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Hi. This is Louis from Wall Street English. When it comes to agreeing, there’re lots of ways to do it. The most straight-forward is to say simply “I agree!” However, we have to be careful. There’s an important distinction between agreeing with someone else’s feelings and agreeing with their ideas.
When we agree, we are saying that whatever someone has said is correct in our opinion. Therefore, if my friend says, “I like swimming” and I say “I agree”, I’m saying that it is correct that she likes swimming, which is a bit of a weird thing to say. So, what should I say?
If I’m agreeing with a feeling, usually signaled with verbs such as “like”, “feel” or “want”. I should just say “me too” or “I do too”. “Me neither” or “I don’t either” if it’s a negative statement such as “I don’t like swimming”.
Now we want to agree with an idea, for example, “swimming is fun”, we have many more options. We can say “I agree” or we can make it stronger by saying “I strongly agree”, “I totally agree” or “I completely agree” .Or weaker by saying “I somewhat agree”. We can also say “that’s right”, “that’s correct” or “you’re right” or “you’re correct”. We can also use a number of single words which allow us to signal agreement without interrupting too much. These are words like “exactly”, “correct” or “totally”. Though be careful with our last one because it’s little new to the language and it’s still a little informal.
OK. So that’s it for now. It’s been fun and I hope you’ll agree. See you next time. Louis.
