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Hi John. hi Dr. Jill, do you like to build things? Yes, although I have to say it has been a long time since I've played with toy blocks.
你好，约翰。嗨，吉尔博士，你喜欢造东西吗？是的，不过不得不说，我已经很久没有玩过积木了。
I was thinking that these blocks can show us how to understand relationships of English words.
我在想，这些积木可以告诉我们如何理解英语单词之间的关系。
How so? Well, let's take a common way to describe how people view the world.
怎么说？我们先用一种常见的方式来描述人们是如何看待世界的。
We might say a person is an optimist or a pessimist.
我们可以说一个人是乐观主义者或悲观主义者。
Let's take the noun pessimist, a person who expects the worst.
我们来看看名词pessimist，是指做最坏打算的人。
Neither of us are pessimists, but there are definitely pessimists in the world. That's right.
我们都不是悲观主义者，但世界上肯定有悲观主义者。没错。
Let's see how we can use our blocks to show relationships between words.
我们看看如何用积木来代表单词之间的关系。
We can take the noun pessimist and add an -ic ending, then we get the adjective pessimistic.
我们可以把名词pessimist加上一个-ic后缀，就得到了形容词pessimistic。
And then we can add an -ally ending to pessimistic.
然后在pessimistic的基础上加上一个-ally后缀。
This is how we arrive at the adverb pessimistically.
就得到了副词pessimistically。
This example shows you one way that English speakers build upon words.
这个例子说明了英语母语者构筑单词的一种方法。
But once you learn how words are connected, you can also study which words are more commonly used.
一旦你知道了单词之间的关系，就可以研究哪些单词更常用。
Google's Ngram Viewer has data from many books.
谷歌的Ngram Viewer收集了来自许多书籍的数据。
Ngram Viewer tells us that the adjective pessimistic is used more frequently than the noun pessimist.
Ngram Viewer告诉我们，形容词pessimistic比名词pessimist使用得更频繁。
We can also learn about which words are most commonly used before or after a word of interest.
我们还可以了解哪些单词最常用于相关单词之前或之后
For example, Google's Ngram Viewer tells us that the article "a" is the most commonly used word before pessimist and pessimistic.
例如，谷歌的Ngram Viewer告诉我们，在pessimist和pessimistic之前，冠词“a”是最常用的单词。
This makes sense because articles often introduce a noun or noun phrase.
这是有道理的，因为冠词通常用来引入一个名词或名词短语。
And that's everyday grammar TV.
这就是每日语法节目。
