, so that we can understand the differences and how to use them.

So, if we take a sentence about a train, about a train is on time, so remember, on time means that the train is arriving and leaving at the correct time. It's the correct schedule. The train is on time. Normal sentence to say that the train is leaving and and arriving at the correct time. If we say with the word mostly: The train is mostly on time. So the meaning of this sentence is that the train is usually on time. It's generally on time. It's normally on time. The train is mostly on time. We're saying that in most situations, most days, the train is often on time. It's rarely late.

Now, if we look at the same idea, the same sentence, but with the word almost, we can see how the meaning changes. So the train is on time… The train is almost on time. When we say the word almost on time, it means it's close to being on time, but actually it's not on time. We can think of it as the meaning nearly or not quite. So if I say that, the train is almost on time, it means that it is a little bit late. It's not on time, but it's very close to being on time. Maybe it's a two minutes late or one minute late. It's close. It's nearly on time, but it's not on time.

So, the train is mostly on time. Generally normally, often. The train is almost on time. It's nearly on time, close to on time, but not quite. So the word mostly, we're thinking about the majority, in general, most situations, mostly, often connected with the number or frequency of something happening. For example, I mostly eat rice for breakfast. It means most days I eat rice, but not always. Maybe five days a week I have rice at breakfast. So mostly connected with numbers, frequency, the quantity of something, to say that it's normally, it's usually like this. however, with the word almost, we're thinking more in terms of the quality, how close something is, it's not completely there. It's not quite at that point, it's not quite this adjective, but it's very close to being at that adjective, or that verb or that situation. So I could say, He almost won the race. He was running in a race and he almost won, meaning he got second place. But he was very nearly first place, but not quite. So mostly general, usually, and almost nearly, but not not completely. So these two words are quite similar, but the meanings are quite different and we use them in very different ways.

So, as always, I've got a full blog post on the website, goldforestacademy.com. If you want to look with more detail and see some connected phrases and words and things like that, there's some more information for you to look at on the website, on the blog post. But for the podcast, that's going to be it for today.

Thank you very much for listening and I hope you are having a good week. Take care. I'll see you in the next episode.