Sometimes you feel the feelings of someone else.
Someone feels sad and you feel sad with them. Their being sad makes you sad.
Someone feels grief and you have grieved before so you have felt what they feel. You've been there.
This social phenomenon describes you feeling (Greek "pathos") with (Greek "sym") someone.
This is what we call Sympathy. Feeling a feeling together.
Sympathy is shared feelings between people. Feeling with someone.
Alternatively:
Sometimes you are with someone who is feeling something that you don't feel, or have not felt before.
But you can still try and imagine how they might feel.
When you do that, you are making (Greek "em") yourself feel (Greek "pathos") what someone might feel. You make feeling.
E-, Em-, and En- are Greek prefixes that Make the following noun or verb happen: empower, enable, encourage.
You can make yourself feel something to understand relatively how someone feels or understand their situation.
This is what we call Empathy.
The distinction is important, because the two experiences are very VERY different.
If you have never feared your father, spiders, public speaking, you cannot sympathise with someone who does, but you can empathise, because you have feared something else before, or been in a similar situation before.
You can empathise with victims of the Hiroshima bombing, but you certainly can't sympathise with them (unless you were there too).
But because sympathy and empathy look and sound the same, they are often confused or used interchangebly.
It's a problem that Sympathy is used for Empathy in Condolence cards and messages of sympathy instead of empathy. This use of Sympathy is often the wrong word.
More problematic to stopping the confusion is that it is rude to correct someone's misuse of the term during the sensitive moment you share. How rude is that!
Sympathy is an instinctive reactive experience. Empathy is an intellectual activity to achieve an experience.
So it's important to know the difference.
Now you know.
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