in 2008 i found the disk again and tried again. Well that still didn't work out too well for me and i eventually gave up. So, saying “I have quite a few friends” is the same as saying “I have a lot of friends”.I purchased (literally) Mugen in 2004 from Ebay after not being able to configure the game or find characters. It means the exact opposite thing: “a large or significant number, or many”. However, it has become quite common for people to use it to mean “many” or “a large number of”. He only means that he hadn’t expected as many visitors at the sea shore on a day when the cyclone panic was endemic.Īs stated in the example above, “Quite a few” is used only when a specific number (of people or things) are not expected in a given situation. In the above example, the speaker doesn’t mean that the beach was crowded. Quite a few people were seen at the sea shore despite the cyclone warning by the weather department. Or the speaker wants to emphasize on the fact that it was “more than you would think”.
“Quite a few” expresses that the speaker was impressed or astonished by the number, as they would have expected less. There is a very common expression “quite a few”, which is a trap for foreign learners because it looks like it could mean “rather few or very few”, but it does not. You can read more about this here on Stack Exchange.įor example: There’s quite a bit of snow on the ground. It is not a whole-hearted endorsement, but I barely have any objections at all. This is a more positive statement that implies I am more or less on board with the proposal. “I have few objections to the vendor’s proposed approach.” Nevertheless, I have objections that need to be addressed. I have some objections, but not so many as to say “I have several objections…”. This implies that I am not on board with the vendor’s proposal. “I have a few objections to the vendor’s proposed approach.” Here’s another comparative example originally found on Stack Exchange. ( meaning I have some/ a couple of friends who can help you with this) I have a few friends who can help you with this. ( meaning I have barely any friends who can help you or I have no friends who can help you with this) I have few friends who can help you with this. ( meaning we usually see a larger number of people in the street during the evening everyday) A Few = Not a Large Number There were few people in the street last evening. ( meaning the stadium looked rather empty for its capacity)
Some more examples of “few” would be as follows: Similarly, when we say there are few buyers for this product, we usually mean to indicate a number that is smaller than “our” expectations or that is generally expected in similar situations. When we use the word “few”, we want to indicate that the number is smaller than what we expect or what is normally found in a particular situation.įor example, if you see only 5 to 10 students present in a classroom session for which 50 students have enrolled, you can say there are “few” students in this session. Technically, the word “Few” suggests a small number of people or things. In the above example, apparently, the person wants to say, “Some people will never change their behavior”. Here’s one of such examples: “Few people will never change their behavior.” I have come across a lot of people who use “few” when they mean to say “some”. One of those most frequently committed errors is the confusion between “Few” and “A Few”. Visit any Facebook Page and you will cringe at the degree of syntax errors people commit pretty innocently.
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