Learn English – the difference between “here we go” and “there we go”

expressionsphrases

As a non-native speaker, I cannot grasp any difference between the expressions "here we go" and "there we go": both expressions seem to underline an event that is going to happen immediately.

Is there any subtle usage detail that I am missing?

Best Answer

J.R. mentioned a distinction that applies in some cases and noted that because of the wide range of uses of the two phrases, there might not be a “universal way to differentiate when one should be used instead of the other”.

Another distinction (similar in that it applies in some cases but far from all) is that “Here we go” is frequently inclusive of the speaker, and “There we go” frequently is not. A very few of the examples of “Here we go” and “There we go” found in A Collection of Confusible Phrases by Yuri Dolgopolov illustrate this: snip from Yuri's book

Another distinction is that “here we go” is found 10 times more commonly (in Google Books English-language corpus) than is “there we go”, and many instances of the latter are irrelevancies like “From there we go to Spain”.