S03E17 - Do you remember?

Hello and welcome to today's episode of the Gold Forest English podcast. As always, my name is Jordan.

Today, I want to talk about two words that are very, very easy to mix up. The words are remember and remind. They're both memory words, but they do different things. Many, many students confuse these words and use the wrong one, and using the wrong word can make your sentence very strange, or it can completely confuse your listener.

So today I want to look at these words carefully, talk about their differences and how to use them, and also talk about some idioms that you can use in everyday conversation that are also connected to memory.

First things first: let's start with remember. The word remember is about your own memory. It happens inside your head. You are bringing information back into your mind.

So, for example, if someone asks you, "Do you remember that woman's name?" and you can bring her name back into your mind, you can say, "Yes, I remember her name. She is called Sarah." This action is happening in your mind. It's you bringing the information back to yourself.

Another example: "I always remember to lock the door before I leave." Again, you're doing the action by yourself. You are remembering. You are bringing the idea to your mind by yourself. Your brain, your action. This is our normal word: remember.

Now the tricky word that students often confuse is remind. Remind is different. It means someone else, or something else, makes you remember. This action comes from outside.

So, for example, if you know that you need to call your mother later, but also you know that you will forget, you could say to your husband or your wife, "Please remind me to call my mum." You're asking the other person to help you remember. Later, your partner will tell you, "You need to call your mum," and then you will remember. So this kind of help to bring the information to your mind is not coming from your own mind. It's coming from outside. Another person or another thing is helping you to remember something. It's causing you to remember.

Another common example is when a song or a smell helps to bring back a memory. You might say, "This smell reminds me of my mother's cooking." It's the smell that is helping you to remember. The action is coming from outside of your body. It's coming from the smell.

So this is the key contrast. Remember is about your own memory working, bringing the information back to your memory. Remind is coming from outside, helping you to remember, or causing you to remember.

A very common mistake that I hear students say is things like, "This picture remembers me of my holiday." This is incorrect English, because the picture cannot remember you. The picture has no brain. The picture reminds you. The correct sentence is, "This picture reminds me of my holiday." Looking at the picture causes you to remember the holiday.

So, if you think that you will forget something, you might ask somebody to remind you. They will help you to remember. So those are our two vocabulary words: remember and remind. They are simple words, they are important words, but we need to be careful to use them correctly.

Now that we've talked about those two words, I want to talk about two idioms that are also about memory. Remember: an idiom is a fixed phrase. We can't change it. We can't change the words. It has a specific, special meaning.

The first idiom is "It slipped my mind." This is a very simple idiom. It simply means "I forgot." It's gentle, it's casual. It's a very soft way to say that I forgot.

So for example, imagine a colleague expected you to send an email, but you didn't. You could say, "I'm so sorry. It completely slipped my mind." Of course, this means that you forgot, but it does make it feel a bit softer, a bit more casual, a bit more friendly and gentle.

The second idiom is "On the tip of my tongue." This is a very common idiom when you can almost remember a word, almost remember a name. You cannot remember it right now, but it feels very close to your memory. You can't quite get it.

So, for example, if you're watching a film and you see an actor, you might say, "Oh, I know that actor. I know his name. Ah, I can't remember. It's on the tip of my tongue." Or, of course, if you're trying to remember an English vocabulary word—you know the word in your own language, but you can't quite remember the word in English—you could say, "I know the word, I'm sure I know it. It's on the tip of my tongue. I just can't quite remember it."

These two idioms are fixed. That means you cannot change the words. We can't say, "It slipped my brain" or "It slipped my memory." You have to say, "It slipped my mind." You can't say, "It's on my tongue tip" or "It's on the edge of my tongue." You must say, "It's on the tip of my tongue." They are fixed phrases.

So, to summarise everything:

- Remember – you do it yourself, inside your head.

- Remind – someone or something else makes you remember.

- "It slipped my mind" – a gentle idiom that means "I forgot."

- "On the tip of my tongue" – I almost remember, but I can't say it right now.

So these are four very natural items connected with memory.

All right, as always, I've written the full blog post on this topic at GoldForestAcademy.com. In the blog post, I talk about the differences between these words and also other words like recall and memorise. So go and check that out if you want a bit more information about memory words.

That's going to be it for today's episode. I hope you will remember these phrases, and if you forget, I hope that something reminds you. Thank you very much for listening. I'll see you in the next episode. Goodbye.