When you teach someone your experiences, can you say "I transferred my experiences"? or is there a better verb to describe it?
3 Answers
"Shared" is actually more common in English. Also, though you have many experiences, you are talking about them as a group when you share them with someone, so you would use the singular form of "experience". Thus, you'd end up with "I shared my experience."
-
2Wait, there's a subtlety here. If by "experience" you mean "accumulated knowledge and skill", then yes, you use the singular. Like, "I shared my experience in auto mechanics." But if you mean "interesting event(s) that happened to me", then you use the plural if you are discussing more than one event. "I shared some experiences I had during my trip to Europe."– JayAug 13, 2013 at 13:18
Transferred isn't correct, because it means you're giving up your experiences to someone else, and when they have them you no longer do. Here's one definition:
transfer (also trans·fer·al) The conveyance or removal of something from one place, person, or thing to another.
So you would not say that you transferred an experience, because sharing them with others does not remove them from your memory or knowledge.
As lonehorseend says, shared is the word we tend to use in English to refer to letting others know of our experiences.
We could only afford to send one member of our team to the conference, but it all worked out because he was more than happy to share his experiences with the rest of the team when he got back.
I sort of agree with Lonehorseend and WendiKidd, but not quite.
If you are talking about "experience" in the sense of interesting stories you have to tell, then yes, we say "share experiences", not "transfer".
But if you are talking about acquired skills, then it is more common to say "share", but people do say "transfer", as in, "We have asked Bob to transfer his experience to the new members of the team." (See, for example, http://www.rainmaker.no/?page_id=28 or http://homepage.ntlworld.com/nick.heap/Expertransf.htm.)