Hi everybody, welcome back to Ask Alicia, the weekly series where you ask me questions and I answer them.

Maybe. Let's skip to your first question this week. First question this week comes from Kandan. Hi Kandan.

Kandan asks, what are the differences between ask, ask two, ask for, and ask about. Okay, this is a big question. So let's break this into parts. On the most basic level,

to ask means to request information, right? You want to get information from somebody else. We can

also use it to get favors as well, like making requests for actions and so on.

So we're going to get into this.

But basically, to ask means you want to get something, information or an action from someone or something else, right?

Okay. So with this in our mind, let's take a look at the other examples that you mentioned.

The first one, which I want to change,

is ask to. So we do not use ask to. You need to use something after ask. We use to after ask when we

use a person after the word ask. So for example, ask you to or ask my mom to, ask my friend too. And we follow

this with a verb. We use this pattern when we want to ask someone to do an action for us. Like,

I want to ask you to check my homework or I asked my mom to move the car. So we do this when we are

asking someone, so we want to get something from someone, we are asking someone for an action.

So we cannot say ask to. This is incorrect. Remove that from your vocabulary. Ask someone to is the correct way to use this.

So ask someone to, infinitive verb. Ask someone to move. Ask someone to check. Ask someone to go.

And so on. So this is how we use ask something to or ask someone to. Okay. So let's continue

to the second example you mentioned. Ask for. So we use

ask for when we want to get something from someone else. So for example, you might ask for the menu

at a restaurant or you might ask for someone's agreement in a debate or a discussion style situation.

So when we ask for something, we want to get that thing.

I asked for the menu.

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