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What's the difference in this sentence with and without " ourselves"? 1.We don't like to live in the house ourselves. 2.We don't like to live in the house.

Answers · 6

2
I think the first sentence was meant to be "we don't like to live in this house BY ourselves", which means "we don't like to live in this house alone/without other people being present". The second sentence just means we don't like to live in the house. There's no other information offered. "We don't like living in this house ourselves" isn't grammatically wrong, but it sounds odd in this situation, in my opinion. To do something yourself means to do something without anyone's help. Confusingly you can use "by" here as well to mean the same thing. But it doesn't work the other way around. I hope my explanation wasn't too confusing, haha. Did you write these sentences, or did you find them somewhere? It might be helpful to know the context, if there is any.
0
I could imagine someone saying “We don’t like to live in the house ourselves” as meaning the same thing as “Personally, we don’t like to live in the house.” It’s kind of a softer way of saying they don’t like to live in the house but that others might.
0
I could imagine someone saying “We don’t like to live in the house ourselves” as meaning the same thing as “Personally, we don’t like to live in the house.” It’s kind of a softer way of saying they don’t like to live in the house but that others might.

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