 Hi, students. It's Shayna, your teacher from espressoenglish.net, and today I want to answer a question I actually got on yesterday's video, which is about the difference between the words afraid, scared, and frightened. Now, these three words actually all mean the same thing, to feel fear. You feel nervous and like you're maybe in danger. So there's not really a difference in definition, but there is a difference in the way we use these three words in English. So I'm going to show you with examples exactly how to use afraid, scared, and frightened. So let's get started. When you are describing yourself, your own feelings or the feelings of someone else, a person, then we use afraid and scared. So a couple of good examples are, I'm afraid of spiders. A spider is like a type of, it's not an insect, but it has eight legs and a lot of people don't like spiders. So I'm afraid of spiders. Or I could also use the word scared. It would mean the same thing. I'm scared of spiders. A lot of children are afraid of the dark or scared of the dark. And they don't like to sleep in a dark room. So their parents put a little light to help them not be afraid. So you can say, I'm, or if you're talking about another person, he is, she is, they are scared of spiders or my children are afraid of the dark. And we use afraid or scared plus the preposition of and then the thing or person or situation that the person is afraid of. You can also be afraid or scared to take an action. For example, I'm afraid to speak in front of a lot of people. So I know a lot of English learners can be afraid to speak English, but I hope that my lessons will help you be more confident and not be scared to speak. All right? So again, to, to review when talking about the feelings of a person use afraid or scared. They're the same. And then use of an object or situation and to plus a verb plus an action. Got it? Let's practice. So in the comments, write one thing that you're afraid of or maybe someone else, your son or daughter, husband or wife is afraid or scared of. I want to see you put this into practice. So if we use afraid and scared when describing a person, we can also use some of these as a verb. For example, the loud noise scared me. So the loud noise caused me to feel afraid. A couple of days ago I was sleeping and my husband's cell phone made a loud noise in the middle of the night and it woke me up and I was a little bit frightened because I didn't know where this noise was coming from. So when using it as a verb, then we use either scared or frightened. The loud noise scared me or the loud noise frightened me. Now these are both in the past. I'm talking about a specific situation in the past that happened previously, but you can also use these in the present. So for example, drunk drivers scare me. Okay? Drunk drivers are people who are driving under the influence of alcohol and that's something that causes me to feel scared. So that is continuous all the time. Drunk drivers scare me. Okay? So I put it in the present or drunk drivers frighten me. All right? So you can use these as verbs when something else causes you to feel that emotion of fear. So in this case, you scare and frighten. Now, when describing an actual thing, or situation that causes that emotion, we use scary or frightening to describe the thing. So in this last sentence, let's imagine that I went on a really big roller coaster at an amusement park and it was really fast and it went upside down. Then I could say it was a scary experience or it was a frightening experience. So now scary or frightening are adjectives that modify experience. Okay? Whereas in the first example with afraid and scared, these are adjectives that talk about me. Okay? So to sum up, afraid, scared and frightened, they all refer to the same thing, but we just use them in slightly different ways depending on the structure of the sentence. So when describing your own feelings or the feelings of a person use afraid or scared, when using it as a verb, so talking about something that caused you to feel fear, then we use scare and frighten and we usually use these in the past because we're normally talking about a situation or event that happened that caused us to feel fear. Or for example, if someone, your friend, let's say you're studying and your friend comes up behind you and says, boo, then you could say, hey, you frightened me. That means you caused me to feel fear or feel afraid. And then you can also use scary and frightening like this. Now in this case, I don't have a person anywhere in the sentence. I'm just talking about the experience or the situation. So you can say it was a scary experience. This is used when talking about movies. It was a scary movie or frightening. It was a frightening experience. It was a frightening movie. I hope that helps clear it up. I really like to use examples to show how native English speakers actually use these words in real life because I think it's easier to learn from examples than just to study definitions or rules. So if you'd like to learn more, I have a lot of courses and e-books that can help you. And I really try to use plenty of real examples inside my courses and e-books. So if you'd like to check out those lessons for yourself, I've made a list of free samples available. You can get those by clicking the link in this video. Take all the free samples and then see which course or which e-book you like the best. If you like all of them and you want to get all of them, then there's a 35% discount. You can find more information about that on my website. Thank you for the question and thank you for joining me today. Don't forget to comment with your example sentence using one of these words and also like this video, share it with all your friends. Bye for now.