Hello, fearless learners!
Welcome to this lesson where we’re going to talk about collocations with the word “have.”
If you don’t know what collocations are, don’t worry. I put a link to a lesson where I talk about collocations in detail. To summarise, collocations help you sound natural when speaking. So make sure you watch that video and you’re going to have your mind blown. You’re going to continue learning collocations as long as you are learning English.
Now let’s get started.
Have a go
So “have a go” is very simple. It just means to take a turn. Take a look at the screen, these two people are hanging out together, one of them is waiting, the other on is playing with a yo-yo. The the waiting person could say, “Can I have a go?” This just means that they want to try playing with the yo-yo as well. The other person could say “just wait, I’m going to play a few turns and you can have a go”. Let’s say that your sister or brother is playing a game and you want to have a turn as well. So you can say “can I have a go” or “that looks really fun, can I go next?”
Have a go at
“Have a go at” is similar to the previous one, but it has a completely different meaning. It means to criticise . Criticise is to say something that someone is doing wrong. For example, if your boss criticized you for being late, you could say, “My boss had a go at me for being late.”
“Don’t have a go at me, I didn’t do anything wrong” is a response to someone criticizing you. Okay, let’s move on to the next one.
Have a Nap
The next on is to have or take a nap. This means that you are not going to sleep for eight hours, you are going to sleep for 20 minutes. For example, you might say, “I had a nap in the afternoon when I felt tired.” Sometimes you might want to take nap on the sofa for maybe 10, 20, 30 minutes, so you’ll say “I feel tired, I think I’ll have a nap.”
Have a word
“Have a word” means to talk to someone quickly. This is either to get advice from them or to tell them something. For example, if you want to talk to someone quickly, you could say, “Could I have a word?” If you want to talk to them about a specific thing, you could say, “I wanted to have a quick word with you about [topic].”
If you were at school and you wanted to talk to your teacher to your child’s teacher you would say “I wanted to have a quick word with you about Suzanne’s grades” or “Suzanne’s homework”. “I wanted to have a quick word with you about yesterday’s incident in the classroom”. Next one,”I was hoping to have a word with her before lunch.” This means that you want to talk to someone before they go to lunch. This shows that you are short on time.
Summary
Today we learned the following collocations:
“have a go”
“have a go at”
“have a nap”
“have a word”
If you want all the notes that I’ve shown you on the screen, all you have to do is go to my website www.blackboardenglish.com/blog to download the pdf version of these notes.
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Thank you so much for listening and coming to class and I’ll see you in the next lesson, bye.