How to use "Remember, remind, recall and recollect" in English? In Spanish we only have "recordar"
Sometimes, I don't know how to use those verbs in English.
6 Answers
Remember, recall, and recollect are synonyms. Remind is very different; see below.
Some differences with remember, recall, and recollect:
Remember means to hold in memory. Recall and recollect mean to bring back from memory into consciousness. Thus we remember things that we can later recall or recollect. In practice, this distinction is often unimportant. If I say that I remember where Mary lives, you know that I recall or recollect it; if I say that I recall or recollect where Mary lives, you know that I remember it.
Remember is also used in the sense of not forgot or not fail to do something. We say I remembered to walk the dog today, but we do not say I recalled (or recollected) to walk the dog today.
In these three sentences...
- I remember going to the beach as a child.
- I recall going to the beach as a child.
- I recollect going to the beach as a child.
...there might be differences in how complete the memory is. Recall might suggest a dimmer, less complete memory than remember, and recollect might be dimmer still. This is very subtle, though, and I'm sure there will be disagreement about it.
Remind is the different one. It means to cause someone to recall/recollect.
- I remind him every morning to take his lunch to school.
- She reminds me of my sister.
Here the subject of the sentence isn't doing the remembering but is causing someone else to remember.
I am a native English speaker and this I find is a truly complex question. In general the English are lazy in their verb usage and would probably use "remember" as a general verb to cover all your possibilities, perhaps phrased in such a way to make the meaning more obvious. Here are a few dictionary links for more specific use:
I am a native speaker of American English (Midwest). To me "remember", "recall", and "recollect" mean the same thing.
"Remind" is a different case. If I tell you, "Remember to take out the garbage.", I have just advised you to do something that you have already forgotten or will probably forget to do. "Remind" can also mean "Hacerle recordar algo a uno".
As an example, "That makes me remember that..." and "That reminds me that..." mean the same thing.
As a noun, "recall", "recollection", and "memory" mean the same thing.
I hope this helps.
What great answers you have! I know instinctively how to use the words, but it takes a question like this to make me think more carefully.
Here is an answer on the BBC site to a question by another Spanish speaker which encapsulates your other great answers:
The noun for recollect is recollection and for recall is recall. I think the Oxford Advanced Learner's dictionary is useful [it is online]
Here is an explanation about remind and remember on a very useful blogspot, I also pick things up from it.
Doctor:
There are several good videos on youtube. Just type "remember vs remind" in the search box. Some of these are by native Spanish speakers who are teaching English. In these cases they say or show how one would say something in English and Spanish.
You can also search for "recordar vs acordar" and watch teachers explain things in the opposite direction.
Doctor:
Another very useful tool for this type of investigation is conext.reverso.net
They have many thousands of sentences in both English and Spanish in their databank.
You can enter a word or a phrase in either English or Spanish and see the way the terms are used with an actual sentences (not machine translated) in both languages.
If you want to see how the sentence was used in full context, there is a link to click on that will show you several sentences from the movie, book, magazine or newspaper that the sentence came from.
My only caution is that sometimes movie subtitles, in particular, are not translated very well. Sometimes they are very literal without taking into account how things would really be said in both languages.
