Spoken vs Written English

Hello and welcome to today’s episode of the Gold Forest English Podcast. My name is Jordan, and today I want to talk about spoken English versus written English.

Students that study with a lot of textbooks can sometimes end up speaking in quite unnatural ways, because written English does not really follow the same rules as spoken English. Written English is always very full, very complete, especially when it’s formal writing. But spoken English, especially casual spoken English, tends to be a lot shorter, and there are a lot more things removed from our sentences. We remove words and we make our spoken sentences shorter and more concise.

So today I want to talk about some of the things that we do with spoken English to make shorter sentences, which is a lot more natural.

A common thing that English speakers do is to remove subjects and auxiliary verbs from our sentences, especially for questions.

So let’s review both of these things - subjects and auxiliary verbs. Both of these things you probably know about, but let’s do a quick review.

Subjects are words like you, he, she, I, they. They are the people words that we use to talk about who does an action. They explain who is doing the action, who is completing the verb. That’s the subject.

Auxiliary verbs are words like do, have, and the verb to be - so is, am, are. These are verbs: do, have, is, am, are. However, in some sentences they are not the main verb.

So for example:

“Do you know him?”

This is an example question. In this sentence, we’ve got the verb do and the verb know. In that question, the main verb is the verb know. The verb do is not the main verb. We call it the auxiliary verb.

Auxiliary basically means extra, a bonus, additional.

So auxiliary verbs like do and have in questions like:

“Do you know him?”

“Have you finished?”

“Are you ready?”

These are all questions that use auxiliary verbs.

Now that we’ve reviewed subjects and auxiliary verbs, we can return to the previous point of spoken English.

In spoken English, we often drop or remove the subjects and auxiliary verbs. This is especially common with questions.

So let’s have a look at some examples.

The first example is:

“Do you want coffee?”

This is a very common question that we might ask: “Do you want coffee?” “Do you want tea?”

However, in natural spoken English, especially in casual situations with friends, we might remove the auxiliary do and remove the subject you. And we would just say:

“Want coffee?”

Instead of “Do you want coffee?”

Now, of course, “Do you want coffee?” is perfectly correct English. There’s no problem with this. But native speakers will often use the shorter, more casual form of “Want coffee?”

We remove the subject you because I’m talking to you, so you don’t need the word you in the sentence. You know that I’m talking to you. And we remove the auxiliary verb do because it’s not important. The only important words are want - the verb - and coffee - the object, the thing that we’re talking about.

So “Do you want coffee?” changes to “Want coffee?”

Similarly, I might ask somebody:

“Have you finished?”

And again, doing the same process, removing the auxiliary verb have and removing the subject you, I have the very short and natural spoken English:

“Finished?”

Just a one-word question, and it keeps the same tone, it keeps the same meaning as the original “Have you finished?” But this is just a very natural, casual way that native speakers will talk using these shorter sentences, shorter questions.

Although this is especially common with questions, we do also use similar shortening techniques with regular sentences.

So for example, the very casual spoken sentence or phrase:

“No problem.”

That has the full meaning, the full sentence of:

“There is no problem.”

But we are removing the extra words. We’re removing the words that don’t matter, and we’re just keeping the key information. “There is no problem” changes to “No problem.”

Now, this topic of spoken English versus written English is quite complex. There are many different ways and reasons that spoken English is often shorter and different from written English.

So if this is an interesting topic for you, I really recommend checking out the blog post on the website, goldforestacademy.com. I wrote this blog post about this topic, covering many different areas of spoken and written English being different, explaining how it’s different, why it’s different, and how to change your full sentences into more natural spoken English.

So if it’s an interesting topic for you, definitely check out that blog post. But if not, no worries. I’ll be making another blog post and another podcast next week.

That’s all for today’s episode. Thank you very much for listening. I’ll see you in the next one. Take care. Goodbye.