Episode 70 - 'There Isn't Much Variety' or 'There Isn't Many Variety', What's Right?

This week my student said 'there wasn't many variety', and just like yesterday's podcast, I had that feeling of 🤔 why is that weird? The problem is that 'variety' is countable and uncountable, so it depends on the situation as to whether we would use 'much' or 'many! Today we'll look at this problem and several possible solutions for it. Tomorrow we'll talk about some idioms and phrases related to sunshine! If we're talking about the negative then we'd be more likely to make it uncountable.'There wasn't much variety.' If we're talking about the positive or something that has many varieties, like plants, then we would add an 's' and use 'many' instead.'There are many varieties of plants.''Are there many varieties of plants?' Don't panic!Remember for countable and uncountable there is a stress-free or less stress option! lots of a lot of You can use these for both countable and uncountable nouns and for positive, negative and question situations. 'There wasn't a lot of variety.' 'There are lots of varieties of flowers.' 'Is there a lot of variety?' You can use either 'a lot of' or 'lots of' for all of these. The only thing to remember is if you're using 'a lot of' then no 's'. If you're using 'lots of' then you need an 's' on the noun and the 'lots'. We also talked about using 'kinds'. We can use 'kinds' instead of 'variety' but I think it would be less likely for us to put 'lots of' and 'kinds' in the same sentence. So choose one or the other. Additional Vocabulary eradicate - to erase, get rid of or eliminate this is really handy for - 'handy' means 'useful' it just gets around that problem - if we 'get around' something then we avoid it or solve the problem.