Learn English: 11 ‘mind’ expressions

Did you know that there are A LOT of expressions in English with the word "mind" in them? "Mind" is a very common word with several different meanings. In this video, I will teach you the three main ways in which "mind" is used in expressions, and then I'll give you 11 very common expressions using the word. The expressions I'll teach you include: Do you mind?, Would you mind?, What's on your mind?, my mind went blank, mind the gap, have someone in mind, give a piece of my mind, lose one's mind, cross one's mind, make up one's mind, and keep in mind. By learning these expressions, you will improve both your listening and speaking.

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Hello. My name is Emma and in today's lesson I am going to teach you a bunch of new vocabulary expressions. These expressions are all very common and very useful. So, the expressions we're going to learn today all have the word "mind" in them. Okay? And there are a lot. I'm not even covering all of them because there are so many expressions in English with the word "mind", so we're only going to cover some of them, but we're going to cover the main ones.

Okay, so, when we talk about "mind", there are different ways we're talking about mind. "Mind" can have to do with the brain and with thinking or thoughts. Okay? So, sometimes when we're talking about mind we're talking about our brain or we're talking about our thoughts. Sometimes we're talking about something totally different with mind. Sometimes when we're talking about mind we're actually talking about being polite. For example: "Do you mind?" this is something where you're being polite. And then we also use "mind" when we're telling somebody to pay attention to something. For example: "Mind the gap" or "Mind the hole". So we have these three times where we're using "mind" and we have a lot of different expressions for each of these different categories. So we're going to go over each of these. I'm going to teach you a bunch of expressions where "mind" has to do with thought or brain, I'll teach you a lot of expressions where it has to do with politeness, and then I'm going to teach you a lot of "mind" expressions that have to do with paying attention. But this is pretty much one way you can look at these expressions.

So let's get started by talking about... When we're talking about mind, and thoughts, and the brain. So, first, when we talk about "mind" one meaning of "mind" can have to do with pretty much the brain, but it's not exactly the brain. Okay? So your brain is in your head and it's a physical thing. You can touch the brain, you can feel the brain, you can see the brain, smell the brain, so it's physical. Mind is not physical. You can't see the mind because the mind is where your thoughts are, where your memories are, and these are things you can't really see or feel, but they're somewhere in here; we just can't see them because they're not physical. So, for example: Einstein, very famous scientist: "Einstein had a brilliant mind." Okay? So this means Einstein had brilliant thoughts, he was very smart. He had, you know, brilliant ideas. These things are all in his mind. So it's similar to brain, although not exactly the same thing, it's very similar to brain.

We can also say: "psychologist". A psychologist is a job and people who are psychologists, they study the human mind, meaning they look at the brain and they look at people's memories, they look at the way people have ideas, and they think about: "Where do these things come from?" Okay? So they study the human mind. So, a lot of the times when we use the word "mind", we're talking about kind of your brain and your thoughts. You know, we might say: "Oh, Beethoven had an incredible mind", or you know: "In your opinion, which minds were the greatest of the 20th century? Who had the greatest mind?" Meaning: Who had the greatest ideas, and thoughts, and pretty much brain? Okay, so that's "mind".

Now, let's look at another way we use "mind" and that's in the expression: "on someone's mind". So this is a very common expression. In English we often ask: "What's on your mind?" Or we also say: "I have a lot on my mind." So, what does: "on my mind" mean? And make sure you have "on someone's mind", so it can be: "on my mind", "on your mind", "on her mind", "on John's mind", you can pretty much put any person here. What does it mean? Well, when we talk about "on our mind" we're usually talking about problems, so we're usually talking about problems that we are thinking about. These are thoughts, we're thinking about something so it's on our mind.