Grammar Tips | Both, either, neither

TRANSCRIPT
Good morning! Happy Monday! I like using hand gestures, mnemonics and charts when I explain English grammar, I think that it makes difficult concepts easy to understand and use. And sometimes I come up with so-called tips and tricks right during the lesson, so I would like to share with you my recent discovery. My today’s tip is about the words “both”, “either” and “neither”. The last two words you can pronounce as either and neither, there is no difference. So, all these three words are used to talk about two things or people, let’s call them A and B. For the word “both” we have A and B or 2/2, for example, “I like both apples and oranges”. For the word “either” we have A or B, or 1 / 2, for example, “I want to go either to the park or to the cinema” and for the word “neither” we have 0 /2 or not A and not B, for example, I like neither cooking nor cleaning.” Attention here, the word “neither” has already a negative meaning, there needs to be an affirmative singular verb, so you can’t say “I don’t like neither cooking nor cleaning”, it needs to be “I like neither cooking nor cleaning”, even though it might seem a bit strange when you try to translate it to your mother tongue. Also, You can use “either” with a negative verb to replace “neither” with a positive verb. For example, you can say “I have neither time nor money” or “I don’t have either time or money”. So the hand gestures that I came up with go as follows, both A and B, either A or B, neither A nor B. It is a simple thing, but it helped my students not to confuse them. I hope that was useful to you as well. Have a great day! Until next week!
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