What, Why, and How of Making Analogies in English

Learning to make analogies in English is super important. It can improve your communication big time. Today, we are going to learn what analogies are, why we make them, how we make them, and when we make them, and we’ll practice!

What are Analogies?

Instead of telling you exactly what they are, read the examples below and see if you can figure it out:

Life is like a roller coaster, short and full of ups and downs.

Teaching a beginner English learner about the future perfect is like teaching a baby rocket science.

We get easily angry and upset when we are hungry. In the same way, animals become aggressive and are more likely to hurt you when they are hungry.

My nephew is a pig. He eats nonstop.

Unlike grass, we don’t grow taller when we get rained on.

A branch is to a tree as an arm is to a man.

Seals are similar to sea lions because they both live in the ocean and have thick skin and flippers.

I do my homework the way you clean your house before guests come: last minute and just enough to make it look done well without any extra effort, hoping nobody inspects closely.

He is just like Jason when it comes to work.

Relationships are the same as buildings: they both take a long time to build.

Farmers that don’t weed their fields lose more and more money over time. Similarly, companies that don’t fire bad employees lose more and more money over time.

Children are like little trees, if you don’t correct them while they are young, they won’t grow straight.

Learning Korean is the opposite of Chinese. In Chinese, speaking is easy and writing takes years; but in Korean, writing is easy but speaking takes years.

To get better at English, you have to grow like a tree.

Did you see something that’s the same in all of the examples? Do this practice activity to see if you figured it out!

Now the answer: an analogy is when you say one thing is like another thing. You make connections between things that are very similar. You describe something using something else. Let’s look at the examples above:

Life is like a roller coaster, it short and full of ups and downs. Here, you are saying that life goes by quickly, and has good parts (ups) and bad parts (downs_ like a roller coaster. Is life only 2 minutes long like a roller coaster? No. In life, do you go up in the air and then down again many times like a roller coaster? No. They are not actually the same, but the connection is there.

Teaching a beginner English learner about the future perfect is like teaching a baby rocket science. The point here is that teaching future perfect is difficult and you shouldn’t do it right away. Can you teach a baby rocket science? No. Can you teach a beginner English learner future prefect? Yes. Are they both difficult? Yes.

We get easily angry and upset when we are hungry. In the same way, animals become aggressive and are more likely to hurt you when they are hungry. This analogy helps explain how animals act based on our own experience of how we act when we are hungry.

My nephew is a pig. He eats nonstop. This analogy compares the way someone eats to a kind of animal. He isn’t actually a pig, but he eats like one!

Unlike grass, we don’t grow taller when we get rained on. This one is debatable because it says one thing is not like another. For me, it has the same purpose and form. It is still comparing one thing to another, but focuses on how they are different.

A branch is to a tree as an arm is to a man. A tree has more than one branch that go out to the side, just like a man has mor than one arm that goes out to the side. They can both move some but stay connected..

…(It’s clear enough now, right?)…

To put analogies simply: their comparisons between two things.

Why make analogies in English?

Analogies add color and clarity to what we say. We can use analogies to explain a new thing by comparing it to something already known, to make something memorable or interesting, to make an argument, or just to be funny! (There might be more reasons, but I can’t think of them. Let me know if you do and I’ll add them to the list!)

Explain something new

In other words, teaching. Let’s say you are trying to teach your friend the word “hot” because he missed English class yesterday. You can say, “Hot is to cold as big is to small.” If he knows the words “cold”, “big”, and “small”, then he will understand hot right away.

For these analogies, you always use something simple to explain something complex or something someone knows to explain something someone doesn’t. Here are some more examples:

The economy is like a country’s lungs, if it is small and weak the country won’t be able to do much and will mostly be inactive.

Being patient is being like a spider: you carefully wait a long time so that a bug will fly into your web. If you move around a lot and make noise the flies will see you and stay away.

Your brain is like a net: it’s stronger and works better if you can connect all of the strings instead of having them all stand alone like hair.

Electricity moves through wires like water moves through pipes, and the switches are the valves.

Make something memorable or interesting

These two are basically the same, so we’ll put them together. Sometimes, we can be more interesting or memorable because we connect something to something else. It’s fun to try to see the connection, like a small riddle or puzzle. Sometimes it’s nice just because the thing we are talking about is something other people don’t enjoy hearing about, so we connect it to something they do like hearing about.

The night got darker and darker like coffee does as it brews.

The walls were as blue as the sky.

He was wearing a sweater that looked like a carpet.

Think of roads like pipes in your house.

Make something convincing (argue)

When we try to convince someone to agree with us, we argue. We don’t have to fight and be loud and angry, but it is still arguing. We can use analogies here, too! We’re trying to make something more convincing. For these examples, I’ll add the context so we can see how it’s different than other uses of analogies.

Teacher trying to convince his students to do their homework: “Doing homework is like exercising, it will make you ready for the big game one day, even though you don’t like it now.”

Boyfriend asking his girlfriend to stop asking him to go shopping with her every time she goes: “You want me to go shopping with you every time you do? That’s like asking the sun to be in the sky every time the moon is.”

Lawyer talking to a judge, trying to get a bigger punishment for someone who lied to an old woman to get her money: “Scammers are the germs of the world: they are everywhere and they hurt people. They have to be dealt with.”

Salesman trying to sell a new phone to a potential customer: “Having this phone is like having a Ferrari.”

Make something funny

Some of the best lines from comedians are analogies. They can be funny because they connect two things that aren’t normally connected in a clever way. We can do it, too, to make jokes and entertain our friends and family.

A beautiful woman that talks too much is like a massive waterfall, if you are too close for too long you just want to plug your ears and get away, but -man- you like looking at her up close!

Ideas are like lottery tickets, you always think they are great right when you get them, but most of the time you realize they’re worthless later.

His room is like a black hole, he’s always putting stuff in it but everything disappears inside.

My mind is like a web browser, 19 tabs are open, most of them aren’t working, and I can’t tell where the music is coming from.

How do we make analogies in English?

Making analogies in English can be tricky because there are lots of different ways to do it and what you say has to make sense. It takes a lot of practice and a lot of listening to others’ examples. Lots of analogies don’t work in other languages only because they don’t work in other cultures, which is where a lot of listening comes in.

There are two basic forms for analogies: similes and metaphors. You don’t have to know these two words, unless you really want to; but you do have to know the two types.

A simile is an analogy using a word that says it’s an analogy. The most common one is “like”. There are many other words, too. Can you find them in the examples?

Let’s make the same analogy many different ways with many different key words. Then, you can study them and make your own examples to practice.

Like

Like trees, character grows slowly over a long period of time.
Character is like a tree, it grows slowly over a long period of time.
Character grows like a tree, slowly over a long period of time.

As trees, character grows slowly over a long period of time.
As slowly as trees, character grows over a long period of time.
Character is as a tree, it grows slowly over a long period of time.
Character is as slow as a tree, it grows over a long period of time.
Character grows as a tree, slowly over a long period of time.
Character grows as slowly as a tree, over a long period of time.

Similar to

Similar to trees, character grows slowly over a long period of time.
Character is similar to a tree, it grows slowly over a long period of time.
Character grows similar to a tree, slowly over a long period of time.

the way

Character grows slowly over a long period of time, the way trees do.
Character grows the way trees do, slowly over a long period of time.
The way character grows is the way trees grow, slowly over a long period of time.

Similarly

Similarly to trees, character grows slowly over a long period of time.
Character grows similarly to a tree, slowly over a long period of time.
Trees grow slowly over a long period of time. Similarly, character develops at a slow rate.

Others for self-study if you have already mastered these: “in the same way”, “the same”, “unlike”, and “opposite of”.

We can also add to these analogy making words to quantify them. You’ll usually hear these quantifiers in spoken English, not in formal writing. Common quantifiers are: much, just, very much, exactly, sort of, kind of. For example:

She’s just like my mom.
Businesses are exactly the same as plants, where water is money.
You have to work hard to get a promotion. Good grades are very much the same.
Much like sports, competition improves the average performance.
People are sort of like wind: they’re really hard to control.
My dog is kind of like a family member: he’s been with us so long.

Further Practice

If the practice activities weren’t enough, here is a great lesson to practice more analogies!