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Imagine a close friend of you (A) has faced a loss recently and they are deeply sad. You arrange a gather-together and while you are chatting with your other friends suddenly you forget about your friend. A common friend of you and your close friend (B) comes to you (who has noticed that "A" is crying in his privacy) and whereas "B" knows that you are a closer friend to "A", asks you to go beside him and console him. I was wondering if you could let me know whether in AmE the self-made sentence below sounds natural or not. If not, then please let me know how a native speaker would say the same thing in a natural way:

  • Go and sit beside him and console him a little.

2 Answers 2

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Your sentence is not wrong, and I don't think anyone would misunderstood your meaning. "Console" is a somewhat formal word though, and it sounds strange to "console a little". After all, why would you only want to comfort someone a little bit? It's also a command, not a request, which might bother some people, and the location is really unnecessary unless it is really important to actually sit next to the person.

I think you should go comfort him

Is more concise and less demanding.

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It sounds unnatural in conversational English. They could say:

  • A looks sad, maybe you should go talk to him
  • I saw A crying, he could use some cheering up
  • Could you comfort A for me?
  • A needs a shoulder to cry on right now
  • Go sit and talk with A; he looks sad

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