Timeline for "Watched any" vs "saw any" in a sentence
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
7 events
when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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May 10, 2016 at 6:14 | history | migrated | from english.stackexchange.com (revisions) | ||
May 9, 2016 at 17:25 | comment | added | Ani Menon | @DanBron Thanks for the answer. You could post it as answer. | |
May 9, 2016 at 16:54 | answer | added | Kevin | timeline score: 3 | |
May 9, 2016 at 16:23 | comment | added | Dan Bron | To most native speakers, asking "Saw any good movies?" would mark you as a foreigner (which is to say it is unidiomatic: it's harder than you think to definitively state whether a particular utterance is "wrong" or not, and it gets harder the more you learn about English, as I'm discovering, so I am starting to shy from that label). As to which is better: they're simply options. Use whichever suits you, or whichever you hear more often from (native speaking) people around you. It's worth noting that watch connotes more engagement, is more active, than see (like listen vs hear). | |
May 9, 2016 at 16:19 | comment | added | Ani Menon | @DanBron thanks, I wanted to know which is the better usage? I have heard people using both. Are you saying saw any new movie? is wrong? | |
May 9, 2016 at 16:15 | comment | added | Dan Bron | You can certainly ask "Have you watched any new movies?", but rather than "Saw any new movies?", we'd typically phrase it as "[Have you] seen any good movies?". As I learned on this site, the intentional omission of words which are so predicable that your interlocutor can understand what was omitted simply from context is known as "conversational deletion". Anyway, I think you'd get better and easier to understand answers if you instead asked this (and any follow-up) answers on our sister site dedicated to people trying to learn English as a foreign language, English Language Learners. | |
May 9, 2016 at 16:10 | history | asked | Ani Menon | CC BY-SA 3.0 |