English word of the day: NAIVE

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Hi everyone! It’s Shayna from EspressoEnglish.net and I’m back with another word of the day – we’re going to focus on the adjective naïve. This word is two syllables with the stress on the second one – nay-EEVE.

When we someone as naïve, we are saying that they are lacking knowledge and experience, they’re sort of innocent and unaware of how the real world works. Many children are naïve, because they don’t understand, for example, that there are lots of bad people and tragedies in the world.

Or let’s say your company has a brand-new employee who is young, he has just graduated from college and this is his first job, and he’s proposing all these big ideas to transform the company. He would be naïve because he has these optimistic beliefs, but he doesn’t have the real, practical experience to know that many of his ideas just wouldn’t work.

So you can describe a person as naïve, or you can describe an idea or a plan or a belief as naïve if you think that idea simply lacks knowledge and experience, it doesn’t match the practical details and complexities of the world, and therefore the idea is likely to fail.

Do you know anyone you would describe as naïve? Would you describe yourself as naïve when you were younger? Let’s try to put this word into practice. All right, thanks for joining me for this word of the day, and I’ll be back tomorrow.


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