 Welcome to this video. Today you're going to learn the difference between sympathy and empathy. This is a question that a student had submitted and actually I get this question a lot so I'm happy to answer it for you. Of course, I'm Jennifer from jforisenglish.com and this channel is dedicated to helping you feel confident speaking English in public so you can take your career and your life to the next level. 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 sympathy and empathy. So let's give a scenario. Let's imagine that your friend Ted just lost his job. So this could be a situation, a negative situation where you want to give some sympathy or some empathy. So if you want to give Ted sympathy, you're going to see something like, oh, I'm sorry to hear that, or oh, that's too bad. That really sucks. So you're going to say those words to Ted, but then you're going to go on with the rest of your day. You're going to be happy. You're going to have fun. You're going to do whatever and you're not really going to think about Ted and his situation anymore because sympathy is at the surface level. A situation happens to a friend, a colleague, a coworker, a family member, someone you know, and then you just use your words to offer some words of support, words of comfort, and then you go on with your day. What is empathy though? Empathy is deeper. Empathy is about emotion. Empathy isn't really about words. Empathy is about trying to understand the emotion that Ted is feeling. So trying to either imagine what Ted must be feeling right now because he just lost his job, the stress he must be feeling, the insecurity, the frustration, the anger, the lack of confidence, whatever emotions that Ted's feeling, you want to understand them, but you want to almost take those emotions on and you feel those emotions. So even though Ted lost his job, you feel the pain of Ted losing his job. And by doing that, you're able to offer more comfort and more support to Ted because you truly want to understand what it feels like. Now because of that, empathy is really not about words. Empathy is about emotion. So how could you show Ted that you have empathy for his situation? Well, you might sit beside Ted on the couch and just put your arm around him or give him a hug or maybe you show your emotion by even having some tears in your eyes as Ted is telling you about how he lost his job and how he's not sure how he's going to pay his mortgage. You don't say anything, but you show Ted that you understand what he's going through because you might have some visible tears in your eyes or you put your hand on his shoulder, on his knee, or you just sit there silently and allow the emotion to be present. That's empathy. Empathy is at a much deeper level. And then when you leave, so you say goodbye to Ted, okay, and then you go home and even though Ted is in his home and you're in your home, you still feel it. You still feel the emotion. You're still a little bit sad yourself. That's empathy. It's way deeper of an emotion. So to summarize, sympathy is about offering words of comfort, but it's step one, offering the words of comfort. And then you offer those words of comfort and then you just go about your day, go about your life as normal. Empathy is about taking it further and is no longer about words. It's about emotions and is trying to understand what someone is feeling or the situation that they're going through at a deeper level. So you can offer support to that person. So that's the difference between sympathy and empathy. As these are more concepts, we don't really use them in sentences. So I know I usually ask you to practice in the sentence practice in the comments below. However, you might not really be able to practice sentences using these words. So because of that, maybe you can just talk about a scenario where you might want to offer someone sympathy and then a scenario where you want to offer someone empathy, or you can think back to a time in your life where you did offer someone sympathy and then someone empathy. So maybe you can just talk about those scenarios more to practice using these expressions. So I hope you found this video helpful. Please hit the like button, share it with your friends, and of course subscribe. And until next time, happy studying. Awesome job with this video. I get this question a lot, which tells me that you guys care. You care about sympathy and empathy, which is awesome because you want to show those to other people. So way to go, you guys. That's great. And I'll see you in my next video. Bye.