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The sentence below is from my book. I know that "little" means a small amount. Does "very little" mean having no time at all or still having a very small amount of time?
Many people work long hours, leaving very little time for leisure activities.
A native speaker paraphrased the sentence to: "many people have experienced a loss of leisure time due to having to work long hours." That's why I thought "very little" might mean zero.
It has no special meaning. "very little time" means "a small but non-zero amount of time"
Similarly if you lose leisure time, it doesn't imply that you lose it all. You can experience a loss of leisure time, but still have a little left.
But the paraphrase has a slightly different meaning. The paraphrase means "they have less leisure time than they had before" and the original means "now they have very little leisure time"
