to familiarise yourself with / familiar / familiarity

When you familiarise yourself with a new process or situation, you begin to learn about it or get used to it so that it becomes normal or familiar to you.  You’re already familiar with the place where you live, the people you see every day and the things you do every day in your job. But when you go to a new place or do a new job, you need to familiarize yourself with the new situation. When a company offers an induction course to new staff, this is intended to familiarise them with the procedures, regulations etc. By the way, like many other verbs ending ‘ise’, you can also write ‘ize’. It doesn’t make any difference to the meaning – ‘ize’ is more common in American English, but both spellings are found in New Zealand and other countries.

I spent a few hours familiarising myself with the software before I felt confident enough to work with it.

I’m sure everyone here is familiar with Professor Hendrix’s work on accounting, but you may not realise he’s also an expert on e-commerce.

more example sentences        questions for personal practice        unit 14

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