 Welcome to this video. Today you're going to learn the difference between rather than and instead of. This is a question that a student had asked and it's a great question and both of these are going to help you with your advanced English grammar. Of course, I'm Jennifer from jforisenglish.com and this channel is dedicated to helping you sound like a fluent, confident, natural English speaker. Now before we go any further, make sure you subscribe and hit that bell icon so you're notified every time I post a new lesson. Now let's dive in with this video. Let's talk about the difference between rather than and instead of. Let's start with rather than. Rather than is used to state a preference. So you have two things and you want to say which one you prefer, which one you like more, your preference. Because of that we're most likely going to use rather than with the verb prefer. For example, I prefer making dinner rather than eating out. So I have my two choices, make dinner, eat out. And my preference is make dinner. I prefer making dinner rather than eating out. So rather than is simply used to connect those ideas and form that complete sentence. Now notice rather than the next verb is going to be a jaren, which is simply your verb in ing. That's 100% of the time when you use a verb. So don't forget that. Now in terms of placement, I can take that same sentence, but I can move rather than to the beginning of the sentence. And I can say rather than ordering take out, I prefer making dinner. So you do have that flexibility. Instead of a jaren verb, you could use a noun. So I could say, I prefer pizza, just the noun. I'm not talking about a verb. I prefer pizza rather than spaghetti. So I'm still connecting the sentence together with rather than, but I'm using two nouns instead of two verbs. Now instead of is used as substitution, which means I'm going to take one object and I'm going to replace it with something else. Okay, so substitution rather than just talking about preference. I like this one more and you still see both objects. That would be rather than, but with instead of we're substituting. So one is going away and we're only leaving the one we want. That's instead of. So I could say we made dinner instead of eating out. Okay, so in this case, the two objects, the two choices, make dinner, eat out. But rather than just stating my preference, one's going away. And the one that went away was eat out. Okay, so we're left with make dinner. We made dinner. Notice my verb tense is the past simple because this action is already complete. We made dinner yesterday instead of eating out. Now notice I'm still using a jaren verb after instead of. So that's your structure instead of jaren verb, but we can also use nouns for our structure. So I could say we had pizza instead of spaghetti. So again, two choices, one of them is going away. We had pizza instead of spaghetti. Now I can also just use the word instead. So let's say a friend asks, oh, so did you have spaghetti last night? So I was talking to my friend about pizza and spaghetti. So she wants to know, did you have spaghetti last night? Then I can say, no, we had pizza instead. So when I don't want to specify the second noun or the second action, because it's already been specified, my friend specified it. So I don't need to repeat it. In that case, I can just drop it and use instead. Did you have spaghetti? No, we had pizza instead. Instead of spaghetti. But I don't need to say it. It would be repetitive. No, we had pizza instead. So just remember that rather than is used to express a preference between two things. And instead of is used to talk about substitution. So taking that action and one of them is going away. Now the best way of course to really feel confident is to practice these. So I want you to leave your own sentences in the comments below. Why don't you try four sentences, two with instead of and two with rather than because you can practice with the jaren and the noun for each. So you get really comfortable with that advanced sentence structure. If you found this video helpful, please hit the like button, share it with your friends and of course subscribe. Now before you go, make sure you head on over to my website, jforestenglish.com and download your free speaking guide. In this guide, I share six tips on how to speak English fluently and confidently. And until next time, happy studying. All right. Awesome job with this video. I can't wait to see your advanced sentences in the comments below and I'll see you in my next video. Bye.