come off

Otherwise, someone might get what they actually ordered. Well, the hair comes out and the gloves come off. [laughter] Right. I don't have a plan. Pizza guy.

Yoksa birisi gerçekten sipariş ettiğini alabilir. Pekala, saçlar toplanıyor ve eldivenler çıkıyor. [kahkahalar] Doğru. Benim bir planım yok. Pizzacı.

The Classic Ones from Season 1 | Friends

The hair comes out and the gloves come off. [laughter] Looks like she didn't leave in such a hurry after all.

Saçlar açıldı ve eldivenler çıkarıldı. [kahkaha] Görünüşe göre o kadar da aceleyle gitmemiş.

The Ones with the Whole Gang from Season 1 | Friends

I'm very excited about this. The spetskål, the cabbage. >> It come off the shoulder. >> do a taste test.

Bunun için çok heyecanlıyım. Spetskål, lahana. >> Omuz kısmından geliyor. >> bir tadım testi yap.

What I Eat in a Day on Svalbard | Summer Meals

hello listeners welcome back to Luke's English podcast how are you today I hope you're doing fine so here's a brand new episode and this one is a short story episode this is one of those episodes where I read you a short story and then use it to teach you some vocabulary and some grammar okay so uh I'm always looking for short stories always looking for little stories that I can use in episodes of my podcast uh this particular story I found this one on the website kora.com I don't know if you're familiar with Kora basically it's a website where uh people can post questions and then other users of the website will post their responses to those questions and the responses get upvoted or down voted and uh if a if a response gets upvoted a lot it then gets pushed up to the top of the page so I was looking on Kora and one of the questions I found there was something like this can you share any true scary stories can you share any true scary stories that I think was the original question that someone had posted and the the top response the most upvoted response was the story that I'm going to tell you today it was actually posted by a guy called Lance Stevenson and pretty sure that the story happened in the United States of America the USA and it was posted yes as a true scary story okay first of all I'm going to just read the story to you and you can try to understand it right uh if you're look at the video version you will see the story on the screen you'll see the text on the screen next to me uh if you are listening to the audio version uh and you want to read the text as well then you can just go to the page for this episode on my website you'll find the whole story uh copied there for you so you can check out the text in your own time if you want to read it as well uh so listen to the story try to understand it and you can think about this like why what can you identify uh the the scary SC elements so what's scary about this story uh try to imagine what is going to happen next and what happens at the end so can you get the specific details what is the scary element to this um after I've read the story to you I will summarize it in my own words just to try and clarify it just to make sure that you've got the details and that you've understood the the kind of the twist let's say the twist at the end of the story and then after that I'll go back through the text of the story and break it down for language highlighting vocabulary and also some some bits of grammar as well we'll be looking at things like um gern and infinitives and participle phrases and other things we're going to look at the way that the story was told and with different kinds of structures okay right so let's let's get started then with this apparently true scary story all right are you ready yes you're ready okay well let's begin then so I've decided to call this Story the invitation so here we go then what is scary about this story about 7 years ago I got an invitation to attend a dinner party at my cousin's house I have a pretty large family and I'd never actually seen this particular cousin before I'd only ever spoken to him on the phone I was surprised that his family unexpectedly invited me over but I was curious to finally meet them the invitation had an address that I didn't know and the GPS was unfamiliar with it too it was in one of those areas where Google Maps doesn't work properly because of poor phone reception so I had to use an old-fashioned paper map I marked the location on the map tried to get a sense of where I was headed and set off in my car as I was driving I I started to notice how far I'd traveled into the countryside and away from civilization I saw trees farms and Fields passing by just trees farms and Fields and more trees and more farms and more Fields where the hell am I going I thought to myself I'd never ventured out so far in that direction before I drove for quite a long time trying to locate the address I had marked on the map the thing is in this area a lot of the roads don't have names or the names aren't clearly marked by road signs I just had to try to match the layout of the streets to the layout I could see on the map I finally found a place at a location that looked like the one I'd noted on my map I was pretty sure that this was the right spot so I parked and got out of the car approaching the house I noticed how dull and dreary it looked it was completely covered in leaves branches and overgrown trees this can't be it I said to myself but as soon as I walked onto the rocky driveway my aunt and uncle came out to greet me they seemed excited and welcoming hello hello come in come in they said beckoning me inside walking into the house I asked where my cousin was answering immediately one of them said oh he just went to run a few errands he should be back later I waited in their kitchen and we spent a couple of hours talking about my mother and my family my aunt made a delicious homemade pot roast that I finished off in minutes after dinner we played an enduring game of Uno it was surprisingly fun and competitive my aunt in particular seemed delighted to be playing when we finished the game of Uno it was almost dark and there was still no sign of my cousin my aunt and uncle assured me that he'd be back anytime soon despite what they said I decided that I had to leave it was almost dark outside and I knew it would be a nightmare to find my way out of this Dreadful place after sunset with no street lights or road signs as my GPS just wasn't working I asked my aunt and uncle the most efficient way to get to the highway they gave me a puzzled look but we thought you were staying the night they said I told them I couldn't because I had work the next day and couldn't afford to miss another day it's it's much better if you leave tomorrow morning trust us you'll get lost they said I Shrugged it off and told them not to worry ah don't worry I've got a pretty good sense of direction I could find my way out of the Sahara Desert I told them looking aggravated they strongly advised me to stay the night for my own sake their body language was weird too as they became more serious and insistent my uncle stood shaking his head and my aunt began to move about the place picking up a set of keys to unlock what I assume was a spare bedroom at this point I was getting annoyed and irritable I sighed fine I'll stay the night then but I have to get up very early for work I said both of them seemed strangely ecstatic that I was staying the night as soon as they went out of the room to get bed sheets and pillows I ran out of the door got in my car and hastily pulled away I know it was rude but I suddenly felt the urge to get out of there quickly it seemed to take me ages but I finally found my way back to the main Highway and drove back through the night wondering why my cousin had never turned up I got home several hours later than I expected it was after midnight and I didn't want to wake my parents up climbing over my fence and entering the back door I noticed that the kitchen lights were on as soon as I took my first step through the door I saw my mom sitting there looking impatient Where Have You Been she asked I was at Aunt Deborah's I told you I replied then why did she call saying you never arrived to this day I still have no idea who I visited okay so that's the story hm did you understand all of that what did you think did you think it was scary I don't know did you understand it enough what's going on what was actually going on here now I've read that story to people before and to an extent some people sort of misunderstood what was going on or they expected something to be happening so let me let me go through the story again and try and tell it to you in my own words to make it clear what happened so here are things that I think didn't happen so I remember telling that story to other people in the past they have they have assumed that the aunt and uncle like the they they assumed that maybe the reason the cousin didn't turn up is because the aunt and uncle maybe had killed him or something um I remember one person I read that story too uh thought that the pot roast was suspicious like what was in the pot roast did they kill the cousin and then they put him in the pot pot roast and he ate the the cousin I don't think that's what's going on basically this the creepy thing about this is that the guy almost definitely got the wrong house he got he went to the wrong house and he spent an evening with two people who he thought were his aunt and uncle two people who essentially seem to be pretending to be his aunt and uncle and who were lying to him about the cousin and stuff they were just strangely delighted to have a stranger in their home they were sort of weirdly uh excited to have someone at home with them and they really wanted that person to stay the night which is strange so who were these people we don't know because he got the wrong house and and meanwhile his real aunt and uncle and and uh his cousin were in a different house somewhere waiting for him to arrive live so a key thing to to know about this is that at the beginning of the story um this the Storyteller the writer says that uh he'd never actually met um his aunt or uncle or cousin before and that seems a little bit odd right a little bit strange that there would be like members of your family especially like an aunt and uncle and a cousin that you'd never actually met before but I suppose it's possible Right some people have very large families and uh especially in the United States which is such a big country if like there are members of your family who live fairly far away then it's not completely strange to to have never seen them or never met them and some families are a bit you know some families are not that close you know and and sometimes if there's like a bad relationship between the parents that they just don't see each other you know so you know there's that right so let me just let me try and clarify the story so the story starts with the guy saying um that s years earlier he received an invitation to have dinner at his cousin's house and he'd never actually met his cousin or his aunt or Uncle before so he was surprised that they had sent him a dinner invitation he'd only ever spoken to his cousin on the phone so he had actually spoken to his cousin but never actually met them face to face another slightly strange thing is that you'd imagine that maybe he would have seen photos of them but apparently not in this case but um so um the address was in a remote location quite far away from where the guy uh lived and he had to go there by car but the GPS his his um you know his satellite navigation in his car his uh his GPS couldn't locate the address and also the um the address that area is like very difficult to to navigate because there are no uh street names or road signs it's very poorly um indicated and apparently very bad mobile phone reception so he wasn't able to use Google Maps so he was forced to use an old fashion paper map and mark the location uh Mark the address on the map and then set off in his car and after driving for a long long time through lots of Countryside uh further and further away from civilization out into the middle of nowhere um he eventually found what he thought was the right place because the the streets didn't have street signs on them it was difficult for him to locate the right address but he tried to match the streets he could see with the streets he could see on the map and he found what he thought was the correct house um he wasn't completely sure uh but when he stepped onto the driveway when he approached the house what he thought was his um aunt and his uncle like these two people quickly came out of the house and greeted him and sort of very enthusiastically welcomed him in and I guess he didn't really have time to think about it but he assumed that these two people must be his aunt and uncle and they welcomed him in very enthusiastically and then he chatted with them in the kitchen for a couple of hours talking about his mother and their family so I suppose I don't know what what's going on there maybe these people pretended you know they were just like oh yeah yeah yeah just going along with it he would talk about his his mom and they would just sort of like just agree and go along with everything so as far as he was concerned these this was his aunt and uncle and when he said oh what about my cousin they just kind of um brushed It Off by saying oh he he'll be back later he's just running a few errands anyway would you like something to eat and uh the woman made him a a pot roast which is a kind of um like a roasted um meal in a in a pot with vegetables and some sort of meat and onion and sauce and stuff like that and he ate the whole thing apparently was delicious then they played a game of Uno which is a kind of card game and uh he noticed that the the his wouldbe aunt and uncle were behaving a bit strangely and the aunt in particular seem to be like like ecstatic about playing the game and like strangely delighted you know and it got darker and darker and he realized that the cousin perhaps wasn't going to turn up and so he he decided that he had to leave but his so-called aunt and uncle were very keen for him to stay and they were they were shocked at the idea that he would leave and they they were like no no no you must stay it'll be too difficult to find your way uh uh out of the area at this time so no no no you must stay and um they started to prepare a bed for him and he suddenly got a weird feeling at this point and decided that he had to leave he also mentioned something about the fact that he had to work the next day and he couldn't afford to miss another day so probably you know he was probably um in already in a little bit of trouble with his boss for missing days of work previously and so it was really important that he got back home in time to be able to get to work um you know without missing another day so he decided that he really did have to leave and in the end he just sort of escaped while they were doing something while they uh quickly went away to get some bed sheets and pillows he sort of escaped and went out of the door got in his car and drove off and managed to find his way home it took him a long time and then when he finally got home um it was late and he wanted just to go straight to bed but his mom was still up waiting for him uh and annoyed with him and she said what where have you been and he said I was at aunt and uncle I was at Aunt Deborah's like I told you and she said well why did they call saying that you never arrived so in fact the real aunt and uncle were waiting the entire evening for him to arrive he must have gone to another house and who were these strange people and why were they so Keen for him to stay the night what was going on and what was in that pot roast anyway just weird I mean so that is one of those sort of stories that is supposed to be scary because of what might have happened or what could have happened or the fact that there are lots of unknown things like we don't know who these people were and why they were so enthusiastic about him being in their home and then staying the night and what and some other details like why was the bedroom door locked with a key and why would why was their behavior so odd so there you go that's the story so what do you think do you think it's a true story I mean we've got no idea of tell we we don't know we can never know if that was a true story or if Lance what was his name Lance Stevenson Lance Stevenson maybe Lance Stevenson just made it up it could be one of those Urban myths you know those sorts of stories which are presented as being true but they're really just made up and designed to be scary little stories like normally stories like this if they if they if we know that they're not true if we know that they're made up then they become less effective they have less impact if you listen to that story believing it's true then it makes it more creepy doesn't it so who knows maybe it's true maybe it's just made up no idea but I quite enjoy it I quite enjoy the um creepiness of it okay so let's now do a language review let's see how the story was written and this is where we're going to focus on some vocabulary and some grammar I'm actually going to give you the sort of Luke's English podcast premium treatment now because normally I do this kind of thing in premium episodes of my podcast and uh that's where I go into the vocabulary and the grammar and stuff in a lot more detail so this is just a flavor of the sort of thing you can get if you subscribe to my premium content uh and if you do that you'll get like loads of extra episodes in your podcast app so you'll get the premium feed which means you'll get all of the free episodes of my audio show without any advertising and also you'll get all these extra episodes that uh involve lots of language teaching from me and this is just a little tap of the sort of thing that you get in those extra premium episodes if you're interested in that by the way uh just go to teacher. co.uk premium info and you can find all the details audio episodes that you can get in your audio podcast app with PDFs every single premium episode has a PDF with worksheets and the rest of it vocabulary teaching grammar teaching pronunciation practice memory exercises and also video versions there are video versions of those premium episodes uh too so you can get all the information at teacher. co.uk premium info so let's start then by going through vocabulary from the story okay you'll see that I've highlighted some words in the story in Orange not every single um slide here has a has a word on it for example the first slide about seven years ago I got an invitation to attend a dinner party at my cousin's house okay fine nothing in particular to to point out there the next slide I have a pretty large family pretty large right it just means fairly large quite large I have a pretty large family and I'd never actually seen this particular cousin before so that word particular this particular cousin just means this specific cousin this cousin in particular okay so obviously this guy's got lots of cousins but now he wants to say this cousin specifically so he'd never actually seen this particular cousin before all right so this particular cousin on this particular day this particular episode of Luke's podcast was particularly interesting for me in particular all right moving on I was surprised that his family unexpectedly invited me over so unexpectedly it's pretty clear I suppose right but it's it's a nice adverb to do something unexpectedly when was the last time you use that word um do something that you don't expect do something unexpectedly okay so they they they unexpectedly did something they did something unexpectedly in this case his family unexpectedly invited me over so invite me I think you understand it's like would you like to come to our house for dinner but invite me over why have we got the word over in there using the word over imp implies visiting someone's home okay and we often use that we say come over invite someone over stay over over means over here at my place so that's just very common when you're talking about coming or visiting someone's home invite someone over come over and stay over yes the invitation had an address that I didn't know and the GPS was unfamiliar with it too so GPS I think it's probably International right GPS the sort of um electronic map device that everyone uses in their car GPS um global positioning system in the UK we also call it satnav satnav did you know that one satellite navigation satnav GPS satnav it was in one of those areas where Google Maps doesn't work properly because of poor phone reception so phone reception refers to you know your the the how much coverage you have how much connection you have on your phone we call it phone reception uh or signal or network or coverage for example if you've only got one bar on your phone and you're trying to do something like maybe you're trying to uh look something up on the Internet uh and you've only got one bar then your phone works very slowly and you can tell I've got such ter terrible reception here have you got any reception I've got no network or the signal here is terrible isn't it okay or if you're on the phone to someone it's like I can't hear you no I've got really bad signal I've got really I've got really bad I've got no network here okay so reception signal or network right I marked the location on the map try to get a sense of where I was headed and set off in my car if you are headed in in a particular direction it means you're going in that direction right so where are we headed we're headed for London meaning we're going to London we're headed for the pub meaning we're going to the pub so if you're headed or heading as well somewhere it means you're going in that direction so I tried to get a sense of where I was headed and set off in my car to set off means to start your journey okay start your journey set off in your car set off on your bike set off on foot okay remember it's always on foot it's never by walking but on foot set off on your journey set off in your car set off on your bike set off on Foot Right set off meaning start your trip as I was driving I started to notice how far I'd traveled into the countryside away from civilization the countryside I mean it's a very common word but as a teacher I often notice that my Learners don't use this word or don't seem to remember it so you got the city and then you've maybe got the suburbs which is that area just around the city and then where it's all green and you've got lots of fields and trees and stuff that's the countryside okay in this case he was driving and driving and he realized how far he' traveled into the countryside away from civilization I saw trees farms and field passing by passing by meaning passing next to him passing on the side as as he looked out of the window passing by where the hell am I going I thought to myself um I just wanted to highlight the use of the hell in that question where the hell am I going and you know you can do that to add a sort of emphasis or anger or surprise or um sort of confusion to your question where the hell am I going just add the word the phrase the hell after the question word where the hell am I going what the hell are you doing what the hell are you talking about what the hell is going on right um and there's also the more rude version which is the f word where the F am I going what the are you talking about right everyone knows that but also you got what the hell where the hell we going what the hell are you doing who the hell are you what the hell are you talking about for example all right there's another one too there's on Earth where on Earth am I going what on Earth are you talking about what on Earth is happening who on Earth is this guy anyway right so on Earth after the word where where where the hell am I going what on Earth am I doing those are slightly more or slightly less rude versions of saying the fword in that situation instead where the hell am I going I thought to myself I'd never ventured out so far in that direction before to venture out means to leave a familiar place and go somewhere new right kind of go on an adventure an adventure that's a noun but the verb is to venture to venture out meaning go out go away to a new place uh that you haven't been to before and go on a journey that involves maybe some risks right so to venture out into the countryside to venture out into the desert to venture out of the house if the snow stops I might venture out to get some supplies from the shop for example okay all right let's keep going I drove for quite a long time trying to locate the address I had marked on the map the thing is in this area a lot of the roads don't have names so the the thing is this is a phrase that we use a lot and normally it's used before giving a reason or maybe giving an excuse like for example where's your home you didn't do your homework where's your homework oh well sorry teacher but the thing is my dog ate it right just like that classic terrible student excuse not that not that uh in all my years as a teacher no one has ever given me that excuse but it's the sort of cliched excuse oh I'm sorry my dog ate my homework if someone actually if if one of my students genuinely gave that excuse oh the thing is my dog ate my homework I would be genuinely impressed of like really wow that's incredible is the dog okay anyway the thing is last night I was out and then uh I lost my bag and then it's like never mind just sit down stop stop giving me this ridiculous excuse so the thing is it's used to give a reason or an excuse right in this case um he's explaining why he had problems like the thing is in this area lots of the roads don't have names okay so it's very common to use the thing is when you're giving excuses or reasons for example if someone says to you would you like to go for a drink with me and you you need to say no you might say oh I'd love to but the thing is I can't or I'd love to go for a drink with you but the thing is you know I'm I'm washing my hair tonight um right okay moving on I just had to try to match the layout of the streets to the layout I could see on the map so the layout is the design or the way in which things are laid out or arranged so the layout of the streets like where the houses are positioned where the road is positioned where the where trees are and stuff that's the layout of the streets and the layout of the map you know the way that the map has been designed okay that's the layout you also have things like the layout of a website you know the way that the website is arranged the way it looks there's a picture here there's text here there's this this this that's the layout of a of a website for example um so approaching the house I noticed how dull and dreary it looked so dull basically means boring another word would be drab uh so dull boring not interesting looking okay dull and boring and dreary dreary another adjective to describe the appearance of this house that didn't look very nice or interesting dreary means sort of depressing so you can imagine a house that is yeah sort of dark depressing it doesn't look like it's been um cleaned or maintained very well it's the it's the classic scary house from a hor from a horror film isn't it there always a house like this it's kind of creepy dull dreary looking house with lots of over grown trees and bushes and and grass and stuff dark Windows the door opens you know with a creek like that the whole thing basically if you're in a movie if you ever find yourself in a movie not that that's ever going to happen but if you do find yourself in a movie and there's a big dreary creepy looking house with lots of overgrown bushes generally it's a good idea to to turn around 180° do a 18 and just go home and stop being in horror films okay right so approaching the house I noticed how dull and dreary it looked it was completely covered in leaves branches and overgrown trees so branches we know are the parts of the tree that come off the main trunk you got the main trunk of the tree the trunk and then from the trunk you get branches of the tree that come out and there are leaves and stuff on the branches um over grown trees a tree that's overgrown is that it's grown too much and it's maybe covering the street or covering a building and it needs to be you know cut back it needs to be pruned or trimmed this can't be it I said to myself but as soon as I walked onto the rocky driveway my aunt and uncle came out to greet me to greet someone just means to say hello to someone like for example if someone comes to your office you would go down to reception to greet them uh uh Luke could you go and greet our guests in reception please you go go and greet them hello You Must Be Our Guests Hello nice to nice to meet you hello that's right come this way uh how was your journey was it all right okay so they greeted him they seemed exciting and welcoming hello hello come in come in they said beckoning me inside to beckon someone is to sort of uh wave with your hand to try and make someone come towards you come in come in so the hand gesture that you would use with your hand when you're saying come in that's to beckon someone or to say come here come here with your hand that gesture is called beckoning to beckon someone walking into the house I asked where my cousin was answering immediately one of them said oh he just went to run a few errands to run a few errands it means just to do a few small jobs right so maybe go to the shops post some letters take something to the cleaners you know fill up the car with fuel just to run a few errands to do a few little jobs I waited in their kitchen and we spent a couple of hours talking about my mother and my family my aunt made a delicious homemade pot roast this is where I said it before meat and vegetables in a big pot in the oven cooked for quite a long time yum yum yum that's a pot roast we don't know what was in this particular pot roast but he said that he finished it off in minutes they made a my aunt made a delicious homemade pot roast that I finished off in minutes finished he finished it I think we understand there was nothing left at the end but finished off what's the function of saying off there I finished it off it just emphasizes that it was completely finished so finish and finish off right if you finished it off it means you completely finished it I mean to be honest if something is finished it's completely finished I mean something is either finished or not finished right so I don't know how really you could say that something is completely finished but it's really just emphasizing it okay that's the function of that phrasal verb it's just emphasizing that it was completely finished so you can it's it's quite nice because you can imagine that the the bowl or the plate that he was eating from is completely complely empty at the end and the pot totally empty he finished it off I suppose this is this is one of the this is one of the creepy elements because later on when you realize that we don't know who these people were or what their intentions were or what their agenda was you start to think what did he what did he eat what was that that he ate we don't know but he trusted these people and maybe he shouldn't have so he finished the entire pot roast off but wonder I wonder what was in it h um after dinner we played an enduring game of Uno do you know the game Uno it's a kind of card game that you play with kids where you kind of deal out cards and then you can you have to pick up cards if you if you can't play the right number You' got to pick up cards it's sort of just a fun not very challenging game that you play with children this is uno so they played an enduring game of Uno enduring means that it lasted a long time an enduring game of Uno a game that lasted a long time other things you could say would be enduring appeal right for example the enduring appeal of The Beatles You Know The Beatles this is the example I always love to use but the Beatles you know they split up in 1970 but they're still popular and they still got new music coming out even now and it just shows that they have an incred they have an an enduring appeal you know people like them and they continue to like them so their appeal has lasted for a long time other things another example might be an enduring memory an enduring memory is a memory that sticks with you for a long time okay when we finished the game of Uno it was almost dark and there was still no sign of my cousin just means that there was no indication of him um he didn't come home and there was no sense that he was going to come home soon just zero nothing no indication no sign of my cousin at all my aunt and uncle assured me that he'd be back anytime soon so they assured him so basically means they made him sure they um made him convinced right so to assure someone is to give confidence to someone to make someone sure or to convince someone okay they assured me that he'd be back anytime soon don't worry he'll be back anytime soon I'm sure he'll just be a few moments they assured him we got similar other words like ensure e NS u e is to make certain that something will happen so you we we assure someone that something will happen and we ensure that something happens for example I just want to ensure that uh um I just want to ensure that the lesson starts at the right time meaning I want to make certain that the lesson starts at the right time let ensure with an E I want to assure you that's with as s Ur e that's to make someone feel sure and also we've got the word insure as well to ensure I'm going to ensure my car to ensure my house and that is to protect that thing against loss and that's to take insurance right so that's where you pay an insurance company and if you if the car gets damaged then the insurance company will pay for the damage so I've insured my car okay in this case my aunt and uncle assured me that he'd be back anytime soon don't worry he'll definitely be be back anytime soon MH ensure I wanted to ensure that I was on time for work my aunt and uncle assured me that he'd be back soon um it was almost dark outside I knew it would be a nightmare to find my way out of this Dreadful place after Sunset so a dreadful place is an awful terrible horrible bad place okay now Dreadful doesn't mean scary it doesn't mean frightening okay um even though it's got the word dread in it dread now the noun dread um does mean fear or or fright right to be filled with Dread means that you're ter scared right but if something is Dreadful it just means it's it's bad for example what did you think of the film I thought it was Dreadful one of the worst films I've seen for ages for example all right um what did you think of the pot roast oh no I couldn't eat it it was Dreadful okay so Dreadful just means bad so the guy decides that he needs to leave because he knew it would be a nightmare to find his way out of this terrible place this Dreadful awful place okay all right as my GPS just wasn't working I asked my aunt and uncle the most efficient way to get to the highway now the efficient way it's not it doesn't mean just the best way to get to the highway it means the in this case the quickest way so in English if something is efficient it means it does something quickly without using a lot of time quickly obviously uh without using a lot of energy or effort or or money okay the most efficient way of getting to the highway just in this case means the quickest way okay you can also say an efficient car an efficient car is one that travels a long way on a smaller amount of fuel right that's an efficient car like you know typically you know German or Japanese cars tend to be pretty efficient right famously like a Volkswagen Golf is a very efficient car but then because they they they do lots of miles to the gallon as we say uh whereas you know those classic American cars those big American muscle cars they look really cool but they are not efficient at all because you need to fill up the car with fuel you drive for about 10 minutes and you got to fill it up again because they're so inefficient yeah okay moving on they gave me a puzzled look so a puzzled look just means a huh a confused look puzzle a puzzle is a thing you have to solve like a crossword puzzle or a word puzzle a puzzled look is a look that you know is confused a confused look okay to give someone a look as well is quite a nice phrase you know uh he gave me a dirty look like when if you say something that someone doesn't like it might give you a dirty look I'm trying to I'm trying to do a dirty look I don't know um she gave me a friendly look hello you know in this case a puzzled look I told them I couldn't stay because I had to work the next day and couldn't afford to miss another day so I couldn't afford to or I can't afford to okay it's always can or could not in this case afford to do something means not have enough m uh not have enough time or enough money to do it okay normally for example do you want to come to Disneyland I can't afford to come to Disneyland uh not until the end of the month when I get paid because it's very expensive isn't it Disneyland you got to pay for the ticket to get there ticket to get in and then you got to you know you got to pay for all the food and all the other stuff it's very expensive I can't afford it right mean I don't have enough money to do it in this case he said I had to work the next day and couldn't afford to miss another day uh in this case couldn't afford to in the sense that he doesn't have enough chances left right if he's late another day or he misses another day he's probably going to get fired by his boss so in terms of Chances with his boss he doesn't have enough chances left so he really couldn't afford to miss another day okay so couldn't afford to because you don't have enough money can't afford to because you don't have enough time can't afford to because you've run out of opportunities you know I Shrugged it off and told them not to worry to shrug something off now to shrug shr u shr u right shrug is to kind of move your shoulders up as if you care as if you don't really care a it's all right you know when you when you kind of move your shoulders up and down to to show that you don't really care or it doesn't matter you don't mind now to shrug something off is is basically a way to say that you consider it to be unimportant or to say that it's not important or act like something is not important someone has said something and you just shrug it off like for example someone has criticized you and you shrug it off like Luke your podcast episodes are quite long aren't they quite long aren't they those podcast episodes who can listen to who could listen to a podcast for that long like it's all right people seem to like it you know just shrug it off shrug off the criticism in this case uh in this case they said to him oh no you you must stay you'll get you know you you'll get lost and he he Shrugged it off and just told them not to worry ah it's all right don't worry I've got a pretty good sense of direction your sense of direction is your ability to know where you are and where you're going if you've got a good sense of direction you generally don't get lost but if you've got a bad sense of direction you get lost easily looking aggravated they strongly advised me me to stay the night for my own sake so aggravated just means annoyed or bothered irritated or peeved like they're like God no you no you shouldn't you shouldn't leave no no no no no no you must stay they were kind of annoyed or bothered or irritated they strongly advised me to stay the night for my own sake right if if if you do something for your own sake it means for your own interest as if to say or if you leave you might get lost it'll be bad for you you could have a you know you could get lost you could get into trouble just for your own sake not for us not for us not for us we don't mind but just for you you see for your own sake for your interest um their body language was weird too because they became more serious and insistent if you are insistent it means you're demanding or adamant or not taking no for an answer oh no no no no no no you must stay no absolutely absolutely not no no no you're staying you're staying no that's that no I won't have any more of it thank you no you are staying and that's the end of it to be insistent and they like no no really really really no no no no you're stay get get the blankets um my uncle stood shaking his head and my aunt began to move about the place moving from here to here to here picking up a set of keys to unlock what I assume was a spare bedroom he assumed it to assume is to think that something is true without actually checking or or getting proof so he wasn't sure he hadn't checked what the room was but he just assumed that it was a spare bedroom oh it must be a spare bedroom this is probably where they want me to sleep but he's only assuming that which again is quite quite nicely written because it suggests to us that oh maybe that room was something else what was that room oh my God it's a torture chamber I don't know uh a spare bedroom a spare bedroom an extra bedroom that's not being used okay so we talk about a spare bedroom um other things a spare pen if you turn up to your English lesson and you don't have a pen then you could say excuse me does anyone have a spare pen do you have a spare pen I could borrow okay at this point I was getting annoyed and irritable so annoyed aggravated frustrated irritated and irritable irritable just means that you are in a state where you can become irritated so if someone is irritable it means they can easily become irritated irritated annoyed aggravated irritable means that you can easily become irritated they're very similar really to be irritable and to be irritated very similar like for example or don't talk to him in the morning he's very he gets very irritable if he hasn't had any coffee I I would leave him alone until he's had his coffee he gets very irritated if he hasn't had his coffee they're more or less the same thing irritable and irritated I sighed fine I'll stay the night then to stay the night obviously means to stay and sleep somewhere both of them seemed strangely ecstatic if you are ecstatic it means you're extremely happy very very pleased oh good he's staying the night bit weird as soon as they went out of the room to get bed sheets and pillows I ran out of the door got in my car and hastily pulled away so we've got the word hasty or in this case the adverb hastily uh if Hasty means in a hurry without thinking carefully so you just do something quickly without really thinking carefully in this case escaped in his car right quickly without really sto stopping to think he did it hastily he pulled away so to pull away this phrasal verb means to leave in a car so the car is parked you get in you start the engine you turn the wheel and V you pull away or pull off is another one okay and the opposite of that is to pull over to pull over that means you're driving in the car and you get to your destination you turn to the side of the road and stop you pull over it's also what police would ask you to do if you're driving along I don't know what it is you're doing you're driving too fast or you're you're completely drunk behind the wheel of the car hopefully not and the police W and they say pull over the car please right pull over have you have you played Grand Theft Auto then I'm sure you've heard the police shouting at you to pull over pull over the car don't do anything stupid buddy you get those sorts of things when you you're playing Grand Theft Auto but anyway pull over just means stop the car by the side of the road and then the opposite would be to pull off or to pull away I know it was rude but I suddenly felt the urge to get out of there quickly if you feel the urge to do something uh it means you feel uh strong motivation to do something suddenly feel that you have to do something I felt the urge to get out of there I felt compelled to get out of there I felt that I had to get out of there I felt the urge an urge is like a a push inside yourself or a a strong uh compulsion or feeling that you need to do something I felt the urge to go to the toilet for example in this case I felt the urge to just get out of there to escape quickly it seemed to take me ages but I finally found my way back to the main Highway and drove back through the night wondering why my cousin had never turned up to turn up means to arrive okay to turn up very common phrasal verb just means to arrive okay for example I've been waiting for you I waited for you all morning and you just didn't turn up what happened okay or like he finally turned up half an hour late or look these three students just didn't turn up today does anyone know what happened to them to turn up meaning to arrive okay um climbing over my fence and entering the back door I noticed the kitchen lights were on a fence do you know what a fence is between two gardens you got like a wooden thing or maybe a metal thing that divides the two gardens and that's a fence right you you'd need to climb over it if you want to get into the back back door of the house that's a fence um as soon as I look as soon as I took my first step through the door I saw my mom sitting there looking impatient a note about the spelling of the word mom or in this case mom M oom is pretty standard in American English right I saw my mom sitting there so that's normal in American English usually in British English it's muu m although in some cases in the UK some people do spell it m for example in Birmingham you know they would say mom as well and spell it with an M but for the most part generally speaking in the UK it's muu M for Mom and in American English M O M for Mom uh I saw my mom sitting there looking impatient so she was looking impatient like she'd been waiting for a long time annoyed frustrated irritated and in this case impatient where have you been where have you been she asked I was at Aunt Deborah I told you then why did she call saying you never arrived dun d d That's the kind of um crucial moment of the story this is where we realize that so he went to the wrong house to this day I still have no idea who I visited so to this day to this day um to this day just means since then and until now including now okay since then until now including now as well so other examples to this day I've never seen Star Wars I I've never seen Star Wars to this day meaning never in my life including today to this day I still remember the moment that we met another example the old castle is still standing to this day all right and in this case to this day I still have no idea who I visited okay so that was that was vocab there a Little vocab recap with phrases like to this day and to be impatient on your on the fence to turn up to feel the urge to do something to pull away or pull over to be ecstatic to be annoyed or irritable or uh irritated or aggravated to stay the night to assume something a spare bedroom a spare pen a spare chair uh to um to do something for your own sake or for someone else's sake to be insistent to shrug something off your sense of direction to to be able to afford something I can't afford to I couldn't afford to a puzzled look to give someone a puzzled look um efficient Dreadful um no sign of someone and so on and so on and so forth right now again if you want to uh find the entire text for this story uh and a a vocabulary list as well check the episode page for this episode on my website okay just follow the link in the description it will take you straight there uh the link in the description for this episode in your show notes uh you'll find a link there click that it'll take you straight to the page for this episode on my website where you'll be able to uh read the entire text and also see uh a list of vocabulary that I've just explained okay now I had planned to go through grammar from the story as well okay and that includes the classic narrative verb tenses looking at past simple past perfect and past continuous and the ways in which those different tenses are used to sequence events in the story in a fairly sophisticated way with the use of some conjunctions as well um also gern and infinitives so for example you may notice that sometimes you see an ing form of a verb and sometimes you have the infinitive form of the verb like inviting and to invite also I wanted to give some comments about what's the the difference between a gerand like inviting and a present participle like inviting how do you know if it's a gerand or if it's a present participle well if it's a present participle it's used as part of a uh a continuous verb form like be doing to be waiting I am waiting she was waiting I have been waiting so if you need that if you have that verb be along with the ing form that ing form is a present participle but if there's no auxiliary verb be then and it's an ing word then it's probably a Geren and gern are used where you actually need a noun in the sentence like for example as the subject of the sentence skateboarding is my favorite thing for example skateboarding is a Geren there it's like the name of a sport right it's like a noun or we use Jaren in other loc where you need a noun like after certain verbs okay I enjoy skateboarding after the verb enjoy if you want to have another verb I enjoy listening to your podcast after the the verb enjoy you need a gerand because that's you know some verbs are followed by gern some verbs are followed by infinitives I enjoy skateboarding I want to go skateboarding want is followed by an infinitive of course that gets a bit complicated because you start to realize okay this verb or even this whole expression is followed by a gerand but this verb and these expressions are followed by an infinitive for example I am looking forward to is followed by a gerand I'm looking forward to seeing you soon what about I can't wait I can't wait to see you so can't wait is followed by an infinitive you see so there's that and there's some examples of that kind of thing in the story and also participle phrases this is where a present participle is used to create a phrase which informs the rest of the sentence like approaching the house I noticed how dull it looked and there are loads of examples of that in this story you could just write as I was approaching the house I noticed how dull it looked or when I was approaching the house I noticed how dull it looked but it can be more efficient to say approaching the house I noticed how dull it looked and there are loads of examples of that in this story as well and various other bits of grammar now I would go through that now but you know what I'm not going to go through that now because that would take too long and I want to go through it in proper detail but you know what I said before that this is the sort of thing I do on uh in I said before this is the sort of thing I do in premium episodes I think what I'll do is I'll wait and I'll probably make a premium episode where I go through the grammar from that story so if you want to get that if you want to get my comments and my my teaching about all of the grammar that's in that story focusing on participle phrases to make efficient reasonably complex sentences gern and infinitives to understand when we use gerns and when we use infinitives after certain other bits of language and also some some things about narrative verb tenses well of course you'll need to sign up to Luke's English podcast premium and um how do you do that you just go to teacher. co.uk premium and there you'll get the option to choose a type of membership and you should choose Le premium it's $4 a month and you get new premium episodes every month plus access to the entire back catalog and there's like over 150 episodes now where either I tell you stories and go through the language in the story and help you practice your pronunciation with the stories so there's a whole series of Story Time episodes where I tell you stories about my own life most of the time like stories from my childhood and things like that there's also vocabulary review episodes where I go through previous episodes of my podcast and pick out bits of language bits of vocabulary and explain them there are episodes where I read articles and then explain the language and help you remember them there's even a 30 minute standup comedy show that I've videoed of myself on stage doing standup comedy and you can get that as well you can listen to that and see the video version of that too there's loads of stuff in the premium uh subscription so if you want to sign up teacher loot.co.za if you like you can see it that way and then you can add the premium episodes to a podcast app on your phone that's the best way to do it and then you can get links for the PDFs and links for the video versions in the episode show notes so over 150 bonus episodes vocab grammar and pronunciation lessons stories article articles episode reviews and more new episodes every month PDFs with every episode um listen in your favorite podcast app except Spotify because it's not a normal podcast app but all the other podcast app apps Apple podcasts pocketcasts overcast and so on and plus you get private video versions on YouTube that's Luke's English podcast premium teer luke. co.uk premium so what I will do next is do the grammar analysis from this story and publish that as a premium episode okay um all right now I'll be I'll because I'm nice what I'll do is I'll publish that as a premium episode and then that'll be only available in the premium subscription for a limited time and then after a little while I don't know how long a few months maybe a couple of months uh I'll probably publish it on on YouTube and as an free episode of my podcast as well so you can get it there but if you want Early Access if you want to get that now then sign up to L premium and it will be it'll be p55 that's going to be the the the the number of the episode p-55 will be a a a grammar analysis for this story that I've told you today okay thank you so much for listening to this latest episode of Luke's English podcast I hope you've enjoyed it what do you think leave your comments in the comments section what did you think of the story did you find it scary Maybe you didn't find it scary at all um but let us know and did you know what was going to happen did you have any idea what was going to happen next has anything strange like that happened to you maybe you can share one of your true stories in the comment section too all right so I'll let you do that otherwise I will speak to you again next time on Luke's English podcast but for now it's time to say goodbye bye bye bye bye bye

hello listeners welcome back to Luke's English podcast how are you today I hope you're doing fine so here's a brand new episode and this one is a short story episode this is one of those episodes where I read you a short story and then use it to teach you some vocabulary and some grammar okay so uh I'm always looking for short stories always looking for little stories that I can use in episodes of my podcast uh this particular story I found this one on the website kora.com I don't know if you're familiar with Kora basically it's a website where uh people can post questions and then other users of the website will post their responses to those questions and the responses get upvoted or down voted and uh if a if a response gets upvoted a lot it then gets pushed up to the top of the page so I was looking on Kora and one of the questions I found there was something like this can you share any true scary stories can you share any true scary stories that I think was the original question that someone had posted and the the top response the most upvoted response was the story that I'm going to tell you today it was actually posted by a guy called Lance Stevenson and pretty sure that the story happened in the United States of America the USA and it was posted yes as a true scary story okay first of all I'm going to just read the story to you and you can try to understand it right uh if you're look at the video version you will see the story on the screen you'll see the text on the screen next to me uh if you are listening to the audio version uh and you want to read the text as well then you can just go to the page for this episode on my website you'll find the whole story uh copied there for you so you can check out the text in your own time if you want to read it as well uh so listen to the story try to understand it and you can think about this like why what can you identify uh the the scary SC elements so what's scary about this story uh try to imagine what is going to happen next and what happens at the end so can you get the specific details what is the scary element to this um after I've read the story to you I will summarize it in my own words just to try and clarify it just to make sure that you've got the details and that you've understood the the kind of the twist let's say the twist at the end of the story and then after that I'll go back through the text of the story and break it down for language highlighting vocabulary and also some some bits of grammar as well we'll be looking at things like um gern and infinitives and participle phrases and other things we're going to look at the way that the story was told and with different kinds of structures okay right so let's let's get started then with this apparently true scary story all right are you ready yes you're ready okay well let's begin then so I've decided to call this Story the invitation so here we go then what is scary about this story about 7 years ago I got an invitation to attend a dinner party at my cousin's house I have a pretty large family and I'd never actually seen this particular cousin before I'd only ever spoken to him on the phone I was surprised that his family unexpectedly invited me over but I was curious to finally meet them the invitation had an address that I didn't know and the GPS was unfamiliar with it too it was in one of those areas where Google Maps doesn't work properly because of poor phone reception so I had to use an old-fashioned paper map I marked the location on the map tried to get a sense of where I was headed and set off in my car as I was driving I I started to notice how far I'd traveled into the countryside and away from civilization I saw trees farms and Fields passing by just trees farms and Fields and more trees and more farms and more Fields where the hell am I going I thought to myself I'd never ventured out so far in that direction before I drove for quite a long time trying to locate the address I had marked on the map the thing is in this area a lot of the roads don't have names or the names aren't clearly marked by road signs I just had to try to match the layout of the streets to the layout I could see on the map I finally found a place at a location that looked like the one I'd noted on my map I was pretty sure that this was the right spot so I parked and got out of the car approaching the house I noticed how dull and dreary it looked it was completely covered in leaves branches and overgrown trees this can't be it I said to myself but as soon as I walked onto the rocky driveway my aunt and uncle came out to greet me they seemed excited and welcoming hello hello come in come in they said beckoning me inside walking into the house I asked where my cousin was answering immediately one of them said oh he just went to run a few errands he should be back later I waited in their kitchen and we spent a couple of hours talking about my mother and my family my aunt made a delicious homemade pot roast that I finished off in minutes after dinner we played an enduring game of Uno it was surprisingly fun and competitive my aunt in particular seemed delighted to be playing when we finished the game of Uno it was almost dark and there was still no sign of my cousin my aunt and uncle assured me that he'd be back anytime soon despite what they said I decided that I had to leave it was almost dark outside and I knew it would be a nightmare to find my way out of this Dreadful place after sunset with no street lights or road signs as my GPS just wasn't working I asked my aunt and uncle the most efficient way to get to the highway they gave me a puzzled look but we thought you were staying the night they said I told them I couldn't because I had work the next day and couldn't afford to miss another day it's it's much better if you leave tomorrow morning trust us you'll get lost they said I Shrugged it off and told them not to worry ah don't worry I've got a pretty good sense of direction I could find my way out of the Sahara Desert I told them looking aggravated they strongly advised me to stay the night for my own sake their body language was weird too as they became more serious and insistent my uncle stood shaking his head and my aunt began to move about the place picking up a set of keys to unlock what I assume was a spare bedroom at this point I was getting annoyed and irritable I sighed fine I'll stay the night then but I have to get up very early for work I said both of them seemed strangely ecstatic that I was staying the night as soon as they went out of the room to get bed sheets and pillows I ran out of the door got in my car and hastily pulled away I know it was rude but I suddenly felt the urge to get out of there quickly it seemed to take me ages but I finally found my way back to the main Highway and drove back through the night wondering why my cousin had never turned up I got home several hours later than I expected it was after midnight and I didn't want to wake my parents up climbing over my fence and entering the back door I noticed that the kitchen lights were on as soon as I took my first step through the door I saw my mom sitting there looking impatient Where Have You Been she asked I was at Aunt Deborah's I told you I replied then why did she call saying you never arrived to this day I still have no idea who I visited okay so that's the story hm did you understand all of that what did you think did you think it was scary I don't know did you understand it enough what's going on what was actually going on here now I've read that story to people before and to an extent some people sort of misunderstood what was going on or they expected something to be happening so let me let me go through the story again and try and tell it to you in my own words to make it clear what happened so here are things that I think didn't happen so I remember telling that story to other people in the past they have they have assumed that the aunt and uncle like the they they assumed that maybe the reason the cousin didn't turn up is because the aunt and uncle maybe had killed him or something um I remember one person I read that story too uh thought that the pot roast was suspicious like what was in the pot roast did they kill the cousin and then they put him in the pot pot roast and he ate the the cousin I don't think that's what's going on basically this the creepy thing about this is that the guy almost definitely got the wrong house he got he went to the wrong house and he spent an evening with two people who he thought were his aunt and uncle two people who essentially seem to be pretending to be his aunt and uncle and who were lying to him about the cousin and stuff they were just strangely delighted to have a stranger in their home they were sort of weirdly uh excited to have someone at home with them and they really wanted that person to stay the night which is strange so who were these people we don't know because he got the wrong house and and meanwhile his real aunt and uncle and and uh his cousin were in a different house somewhere waiting for him to arrive live so a key thing to to know about this is that at the beginning of the story um this the Storyteller the writer says that uh he'd never actually met um his aunt or uncle or cousin before and that seems a little bit odd right a little bit strange that there would be like members of your family especially like an aunt and uncle and a cousin that you'd never actually met before but I suppose it's possible Right some people have very large families and uh especially in the United States which is such a big country if like there are members of your family who live fairly far away then it's not completely strange to to have never seen them or never met them and some families are a bit you know some families are not that close you know and and sometimes if there's like a bad relationship between the parents that they just don't see each other you know so you know there's that right so let me just let me try and clarify the story so the story starts with the guy saying um that s years earlier he received an invitation to have dinner at his cousin's house and he'd never actually met his cousin or his aunt or Uncle before so he was surprised that they had sent him a dinner invitation he'd only ever spoken to his cousin on the phone so he had actually spoken to his cousin but never actually met them face to face another slightly strange thing is that you'd imagine that maybe he would have seen photos of them but apparently not in this case but um so um the address was in a remote location quite far away from where the guy uh lived and he had to go there by car but the GPS his his um you know his satellite navigation in his car his uh his GPS couldn't locate the address and also the um the address that area is like very difficult to to navigate because there are no uh street names or road signs it's very poorly um indicated and apparently very bad mobile phone reception so he wasn't able to use Google Maps so he was forced to use an old fashion paper map and mark the location uh Mark the address on the map and then set off in his car and after driving for a long long time through lots of Countryside uh further and further away from civilization out into the middle of nowhere um he eventually found what he thought was the right place because the the streets didn't have street signs on them it was difficult for him to locate the right address but he tried to match the streets he could see with the streets he could see on the map and he found what he thought was the correct house um he wasn't completely sure uh but when he stepped onto the driveway when he approached the house what he thought was his um aunt and his uncle like these two people quickly came out of the house and greeted him and sort of very enthusiastically welcomed him in and I guess he didn't really have time to think about it but he assumed that these two people must be his aunt and uncle and they welcomed him in very enthusiastically and then he chatted with them in the kitchen for a couple of hours talking about his mother and their family so I suppose I don't know what what's going on there maybe these people pretended you know they were just like oh yeah yeah yeah just going along with it he would talk about his his mom and they would just sort of like just agree and go along with everything so as far as he was concerned these this was his aunt and uncle and when he said oh what about my cousin they just kind of um brushed It Off by saying oh he he'll be back later he's just running a few errands anyway would you like something to eat and uh the woman made him a a pot roast which is a kind of um like a roasted um meal in a in a pot with vegetables and some sort of meat and onion and sauce and stuff like that and he ate the whole thing apparently was delicious then they played a game of Uno which is a kind of card game and uh he noticed that the the his wouldbe aunt and uncle were behaving a bit strangely and the aunt in particular seem to be like like ecstatic about playing the game and like strangely delighted you know and it got darker and darker and he realized that the cousin perhaps wasn't going to turn up and so he he decided that he had to leave but his so-called aunt and uncle were very keen for him to stay and they were they were shocked at the idea that he would leave and they they were like no no no you must stay it'll be too difficult to find your way uh uh out of the area at this time so no no no you must stay and um they started to prepare a bed for him and he suddenly got a weird feeling at this point and decided that he had to leave he also mentioned something about the fact that he had to work the next day and he couldn't afford to miss another day so probably you know he was probably um in already in a little bit of trouble with his boss for missing days of work previously and so it was really important that he got back home in time to be able to get to work um you know without missing another day so he decided that he really did have to leave and in the end he just sort of escaped while they were doing something while they uh quickly went away to get some bed sheets and pillows he sort of escaped and went out of the door got in his car and drove off and managed to find his way home it took him a long time and then when he finally got home um it was late and he wanted just to go straight to bed but his mom was still up waiting for him uh and annoyed with him and she said what where have you been and he said I was at aunt and uncle I was at Aunt Deborah's like I told you and she said well why did they call saying that you never arrived so in fact the real aunt and uncle were waiting the entire evening for him to arrive he must have gone to another house and who were these strange people and why were they so Keen for him to stay the night what was going on and what was in that pot roast anyway just weird I mean so that is one of those sort of stories that is supposed to be scary because of what might have happened or what could have happened or the fact that there are lots of unknown things like we don't know who these people were and why they were so enthusiastic about him being in their home and then staying the night and what and some other details like why was the bedroom door locked with a key and why would why was their behavior so odd so there you go that's the story so what do you think do you think it's a true story I mean we've got no idea of tell we we don't know we can never know if that was a true story or if Lance what was his name Lance Stevenson Lance Stevenson maybe Lance Stevenson just made it up it could be one of those Urban myths you know those sorts of stories which are presented as being true but they're really just made up and designed to be scary little stories like normally stories like this if they if they if we know that they're not true if we know that they're made up then they become less effective they have less impact if you listen to that story believing it's true then it makes it more creepy doesn't it so who knows maybe it's true maybe it's just made up no idea but I quite enjoy it I quite enjoy the um creepiness of it okay so let's now do a language review let's see how the story was written and this is where we're going to focus on some vocabulary and some grammar I'm actually going to give you the sort of Luke's English podcast premium treatment now because normally I do this kind of thing in premium episodes of my podcast and uh that's where I go into the vocabulary and the grammar and stuff in a lot more detail so this is just a flavor of the sort of thing you can get if you subscribe to my premium content uh and if you do that you'll get like loads of extra episodes in your podcast app so you'll get the premium feed which means you'll get all of the free episodes of my audio show without any advertising and also you'll get all these extra episodes that uh involve lots of language teaching from me and this is just a little tap of the sort of thing that you get in those extra premium episodes if you're interested in that by the way uh just go to teacher. co.uk premium info and you can find all the details audio episodes that you can get in your audio podcast app with PDFs every single premium episode has a PDF with worksheets and the rest of it vocabulary teaching grammar teaching pronunciation practice memory exercises and also video versions there are video versions of those premium episodes uh too so you can get all the information at teacher. co.uk premium info so let's start then by going through vocabulary from the story okay you'll see that I've highlighted some words in the story in Orange not every single um slide here has a has a word on it for example the first slide about seven years ago I got an invitation to attend a dinner party at my cousin's house okay fine nothing in particular to to point out there the next slide I have a pretty large family pretty large right it just means fairly large quite large I have a pretty large family and I'd never actually seen this particular cousin before so that word particular this particular cousin just means this specific cousin this cousin in particular okay so obviously this guy's got lots of cousins but now he wants to say this cousin specifically so he'd never actually seen this particular cousin before all right so this particular cousin on this particular day this particular episode of Luke's podcast was particularly interesting for me in particular all right moving on I was surprised that his family unexpectedly invited me over so unexpectedly it's pretty clear I suppose right but it's it's a nice adverb to do something unexpectedly when was the last time you use that word um do something that you don't expect do something unexpectedly okay so they they they unexpectedly did something they did something unexpectedly in this case his family unexpectedly invited me over so invite me I think you understand it's like would you like to come to our house for dinner but invite me over why have we got the word over in there using the word over imp implies visiting someone's home okay and we often use that we say come over invite someone over stay over over means over here at my place so that's just very common when you're talking about coming or visiting someone's home invite someone over come over and stay over yes the invitation had an address that I didn't know and the GPS was unfamiliar with it too so GPS I think it's probably International right GPS the sort of um electronic map device that everyone uses in their car GPS um global positioning system in the UK we also call it satnav satnav did you know that one satellite navigation satnav GPS satnav it was in one of those areas where Google Maps doesn't work properly because of poor phone reception so phone reception refers to you know your the the how much coverage you have how much connection you have on your phone we call it phone reception uh or signal or network or coverage for example if you've only got one bar on your phone and you're trying to do something like maybe you're trying to uh look something up on the Internet uh and you've only got one bar then your phone works very slowly and you can tell I've got such ter terrible reception here have you got any reception I've got no network or the signal here is terrible isn't it okay or if you're on the phone to someone it's like I can't hear you no I've got really bad signal I've got really I've got really bad I've got no network here okay so reception signal or network right I marked the location on the map try to get a sense of where I was headed and set off in my car if you are headed in in a particular direction it means you're going in that direction right so where are we headed we're headed for London meaning we're going to London we're headed for the pub meaning we're going to the pub so if you're headed or heading as well somewhere it means you're going in that direction so I tried to get a sense of where I was headed and set off in my car to set off means to start your journey okay start your journey set off in your car set off on your bike set off on foot okay remember it's always on foot it's never by walking but on foot set off on your journey set off in your car set off on your bike set off on Foot Right set off meaning start your trip as I was driving I started to notice how far I'd traveled into the countryside away from civilization the countryside I mean it's a very common word but as a teacher I often notice that my Learners don't use this word or don't seem to remember it so you got the city and then you've maybe got the suburbs which is that area just around the city and then where it's all green and you've got lots of fields and trees and stuff that's the countryside okay in this case he was driving and driving and he realized how far he' traveled into the countryside away from civilization I saw trees farms and field passing by passing by meaning passing next to him passing on the side as as he looked out of the window passing by where the hell am I going I thought to myself um I just wanted to highlight the use of the hell in that question where the hell am I going and you know you can do that to add a sort of emphasis or anger or surprise or um sort of confusion to your question where the hell am I going just add the word the phrase the hell after the question word where the hell am I going what the hell are you doing what the hell are you talking about what the hell is going on right um and there's also the more rude version which is the f word where the F am I going what the are you talking about right everyone knows that but also you got what the hell where the hell we going what the hell are you doing who the hell are you what the hell are you talking about for example all right there's another one too there's on Earth where on Earth am I going what on Earth are you talking about what on Earth is happening who on Earth is this guy anyway right so on Earth after the word where where where the hell am I going what on Earth am I doing those are slightly more or slightly less rude versions of saying the fword in that situation instead where the hell am I going I thought to myself I'd never ventured out so far in that direction before to venture out means to leave a familiar place and go somewhere new right kind of go on an adventure an adventure that's a noun but the verb is to venture to venture out meaning go out go away to a new place uh that you haven't been to before and go on a journey that involves maybe some risks right so to venture out into the countryside to venture out into the desert to venture out of the house if the snow stops I might venture out to get some supplies from the shop for example okay all right let's keep going I drove for quite a long time trying to locate the address I had marked on the map the thing is in this area a lot of the roads don't have names so the the thing is this is a phrase that we use a lot and normally it's used before giving a reason or maybe giving an excuse like for example where's your home you didn't do your homework where's your homework oh well sorry teacher but the thing is my dog ate it right just like that classic terrible student excuse not that not that uh in all my years as a teacher no one has ever given me that excuse but it's the sort of cliched excuse oh I'm sorry my dog ate my homework if someone actually if if one of my students genuinely gave that excuse oh the thing is my dog ate my homework I would be genuinely impressed of like really wow that's incredible is the dog okay anyway the thing is last night I was out and then uh I lost my bag and then it's like never mind just sit down stop stop giving me this ridiculous excuse so the thing is it's used to give a reason or an excuse right in this case um he's explaining why he had problems like the thing is in this area lots of the roads don't have names okay so it's very common to use the thing is when you're giving excuses or reasons for example if someone says to you would you like to go for a drink with me and you you need to say no you might say oh I'd love to but the thing is I can't or I'd love to go for a drink with you but the thing is you know I'm I'm washing my hair tonight um right okay moving on I just had to try to match the layout of the streets to the layout I could see on the map so the layout is the design or the way in which things are laid out or arranged so the layout of the streets like where the houses are positioned where the road is positioned where the where trees are and stuff that's the layout of the streets and the layout of the map you know the way that the map has been designed okay that's the layout you also have things like the layout of a website you know the way that the website is arranged the way it looks there's a picture here there's text here there's this this this that's the layout of a of a website for example um so approaching the house I noticed how dull and dreary it looked so dull basically means boring another word would be drab uh so dull boring not interesting looking okay dull and boring and dreary dreary another adjective to describe the appearance of this house that didn't look very nice or interesting dreary means sort of depressing so you can imagine a house that is yeah sort of dark depressing it doesn't look like it's been um cleaned or maintained very well it's the it's the classic scary house from a hor from a horror film isn't it there always a house like this it's kind of creepy dull dreary looking house with lots of over grown trees and bushes and and grass and stuff dark Windows the door opens you know with a creek like that the whole thing basically if you're in a movie if you ever find yourself in a movie not that that's ever going to happen but if you do find yourself in a movie and there's a big dreary creepy looking house with lots of overgrown bushes generally it's a good idea to to turn around 180° do a 18 and just go home and stop being in horror films okay right so approaching the house I noticed how dull and dreary it looked it was completely covered in leaves branches and overgrown trees so branches we know are the parts of the tree that come off the main trunk you got the main trunk of the tree the trunk and then from the trunk you get branches of the tree that come out and there are leaves and stuff on the branches um over grown trees a tree that's overgrown is that it's grown too much and it's maybe covering the street or covering a building and it needs to be you know cut back it needs to be pruned or trimmed this can't be it I said to myself but as soon as I walked onto the rocky driveway my aunt and uncle came out to greet me to greet someone just means to say hello to someone like for example if someone comes to your office you would go down to reception to greet them uh uh Luke could you go and greet our guests in reception please you go go and greet them hello You Must Be Our Guests Hello nice to nice to meet you hello that's right come this way uh how was your journey was it all right okay so they greeted him they seemed exciting and welcoming hello hello come in come in they said beckoning me inside to beckon someone is to sort of uh wave with your hand to try and make someone come towards you come in come in so the hand gesture that you would use with your hand when you're saying come in that's to beckon someone or to say come here come here with your hand that gesture is called beckoning to beckon someone walking into the house I asked where my cousin was answering immediately one of them said oh he just went to run a few errands to run a few errands it means just to do a few small jobs right so maybe go to the shops post some letters take something to the cleaners you know fill up the car with fuel just to run a few errands to do a few little jobs I waited in their kitchen and we spent a couple of hours talking about my mother and my family my aunt made a delicious homemade pot roast this is where I said it before meat and vegetables in a big pot in the oven cooked for quite a long time yum yum yum that's a pot roast we don't know what was in this particular pot roast but he said that he finished it off in minutes they made a my aunt made a delicious homemade pot roast that I finished off in minutes finished he finished it I think we understand there was nothing left at the end but finished off what's the function of saying off there I finished it off it just emphasizes that it was completely finished so finish and finish off right if you finished it off it means you completely finished it I mean to be honest if something is finished it's completely finished I mean something is either finished or not finished right so I don't know how really you could say that something is completely finished but it's really just emphasizing it okay that's the function of that phrasal verb it's just emphasizing that it was completely finished so you can it's it's quite nice because you can imagine that the the bowl or the plate that he was eating from is completely complely empty at the end and the pot totally empty he finished it off I suppose this is this is one of the this is one of the creepy elements because later on when you realize that we don't know who these people were or what their intentions were or what their agenda was you start to think what did he what did he eat what was that that he ate we don't know but he trusted these people and maybe he shouldn't have so he finished the entire pot roast off but wonder I wonder what was in it h um after dinner we played an enduring game of Uno do you know the game Uno it's a kind of card game that you play with kids where you kind of deal out cards and then you can you have to pick up cards if you if you can't play the right number You' got to pick up cards it's sort of just a fun not very challenging game that you play with children this is uno so they played an enduring game of Uno enduring means that it lasted a long time an enduring game of Uno a game that lasted a long time other things you could say would be enduring appeal right for example the enduring appeal of The Beatles You Know The Beatles this is the example I always love to use but the Beatles you know they split up in 1970 but they're still popular and they still got new music coming out even now and it just shows that they have an incred they have an an enduring appeal you know people like them and they continue to like them so their appeal has lasted for a long time other things another example might be an enduring memory an enduring memory is a memory that sticks with you for a long time okay when we finished the game of Uno it was almost dark and there was still no sign of my cousin just means that there was no indication of him um he didn't come home and there was no sense that he was going to come home soon just zero nothing no indication no sign of my cousin at all my aunt and uncle assured me that he'd be back anytime soon so they assured him so basically means they made him sure they um made him convinced right so to assure someone is to give confidence to someone to make someone sure or to convince someone okay they assured me that he'd be back anytime soon don't worry he'll be back anytime soon I'm sure he'll just be a few moments they assured him we got similar other words like ensure e NS u e is to make certain that something will happen so you we we assure someone that something will happen and we ensure that something happens for example I just want to ensure that uh um I just want to ensure that the lesson starts at the right time meaning I want to make certain that the lesson starts at the right time let ensure with an E I want to assure you that's with as s Ur e that's to make someone feel sure and also we've got the word insure as well to ensure I'm going to ensure my car to ensure my house and that is to protect that thing against loss and that's to take insurance right so that's where you pay an insurance company and if you if the car gets damaged then the insurance company will pay for the damage so I've insured my car okay in this case my aunt and uncle assured me that he'd be back anytime soon don't worry he'll definitely be be back anytime soon MH ensure I wanted to ensure that I was on time for work my aunt and uncle assured me that he'd be back soon um it was almost dark outside I knew it would be a nightmare to find my way out of this Dreadful place after Sunset so a dreadful place is an awful terrible horrible bad place okay now Dreadful doesn't mean scary it doesn't mean frightening okay um even though it's got the word dread in it dread now the noun dread um does mean fear or or fright right to be filled with Dread means that you're ter scared right but if something is Dreadful it just means it's it's bad for example what did you think of the film I thought it was Dreadful one of the worst films I've seen for ages for example all right um what did you think of the pot roast oh no I couldn't eat it it was Dreadful okay so Dreadful just means bad so the guy decides that he needs to leave because he knew it would be a nightmare to find his way out of this terrible place this Dreadful awful place okay all right as my GPS just wasn't working I asked my aunt and uncle the most efficient way to get to the highway now the efficient way it's not it doesn't mean just the best way to get to the highway it means the in this case the quickest way so in English if something is efficient it means it does something quickly without using a lot of time quickly obviously uh without using a lot of energy or effort or or money okay the most efficient way of getting to the highway just in this case means the quickest way okay you can also say an efficient car an efficient car is one that travels a long way on a smaller amount of fuel right that's an efficient car like you know typically you know German or Japanese cars tend to be pretty efficient right famously like a Volkswagen Golf is a very efficient car but then because they they they do lots of miles to the gallon as we say uh whereas you know those classic American cars those big American muscle cars they look really cool but they are not efficient at all because you need to fill up the car with fuel you drive for about 10 minutes and you got to fill it up again because they're so inefficient yeah okay moving on they gave me a puzzled look so a puzzled look just means a huh a confused look puzzle a puzzle is a thing you have to solve like a crossword puzzle or a word puzzle a puzzled look is a look that you know is confused a confused look okay to give someone a look as well is quite a nice phrase you know uh he gave me a dirty look like when if you say something that someone doesn't like it might give you a dirty look I'm trying to I'm trying to do a dirty look I don't know um she gave me a friendly look hello you know in this case a puzzled look I told them I couldn't stay because I had to work the next day and couldn't afford to miss another day so I couldn't afford to or I can't afford to okay it's always can or could not in this case afford to do something means not have enough m uh not have enough time or enough money to do it okay normally for example do you want to come to Disneyland I can't afford to come to Disneyland uh not until the end of the month when I get paid because it's very expensive isn't it Disneyland you got to pay for the ticket to get there ticket to get in and then you got to you know you got to pay for all the food and all the other stuff it's very expensive I can't afford it right mean I don't have enough money to do it in this case he said I had to work the next day and couldn't afford to miss another day uh in this case couldn't afford to in the sense that he doesn't have enough chances left right if he's late another day or he misses another day he's probably going to get fired by his boss so in terms of Chances with his boss he doesn't have enough chances left so he really couldn't afford to miss another day okay so couldn't afford to because you don't have enough money can't afford to because you don't have enough time can't afford to because you've run out of opportunities you know I Shrugged it off and told them not to worry to shrug something off now to shrug shr u shr u right shrug is to kind of move your shoulders up as if you care as if you don't really care a it's all right you know when you when you kind of move your shoulders up and down to to show that you don't really care or it doesn't matter you don't mind now to shrug something off is is basically a way to say that you consider it to be unimportant or to say that it's not important or act like something is not important someone has said something and you just shrug it off like for example someone has criticized you and you shrug it off like Luke your podcast episodes are quite long aren't they quite long aren't they those podcast episodes who can listen to who could listen to a podcast for that long like it's all right people seem to like it you know just shrug it off shrug off the criticism in this case uh in this case they said to him oh no you you must stay you'll get you know you you'll get lost and he he Shrugged it off and just told them not to worry ah it's all right don't worry I've got a pretty good sense of direction your sense of direction is your ability to know where you are and where you're going if you've got a good sense of direction you generally don't get lost but if you've got a bad sense of direction you get lost easily looking aggravated they strongly advised me me to stay the night for my own sake so aggravated just means annoyed or bothered irritated or peeved like they're like God no you no you shouldn't you shouldn't leave no no no no no no you must stay they were kind of annoyed or bothered or irritated they strongly advised me to stay the night for my own sake right if if if you do something for your own sake it means for your own interest as if to say or if you leave you might get lost it'll be bad for you you could have a you know you could get lost you could get into trouble just for your own sake not for us not for us not for us we don't mind but just for you you see for your own sake for your interest um their body language was weird too because they became more serious and insistent if you are insistent it means you're demanding or adamant or not taking no for an answer oh no no no no no no you must stay no absolutely absolutely not no no no you're staying you're staying no that's that no I won't have any more of it thank you no you are staying and that's the end of it to be insistent and they like no no really really really no no no no you're stay get get the blankets um my uncle stood shaking his head and my aunt began to move about the place moving from here to here to here picking up a set of keys to unlock what I assume was a spare bedroom he assumed it to assume is to think that something is true without actually checking or or getting proof so he wasn't sure he hadn't checked what the room was but he just assumed that it was a spare bedroom oh it must be a spare bedroom this is probably where they want me to sleep but he's only assuming that which again is quite quite nicely written because it suggests to us that oh maybe that room was something else what was that room oh my God it's a torture chamber I don't know uh a spare bedroom a spare bedroom an extra bedroom that's not being used okay so we talk about a spare bedroom um other things a spare pen if you turn up to your English lesson and you don't have a pen then you could say excuse me does anyone have a spare pen do you have a spare pen I could borrow okay at this point I was getting annoyed and irritable so annoyed aggravated frustrated irritated and irritable irritable just means that you are in a state where you can become irritated so if someone is irritable it means they can easily become irritated irritated annoyed aggravated irritable means that you can easily become irritated they're very similar really to be irritable and to be irritated very similar like for example or don't talk to him in the morning he's very he gets very irritable if he hasn't had any coffee I I would leave him alone until he's had his coffee he gets very irritated if he hasn't had his coffee they're more or less the same thing irritable and irritated I sighed fine I'll stay the night then to stay the night obviously means to stay and sleep somewhere both of them seemed strangely ecstatic if you are ecstatic it means you're extremely happy very very pleased oh good he's staying the night bit weird as soon as they went out of the room to get bed sheets and pillows I ran out of the door got in my car and hastily pulled away so we've got the word hasty or in this case the adverb hastily uh if Hasty means in a hurry without thinking carefully so you just do something quickly without really thinking carefully in this case escaped in his car right quickly without really sto stopping to think he did it hastily he pulled away so to pull away this phrasal verb means to leave in a car so the car is parked you get in you start the engine you turn the wheel and V you pull away or pull off is another one okay and the opposite of that is to pull over to pull over that means you're driving in the car and you get to your destination you turn to the side of the road and stop you pull over it's also what police would ask you to do if you're driving along I don't know what it is you're doing you're driving too fast or you're you're completely drunk behind the wheel of the car hopefully not and the police W and they say pull over the car please right pull over have you have you played Grand Theft Auto then I'm sure you've heard the police shouting at you to pull over pull over the car don't do anything stupid buddy you get those sorts of things when you you're playing Grand Theft Auto but anyway pull over just means stop the car by the side of the road and then the opposite would be to pull off or to pull away I know it was rude but I suddenly felt the urge to get out of there quickly if you feel the urge to do something uh it means you feel uh strong motivation to do something suddenly feel that you have to do something I felt the urge to get out of there I felt compelled to get out of there I felt that I had to get out of there I felt the urge an urge is like a a push inside yourself or a a strong uh compulsion or feeling that you need to do something I felt the urge to go to the toilet for example in this case I felt the urge to just get out of there to escape quickly it seemed to take me ages but I finally found my way back to the main Highway and drove back through the night wondering why my cousin had never turned up to turn up means to arrive okay to turn up very common phrasal verb just means to arrive okay for example I've been waiting for you I waited for you all morning and you just didn't turn up what happened okay or like he finally turned up half an hour late or look these three students just didn't turn up today does anyone know what happened to them to turn up meaning to arrive okay um climbing over my fence and entering the back door I noticed the kitchen lights were on a fence do you know what a fence is between two gardens you got like a wooden thing or maybe a metal thing that divides the two gardens and that's a fence right you you'd need to climb over it if you want to get into the back back door of the house that's a fence um as soon as I look as soon as I took my first step through the door I saw my mom sitting there looking impatient a note about the spelling of the word mom or in this case mom M oom is pretty standard in American English right I saw my mom sitting there so that's normal in American English usually in British English it's muu m although in some cases in the UK some people do spell it m for example in Birmingham you know they would say mom as well and spell it with an M but for the most part generally speaking in the UK it's muu M for Mom and in American English M O M for Mom uh I saw my mom sitting there looking impatient so she was looking impatient like she'd been waiting for a long time annoyed frustrated irritated and in this case impatient where have you been where have you been she asked I was at Aunt Deborah I told you then why did she call saying you never arrived dun d d That's the kind of um crucial moment of the story this is where we realize that so he went to the wrong house to this day I still have no idea who I visited so to this day to this day um to this day just means since then and until now including now okay since then until now including now as well so other examples to this day I've never seen Star Wars I I've never seen Star Wars to this day meaning never in my life including today to this day I still remember the moment that we met another example the old castle is still standing to this day all right and in this case to this day I still have no idea who I visited okay so that was that was vocab there a Little vocab recap with phrases like to this day and to be impatient on your on the fence to turn up to feel the urge to do something to pull away or pull over to be ecstatic to be annoyed or irritable or uh irritated or aggravated to stay the night to assume something a spare bedroom a spare pen a spare chair uh to um to do something for your own sake or for someone else's sake to be insistent to shrug something off your sense of direction to to be able to afford something I can't afford to I couldn't afford to a puzzled look to give someone a puzzled look um efficient Dreadful um no sign of someone and so on and so on and so forth right now again if you want to uh find the entire text for this story uh and a a vocabulary list as well check the episode page for this episode on my website okay just follow the link in the description it will take you straight there uh the link in the description for this episode in your show notes uh you'll find a link there click that it'll take you straight to the page for this episode on my website where you'll be able to uh read the entire text and also see uh a list of vocabulary that I've just explained okay now I had planned to go through grammar from the story as well okay and that includes the classic narrative verb tenses looking at past simple past perfect and past continuous and the ways in which those different tenses are used to sequence events in the story in a fairly sophisticated way with the use of some conjunctions as well um also gern and infinitives so for example you may notice that sometimes you see an ing form of a verb and sometimes you have the infinitive form of the verb like inviting and to invite also I wanted to give some comments about what's the the difference between a gerand like inviting and a present participle like inviting how do you know if it's a gerand or if it's a present participle well if it's a present participle it's used as part of a uh a continuous verb form like be doing to be waiting I am waiting she was waiting I have been waiting so if you need that if you have that verb be along with the ing form that ing form is a present participle but if there's no auxiliary verb be then and it's an ing word then it's probably a Geren and gern are used where you actually need a noun in the sentence like for example as the subject of the sentence skateboarding is my favorite thing for example skateboarding is a Geren there it's like the name of a sport right it's like a noun or we use Jaren in other loc where you need a noun like after certain verbs okay I enjoy skateboarding after the verb enjoy if you want to have another verb I enjoy listening to your podcast after the the verb enjoy you need a gerand because that's you know some verbs are followed by gern some verbs are followed by infinitives I enjoy skateboarding I want to go skateboarding want is followed by an infinitive of course that gets a bit complicated because you start to realize okay this verb or even this whole expression is followed by a gerand but this verb and these expressions are followed by an infinitive for example I am looking forward to is followed by a gerand I'm looking forward to seeing you soon what about I can't wait I can't wait to see you so can't wait is followed by an infinitive you see so there's that and there's some examples of that kind of thing in the story and also participle phrases this is where a present participle is used to create a phrase which informs the rest of the sentence like approaching the house I noticed how dull it looked and there are loads of examples of that in this story you could just write as I was approaching the house I noticed how dull it looked or when I was approaching the house I noticed how dull it looked but it can be more efficient to say approaching the house I noticed how dull it looked and there are loads of examples of that in this story as well and various other bits of grammar now I would go through that now but you know what I'm not going to go through that now because that would take too long and I want to go through it in proper detail but you know what I said before that this is the sort of thing I do on uh in I said before this is the sort of thing I do in premium episodes I think what I'll do is I'll wait and I'll probably make a premium episode where I go through the grammar from that story so if you want to get that if you want to get my comments and my my teaching about all of the grammar that's in that story focusing on participle phrases to make efficient reasonably complex sentences gern and infinitives to understand when we use gerns and when we use infinitives after certain other bits of language and also some some things about narrative verb tenses well of course you'll need to sign up to Luke's English podcast premium and um how do you do that you just go to teacher. co.uk premium and there you'll get the option to choose a type of membership and you should choose Le premium it's $4 a month and you get new premium episodes every month plus access to the entire back catalog and there's like over 150 episodes now where either I tell you stories and go through the language in the story and help you practice your pronunciation with the stories so there's a whole series of Story Time episodes where I tell you stories about my own life most of the time like stories from my childhood and things like that there's also vocabulary review episodes where I go through previous episodes of my podcast and pick out bits of language bits of vocabulary and explain them there are episodes where I read articles and then explain the language and help you remember them there's even a 30 minute standup comedy show that I've videoed of myself on stage doing standup comedy and you can get that as well you can listen to that and see the video version of that too there's loads of stuff in the premium uh subscription so if you want to sign up teacher loot.co.za if you like you can see it that way and then you can add the premium episodes to a podcast app on your phone that's the best way to do it and then you can get links for the PDFs and links for the video versions in the episode show notes so over 150 bonus episodes vocab grammar and pronunciation lessons stories article articles episode reviews and more new episodes every month PDFs with every episode um listen in your favorite podcast app except Spotify because it's not a normal podcast app but all the other podcast app apps Apple podcasts pocketcasts overcast and so on and plus you get private video versions on YouTube that's Luke's English podcast premium teer luke. co.uk premium so what I will do next is do the grammar analysis from this story and publish that as a premium episode okay um all right now I'll be I'll because I'm nice what I'll do is I'll publish that as a premium episode and then that'll be only available in the premium subscription for a limited time and then after a little while I don't know how long a few months maybe a couple of months uh I'll probably publish it on on YouTube and as an free episode of my podcast as well so you can get it there but if you want Early Access if you want to get that now then sign up to L premium and it will be it'll be p55 that's going to be the the the the number of the episode p-55 will be a a a grammar analysis for this story that I've told you today okay thank you so much for listening to this latest episode of Luke's English podcast I hope you've enjoyed it what do you think leave your comments in the comments section what did you think of the story did you find it scary Maybe you didn't find it scary at all um but let us know and did you know what was going to happen did you have any idea what was going to happen next has anything strange like that happened to you maybe you can share one of your true stories in the comment section too all right so I'll let you do that otherwise I will speak to you again next time on Luke's English podcast but for now it's time to say goodbye bye bye bye bye bye

854. The Invitation (Learn English with a Short Story)

hello listeners welcome back to Luke's English podcast this is episode number 97 and the idea with this one is that I'm going to share with you a couple of extracts from my most recent series of Luke's English podcast premium so I've been working on premium series 64 uh Parts one and two of that were published just a few days ago so if you are a premium subscriber then check them out um and so what I thought I would do with this episode actually is share on the free podcast some extracts from clips from part one and part two of this premium series that I've been working on what you'll get is uh the clip for part one which I'm going to play to you in a moment I recorded it just a few days ago at the end of last week in part one what I did was first of all I had a bit of a ramble so I talked about catching a cold and trying to recover from a cold and I talked about a recent trip I did to England with my two kids and the uh experience of traveling with little children and what that's like and then after that I went for this idea where I would randomly choose several books from my bookshelf here in my podcast room and just read a couple of pages from those books and then use them to teach you English it was a sort of like um an improvised uh rambling premium episode involving a little bit of reading from books and what ended up happening was I think quite interesting and quite entertaining and certainly valuable in terms of learning English so I'm going to play you about 10 minutes from part one and then in part two I'll play you the section where I go through lots of vocabulary that I used in part one so you'll hear me going through about 20 items of vocabulary words phrases that that came up sort of spontaneously in part one okay so as you listen to this clip which I'm about to play to you you can just try to perhaps predict which words and phrases I might be dealing with uh in the second part okay um that's it basically all right premium subscribers by the way you might have already heard this of course you might have heard this stuff already if you haven't you can go and check out the full episodes uh but of course you'll be getting part three part four and other parts of this series later on this week as well so you'll get the full load where I go through all the vocab and do all the other stuff the pronunciation and everything so you'll get the whole series premium subscribers but anyway this is a chance for my free subscribers to just have a little sneak peek a little taste of LEP premium so let's go back a few days now and listen to about 10 minutes of me talking uh at the beginning in part one of premium series 64 here we go hello welcome back to Luke's English podcast premium how are you doing listeners you're doing okay welcome back to to the show so first of all I need to say this that you're you're listening to me right you are hello you are listening hello you you're listening good pay attention um you're listening to me and you might be thinking what happened to your voice Luke right um well uh yeah I've I've been uh recovering from a cold I mean I'm still recovering from a cold so I caught a cold like five six seven days ago I can't remember uh sometime last week I woke up with that feeling at the back of my throat you know the feeling just that little I don't know what it is really just that Sensation that uh uh something's up like I've got a maybe a little tickle at the back of my throat or maybe just the hint of something uncomfortable at the back of the throat and I thought ah oh I think a cold is coming on now what do you do in that situation when you feel like you've got a cold coming on what do you do I mean is there anything you can do I suppose there are different remedies that I don't know about I mean what are they you quickly drink a cup of green tea with lemon and honey in it or something or you quickly you know dunk your head in a bucket of hot water filled with onions I don't know what what's what's the method for dealing with that I don't really know uh for me I do try to you know drink a hot drink keep myself warm um and stay positive and just get on with things but sometimes there is no denying the virus which uh has inadvertently infected the body your body somehow and you succumb to a cold why why did I say that in such fancy language what I meant was that in the end there's nothing you can do and you just have to accept that you're that you've you've caught a cold and uh you know there's no way to escape it so anyway I got a cold um and it was just kind of a head cold really this is an expression we use to describe just like a little cold that you catch that only affects your head it doesn't kind of make you feel especially tired it doesn't really give you aches and pains in your body or anything like that um it's just in your head so I got a kind of a blocked up nose I got a kind of a slightly sore throat bit of a cough I've still got a bit of a cough uh but I'm absolutely fine just in case you are worried because I know my listeners when they when you hear that I've got a bit of a sore throat people are concerned and they say to me please look after yourself please look after your throat um but I'm fine and uh in fact I quite like the sound of my voice don't you think don't you think it sounds good it's got a kind of uh slightly grally deeper quality to it which is perfect for recording an episode of this podcast so this is a a premium episode there is as usual there's a video version for this which hardly anyone will watch because um I mean premium subscribers I've got a certain number of Premium subscribers right and yet the episodes don't get the same number of listens so the audio episodes um video versions the com the combined number even is not is usually not as high as the number of Premium subscribers that I have which suggests to me that there are quite a lot of people who've subscribed to Le premium but just don't listen to the episodes or maybe don't know how to do it because it's slightly complicated um I mean I I would talk to those people now and say if you don't know how to listen to the episodes just go to teacher luke. co.uk / premium info but of course that's pointless to say because obviously those people who uh don't know how to listen are not listening so it's difficult to know how to get through to those people an email probably would would be the way to do it which I might do anyway um if you are watching the video version of this which you can find a link to the video in the show notes of this episode which I hope you are listening to in a podcast app on your phone just open up the episode in your podcast app and look at the episode description or show notes and there's a link in there for the video version so if you are if you end up watching the video version you might think that I look a bit tired and the reason for that is I am I am quite tired today uh because um uh well I spent five days uh I went to it's so it's the school holidays in in France at the moment so my kids are not at school and I went to England with them so that means it was just me my wife stayed here she had like lots of work to do so I took the kids to England to stay with my parents and it was a bit exhausting because well first of all my son my daughter's okay she can kind of like look after herself she's fairly self-sufficient these days entertains herself and stuff except when she pesters me to uh tell her a story and just you know just like please tell me a story tell me another story tell me a scary story and I have to tell her story then I have to and then she's like can you make it that wasn't scary at all can you tell me another story so sometimes she goes into this mode where she pesters me to tell her stories over and over and over again um but generally she's quite self-sufficient but my son is uh 15 months old now and he's you know W up on his feet walking around exploring everything climbing on everything and uh pulling every single object uh that he can find towards himself uh and so that means that he he needs to be monitored constantly um so that was a little bit exhausting for me and my parents you know I really don't want to exhaust them I think it can be a bit exhausting you know and they're they're they're you know fairly old these days um which means that so while I was there at my parents house I basically had to be constantly monitoring ing my son which was lovely of course but also quite tiring and uh I only got breaks to kind of have a shower very quickly go to the toilet sometimes do this that and the other but most of the time I was looking after him every time I had to go away one of my parents had to look after my son and that meant sort of following him up the stairs because he he was constantly climbing up the stairs so they had to follow him up the stairs so they were up going up and down the stairs picking him up bending over you know all the sort of things that I don't really want my parents to have to do very much because it makes them tired you know back ache arthritis and things like that so um so it's you know a wonderful uh little five-day trip but very tiring as well and um also you know dealing with having a cold at the same time and the journey really the journeys were perhaps the most exhausting uh so I had a big suitcase with all our stuff in it and it was quite a lot of stuff for three people you know and a lot of kids stuff nappies milk bottles all the rest of it in a big suitcase and then a backpack on my back full of stuff as well including my computer which I didn't even really use while I was there but I thought I'd bring it anyway just in case actually got a spare moment to do some work which I didn't uh anyway backpack full of stuff um and uh then obviously my daughter with her backpack and then a pram and uh my son as well so traveling like walking to the station or walking through train stations going up and downstairs uh just getting from one place to the next go you know getting through onto the train platform getting this getting onto the train all that stuff managing all those things was actually pretty exhausting especially when I've got this big pram with a person in it and a huge suitcase on Wheels and my daughter who's six trying to keep her keep an eye on her so that was also quite exhausting a lot of carrying heavy lifting and stuff and uh certainly on the train um I mean my son slept a bit I'm just rambling have you noticed this is a a rambling episode on Luke's English podcast premium and I'll explain I'll explain stuff in a moment all right but we just we've just jumped straight into full-on rambling here okay I hope you're all right with that I'll be explaining myself and justifying all of this uh in a moment and also explaining why um this is slightly different to the usual kind of Premium episode but anyway let me just continue and tell you why I might look a bit tired today U perhaps I always look tired these days because you know cuz you know I'm you know not getting any younger um anyway what was I saying so anyway yes luckily my son slept a bit in a carrier you know those things that you can use to carry your child so luckily he slept um quite a lot in the carrier in the on the first part of ah do I need to tell you all about it basically it's it's the journey from from here in the center of Paris to where my parents live involves two train Journeys the first going from Paris to uh to my parents place um uh involves a Eurostar that's the train that goes from Paris to London under the uh English Channel under the water that's 2 hours and 20 minutes and then after that we have to get from s panras Station in London to uh Marley Bone station which is um not too far away but still it's either a an underground Journey a a trip on the Underground plus a bit of a walk or two underground lines or we just take a taxi normally we just take a taxi then we have to get another train from uh Marley Bone station to uh a station about an hour and a half away um in the Midlands okay so that's kind of two possibly three train Journeys or a train journey a taxi ride a train journey and a bit of walking and stuff um so he he normally would fall asleep for about an hour on one of those Journeys but for the rest of the time he can't really be contained i' keep him in the pram right or keep him in the carrier but after a certain amount of time he just cannot be contained and he has a big melt down has he has a big tantrum where he's crying and screaming and grabbing and you know scratching my face and stuff because you can't keep him in one one place like that contained for for too long so at that point I have to let him out and that means he's just loose on the train which means I have to follow him around while he kind of goes up and down on the Eurostar that's all right because there are spaces between sort of at the ends of each train Carriage there's a space with doors and you can kind of hang around there and you don't disturb the passengers too much the other train it's a bit different so anyway you can understand that it involves a lot of sort of improvisation uh for me as a dad trying to make sure that my son uh isn't just all over the floor kind of getting his hands dirty and and isn't disturbing the other passengers and isn't having a crying meltdown and I kind of was partially successful it's sort of like survival really survival parenting um in those situations so so you know two of those trips one there and one on the way back and as a you know that was we got back the day before yesterday so um anyway I'm just still recovering from that I'm a bit frazzled L from that meaning a bit sort of tired a bit worn out but I'm glad to be back doing Luke's English podcast here Luke's English podcast premium okay so that was as I said about 10 minutes I think uh of uh the episode that I did on LP premium just a few days ago and um the rest of that episode includes the moments when I pull a couple of books off the off the shelves here and read some extracts and teach Te You English from them now let me play you a longer clip uh this is about 30 minutes this clip and this is from part two which I recorded actually in the evening when the sun had gone down which is why if you if you're watching the video version of this you'll see that my room was much darker that's why you know cuz the sun had gone down you see my commitment to teaching you English is that I'll even do this in the evening when I should be sitting with my feet up and a nice cup of tea and a hot water bottle no I was was in this podcast room working a way to you know teach you vocabulary anyway right so which bits of vocabulary do you think I'm going to be explaining now which things well you can find out as I now let you listen to a longer clip from part two of premium series 64 with vocab explanations here we go so next you will see the full list with definitions and examples from the episode I'll talk about these things in part two of this series hello that's what I'm doing now after this you can try to do the vocabulary quizzes and any other tasks you find on this PDF below I will talk about all of this and give my answers and responses to the tasks in part two so let's go through the full vocab list number one to recover from something um I'm recovering from a cold I said so to recover from something as you probably can guess is or you may know already is you've been ill and then you get better or you recover right so to recover means to regain health or Str after an illness or a difficult experience okay sometimes it takes a long time to recover from a cold sometimes the cold lingers and it stays with you for ages sometimes you just recover quite quickly um so this phrase emphasizes the process of healing and can apply to both physical and emotional challenges so you can you can recover from sort of any an emotional experience as well you know like a trauma or something like that or uh if you get a shock you know you might need to sit down and recover from it number two to catch a cold okay to catch a cold all right uh for example I caught a cold last week and have been sneezing ever since I don't think I said that I've been sneezing ever since um like I said I've been using some AI tools to help me produce all this work which is why I was able to make this long PDF in quite quick time but using AI occasionally the AI starts to take sort of independent creative decisions and changes things slightly I don't remember saying I've been sneezing ever since maybe I did but I don't think I did anyway I caught a cold last week is the thing so to catch a cold you know um there's a joke there's there's a joke which you won't find funny now because I've already given you the punch line but the joke is what's faster hot or cold what's faster hot or cold well cold no what oh god I ruined it completely what is faster hot or cold well it's hot of course because you can catch a cold um to catch a cold it means just to become ill with a common viral infection like a not a very serious viral infection very common one the common cold characterized by symptoms like a runny nose and a sore throat and a cough and sneezing cough sneezing a chew yeah so catch a cold is a common expression used to describe the onset of this illness have you caught a cold oh I think I've caught a cold you would say I think I have caught a cold yeah I caught a cold last night because I you know I didn't I wasn't wearing my jacket number three a tickle in your throat I said I felt a tickle in my throat I have a little tickle at the back of my throat or I had a little tickle at the back of my throat so that was the feeling that I had um on Thursday morning last week when I felt like I was catching a cold I had a little tickle so a tickle to tickle can be a verb to tickle someone it can also be a noun meaning the feeling of being tickled um if you get a feather you know from a bird you know a feather um part you know a thing from a bird's wing and you take the feather and you rub it under someone's nose stop it it tickles it tickles it tickles stop tickling me right you can feel a tickle in your throat which is like just that little feeling like you you might be catching a cold so it's like a light irritating sensation often in the throat that may prompt coughing or the need to clear one's throats like oh I've just got the I think I might be catching a cold I've got a little tickle at the back of my throat you should have a warm cup of tea with lemon and honey and onion and whiskey and vodka in it just those things okay um yeah and Kuma and papuma and the essence of jinsang and uh tea tree and just everything put everything in the cup of tea literally everything um so I have a little tickle at the back of my throat this phrase is often used to describe the early signs of cold or allergy H okay moving swiftly on number four is a hint a hint of something I had a hint of a cold like little oh is that a cold I think I might be getting a cold little tickle it's just a hint of a cold a hint there's a hint of something uncomfortable in the atmosphere I didn't say that that's AI again being creative but you could say that if you're in a situation where I don't know you've walked into a room and there are people in the room already and you come in and they they stop talking and they all just kind of look at each other and they look at you and then they look down at the floor you're oh uh sorry I didn't mean to interrupt um and they're like no no no no no no no no no fine it's fine it's fine um Can can we help you with anything at all um no no no it's all right never mind right okay okay um great oh okay well I'll just I'll see you later guys all right oh dear what was going on in there there was like a hint of something uncomfortable in the atmosphere so a hint a slight indication or a sort of trace a little bit of a feeling or or condition of something a hint could be an indication something that that helps you realize something but in the case of a catching a cold a little a hint is like a slight clue or light indication that you that you might be catching a cold in the case of that room there was a a hint that something serious was going on or there was something else going on I could just pick picked up on some little Clues um so a hint of something a hint of a cold uh this phrase suggests a subtle presence of something that may not be overtly obvious there was a hint of uh tension in the room or I've uh I got a a little hint of a cold I think um or if you're doing a test and I give you a hint you know well it's a four-letter word starts with s ends in t it's a bit rude H oh is it yes that's the answer what kind of quiz is that I don't know but I gave you a a big hint there as well little clue that suggests something else in this case it was a hint of a cold like that little tickle at the back of my throat and I said I I I felt like a cold was coming on to feel a cold um I felt a cold coming on all right example what do you do when you feel like there's a cold coming on right you can say when you feel there's a cold coming on or when you feel like there's a cold coming on so this is the the the feeling that one is beginning to develop a cold I can feel a cold coming on When You Ah that's it when you can feel a cold coming on so I should change that to can can feel a cold coming on what do you do when you can feel a cold coming on I think I can feel a cold coming on what do you do when you can feel a cold coming on so this this expression is commonly used to discuss preventative measures for an impending illness like when you can feel a cold coming we often will say I can feel a cold coming on and then you would probably talk about things you could do to prevent the cold getting worse what do you do when you when you can feel a cold coming on do you dip your head in a vat of sulfuric acid I mean sure you your head will come off but you won't have a cold anymore um I don't know like there's different that's ridiculous of course um yeah uh but some people you know they do those things like yeah some people like drink a glass of Brandy that's what they would have done in the 19th century for sure or lemon and honey or you know other things inhaling lots of steam from a bowl with a towel over your head things like that so a remedy I'm talking about remedies for a cold a remedy is a treatment or medicine used to cure a disease or to relieve symptoms so what remedy what remedies are there for a sore throat you can get these little lozenges that you can suck which help to um make the the sore throat better that could be a remedy or you can take sort of cough medicine which you drink and it helps to kind of soothe your sore throat um or honey as well so remedies can be natural or pharmaceutical and often vary by culture and personal preference different people have different remedies number seven to dunk your head in a bucket of hot water this was a stupid remedy that I talked about dunk your head in a bucket of hot water filled with onions it's no one uses that as a remedy as far as I know that's not like a Trad traditional British Remedy or anything although it kind of sounds like it could be couldn't it drink a pint of cider and dunk your head in a bucket of hot water filled with old onions works every time in England uh uh to dunk your head so to dunk something in something means to to submerge something briefly okay now in basketball you dunk you slam dunk meaning put the ball in the basket right it's slam dunk but you can dunk other things in other things like you would dunk a Biscuit in your cup of tea and um if you were an idiot you would dunk your entire head in a bucket of hot water so you'd put your head into the hot water and then take it out again so to dunk your head in the water you quickly dunk your head in a bucket of hot water uh here's a comment while while often used in food contexts this verb can also describe a quick immersion for therapeutic purposes yeah all right food context you you might dunk a Biscuit in a cup of tea or you would dunk um um you know if you're frying if you're making tempora or something you would take a vegetable and dunk it in the batter and then dunk that in the in the hot fat or something uh number eight is to deny something to deny something um for example um there is no denying the virus which has inadvertently infected your body there's no denying it so sometimes you have to just accept that you're catching a cold and there's nothing you can do about it there's no denying the virus so to deny the virus would be to to refuse refuse to acknowledge or refuse to accept the existence of it it's like no no I'm not no I I I refuse to have a cold no it's not going to happen sorry not possible there it's not sorry you can't deny the virus which has in inadvertently infected your body there's nothing you could do you just have to accept it another example he continues to deny that he has a problem you know this is a person who maybe drinks too much or something or maybe it could have yeah 39 PS of Guinness uh every day 39 pints of Guinness every day but you know Guinness is good for you isn't it it's good for you I don't have a problem I don't you know it's not like I'm drinking 40 pints of Guinness a day so it's fine isn't it still denies that he has a problem I don't have a problem what are you talking about problem he does seem fairly he's he's quite under control and seems quite sober considering he's had 39s a Guinness I'm absolutely fine I tell you well you should see him when he has 40 it all comes crashing down anyway so to deny something this term can reflect emotional social or psychological resistance which is basically where he like no I refuse to accept it I deny uh that I have a problem nope no problem here and also no I don't have a cold no no no cold here you can't deny it sorry you have to accept that the that you've got a cold sometimes inadvertently is number nine so I said um there's no denying the virus which has inadvertently infected your body I was using quite fancy sounding language but inadvertently it's inadvertently infected your body inadvertently just means without intention or just accidentally I mean you know I don't know if viruses are sentient and they're going hm Luke Thompson I will give him a cold now come on let's go party in Luke Thompson's nose um I don't think they're doing that I think it just sort of happens doesn't it um it just happens accidentally without anyone intending for it to happen like you didn't in choose to have a to catch a cold um so this this adverb inadvertently emphasizes that an action was not deliberate often leading to unintended consequences now I was just using fancy language you might say um when I was talking about catching a cold you could also say things like this she inadvertently revealed the surprise party oh uh it'll be fun at the party on Friday whoops oh Susan you gave away the party yeah okay Bob now you know we're having a surprise party for you thanks a lot Susan oh Susan inadvertently revealed the surprise party she did it by accident without intending to do it number 10 to succumb to something I said sometimes there's no denying the virus which has in inadvertently infected your body and you succumb to a cold which is where at the beginning you're like no I refuse to have a cold and I'll just keep calm and carry on and I'm sure I'll be fine and then after two days you're like okay all right I've got a cold and there's nothing I can do about it by the way listeners you can hear that I've got a bit of a blocked nose but again I'm I'm fine despite the way it's affecting my voice so to succumb to something then yeah to succumb to a cold like oh okay right that's it I've got a cold then there's there's no denying it um so this means to yield to a superior Force so basically the cold is like no no no I'm here and there's nothing you can do about it and then you just kind of go all right then I've got a cold so to yield to a superior force or overwhelming desire often resulting in surrender which is like that feeling of like all right then I'll stop fighting it all right I've got a cold I'm going to stay in bed um this phrase implies a sense of helplessness against an external influence you just succumb to it you can also succumb to other things you might succumb to a Temptation we like no I will not eat chocolate cake NOP no chocolate cake for me uh uh uh no way oh there's a chocolate cake no but I'm not eating chocolate cake no no no thanks maybe just a little bit um just a oh I'll go and have a taste M oh that is very good well all right I'll just have one piece that's one piece is all right if it's just one that's okay all right so Yum Yum Yum Yum Yum Yum a I've eaten a whole chocolate cake not that that happens to me um and if you know I don't mean to make fun of that kind of compulsive eating situation which can be you know a problem but anyway I'm just giving an example of the phrase to succumb to a Temptation right um number 11 fancy language so this is language that is elaborate sophisticated or unnecessarily complex and I said why did I say that in such fancy language which was that previous sentence sometimes there is no denying the which has inadvertently infected the body and you succumb to a cold slightly fancy language why did I say it like that so a bit too complex and elaborate so this term often implies a critique of over complication in communication no need to use fancy language just keep it plain and simple so maybe I could have said sometimes you just sometimes you can't stop it and you have to accept that you've got a cold you know you know that would be more normal plain English sometimes it's fun to use fancy language that's all uh fancy is quite an interesting word as an adjective it can mean um it can mean elaborate sophisticated like oh this is a fancy restaurant isn't it oh look at this really Posh Restaurant look at this look at the look at what what they've done to the ceiling wow it's really a really fancy restaurant this so it could mean that which is a bit like fancy language and as a verb it can have sort of several meanings one is that it can mean that you find someone attractive right you think someone is attractive like oh I think she fancies me have you seen the way uh have you seen the way Sandra has been looking at me I think she fancies me I'm going to say I think so yeah do you think so yeah no you're wrong she just needs glasses yeah she that's why she's staring at you she doesn't know who you are oh oh all right okay so she doesn't fancy me she's just blind um yeah uh so it can be that to find someone attractive but also to fancy could mean to to want something which is related to the the previous example I just gave but to fancy a person normally uh but also you can fancy something else like you can fancy an ice cream oh who fancies an ice cream or anyone fancy a pint which is like would anyone like to have a pint of beer anyone fancy a pint there's a pub around the corner so fancy can be like oh elaborate and sophisticated and Posh fancy language could be elaborate sophisticated and maybe unnecessarily complex a fancy restaurant oh very nice and Posh and lovely gorgeous design uh does anyone fancy an ice cream would anyone like to have an ice cream and all you know what I think Sandra fancies you do you see the way she's been looking at you yeah she laughs at all your jokes yeah I think she fancies you mate all right number 12 a head cold if you remember this one it's like I talked about having a cold and I said it's just a head cold so a head cold is a cold that primarily affects the nasal passages that's your nose and sinuses that's like the you know the area the the parts of your nose on the inside causing symptoms like congestion that's where your nose is blocked and headache that's when your head aches for example uh having a head cold it it doesn't really give you aches and pains in your body or anything like that it's just a head cold so this term distinguishes between different types of colds highlighting where symptoms are primarily felt so it's just a head cold number 13 is a blocked up nose a blocked nose or a blocked up nose which you can kind of hear I've still got that's where someone speak like this hello my name is my name is uh whatever right blocked up no my name is Michael Michael Benson um sorry Michael Benson bichael banson no Michael Benson bichel banson who's called Michael banson no it's Michael banson anyway Michael Manson not bichael banson who's called bichel banson you idiot anyway a blocked up nose so this is nasal congestion that makes it difficult to breathe through the nose example I can't taste my food properly with this blocked up nose like oh I feel terrible i've got a blocked up nose and uh so this phrase is often used to describe a common symptom of colds or allergies you get a blocked up nose you get a sore throat get a headache blah blah blah cough number 14 a slightly sore throat can you say that a slightly sore throat a slightly sore throat sore sore throat I've got a slightly sore throat slightly sore if something is sore it means it's painful you know like if you uh if you're skateboarding and you wearing a pair of shorts just a pair of shorts it's a lovely sunny day you're on you're you're in your favorite shorts on a skateboard going down the road and then suddenly whoa whoa you get that speed wobble where the skateboard starts wobbling like I can't stop it wobbling and then you're flying through the air and then bam you land on the road and you scrape along the road and you end up grazing all of the you know you end up skinning your all the skin comes off your elbows and your knees and then you've got very sore elbows and knees similarly if you catch a cold you might get a sore throat I mean you wouldn't fall off a skateboard and get a sore throat or maybe I don't know if you land on your throat if that possible no it's not you could land on your neck which would be very bad news anyway a slightly sore throat like mild pain or discomfort in the throat often a symptom of illness I woke up with a slightly sore throat today uh so this phase suggests the onset meaning the the beginning of illness without severe symptoms um number 15 a gra voice I said um I said my voice has got a kind of slightly grally deeper quality to it which you can hear now hello you're listening to Luke's English podcast with a slightly grally voice so that describes this kind of tone of voice gravel is like little stones that might be put on a path or on a driveway you know when you drive a car uh and park it in front of a house driving over gravel or walking on gravel so that those little stones that might be on a driveway or a path that's known as gravel and so a grally voice is like a voice that sounds like it's got gravel in it a voice that has a rough or raspy quality a okay a comment this term often describes a voice affected by illness or fatigue but can also be a characteristic of certain individuals so it's and it's it can be described it can be kind of um I think it can be kind of an attractive equality in a person's voice especially uh on a night like this uh number 16 oh my God am I going to get through all the vocab well if I don't then so be it I'll just do the rest in another maybe I'll do 32 items and I'll do the rest in another part you know it is what it is isn't it number 16 self-sufficient I was talking about my daughter saying that you know when I travel with my daughter and with my son my son's 15 months old so he needs to be looked after and monitored all the time but my my daughter's like nearly seven and she's fairly self-sufficient these days so if you're self sufficient it means you're able to uh provide for yourself or let's say look after yourself without assistance um that's without assistance that's not without ass sister like she's okay she can look after herself without a sister whereas my brother he needs a sister I mean sorry assistants how many sisters how many assistants oh never mind she can look after herself without assistance without help right she's fairly self-sufficient so the phrase conveys Independence and self-reliance often in personal or financial contexts so she's you know she's able to go to the toilet on her own you can leave her sitting reading a book and you know that she's not going to get up and pull all the books off a bookshelf or pull all the plants out of the plant pots and spread dirt everywhere you know yeah she's fairly self-sufficient unlike my son who is not um number 17 to pester someone so despite the fact that my daughter is fairly self-sufficient certainly in comparison to my son at this moment in time she does pester me uh for certain things so to pester someone is to annoy or bother someone persistently often asking them can I have this can I have this could you do this for me can I do this can I can I watch something can I watch something on the ipad please Daddy please I won't cry I won't cry I won't complain I won't winch I won't pester you it's like you're you're you're already you you're already pestering me what do you mean you won't you're already doing it but I won't winge I won't I promise I won't you're already winging but please but please can I just just just just 20 minutes just just 30 minutes that's another thing she does she'll start negotiating but instead of like making concessions she goes the other way so she'll say just 20 minutes just 20 minutes please Daddy please and you go 30 minutes 30 minutes 30 40 minutes you're like you you can't negotiate like that you're going the wrong way you have to go you have to be like 20 minutes 15 15 minutes 10 just 10 she goes the other way so like you don't know how to negotiate you're 7 years old um but she pesters me me she entertains herself except when she pesters me to tell her a story can you tell me a story can you tell me a scary story please uh it's adorable I love telling her stories but sometimes I have no stories left um so to pester someone this verb often has a a playful connotation but can also Express frustration stop pestering me all the time can I have can I have a sweetie can I have a sweetie please can I have two sweeties number 18 backache and arthritis so I was talking about my parents and saying well I didn't really want them to have to look after my son all the time because they you know they suffer from little things well little things like back ache which is when you're back aches and arthritis which is a condition causing inflammation in the joints so the joints like the elbows the wrists the knees the hips ankles fingers and toes the they become inflamed they swell up this is arthritis it's a very common condition that affects many adults as they get older and uh my mom has arthritis um blesser um and it must be very uncomfortable and I don't want her going around sort of trying to having to climb the stairs after my son and picking him up and stuff my dad has a bit of back had a bit of back ache this weekend my mom's got arthritis so these are common health issues back ache refers to an ache hear it back ache headache ear ache tooth achee right ache um common health issues back ache refers to pain in the back while AR arthritis is a condition causing inflammation in the joints all right for example you know I've been dealing with a back ache arthritis and things like that so both of these terms highlight chronic pain this is pain that sort of doesn't really go away very easily and can be common complaints among various age groups but especially among elderly people older people let's say uh number 19 to have a meltdown to have a tantrum a meltdown or a tantrum so I was describing the behavior of my son when he gets tired if he's you know hungry or frustrated by something he might have a tantrum or have a meltdown uh a tantrum to be honest is the word that's more commonly used with toddlers that's little kids who have recently started to walk um they have a tantrum a temper tantrum or a tantrum you've seen it they throw themselves on the floor they kick their legs and they cry and and make a lot of noise right that's a tantrum I also call it having a meltdown as well although often meltdown is is uh applied to is used to describe the behavior of adults so you might see a sports player having a meltdown like a a tennis player might have a meltdown on the court where they suddenly get incredibly angry and frustrated and they lose control of themselves and they argue with the referee or they throw their their racket on the ground or scream at someone in the audience or something you know like this tennis player had a meltdown on the court this afternoon but um I use it to describe my wife and I use that word to describe what our son does sometimes he has a meltdown or he has a tantrum so to experience a sudden emotional Outburst a meltdown is often characterized by extreme distress while a tantrum is typically associated with children's Behavior but as I said my wife and I use the word meltdown normally used to describe the behavior of adults to describe what our what our children do sometimes for example he just cannot be contained and has a big meltdown he has uh he has he had a big tantrum where he's crying and screaming and grabbing these phrases often imply a loss of control either emotionally or behaviorally yeah okay um yeah you know what I'm going to stop here okay so that is where I stopped and that was the end of part two of p64 and uh what's going to come next is part three and probably part four I haven't done those yet I'll be working on them this week and in Parts three and four I'll go through the rest of the vocabulary uh from the rest of my ramble where I ended up talking about lots of other things um but I hope you enjoyed that I hope you found it useful if you're a premium subscriber and you can access the PDF um you'll see that it's in sections and after all that vocab stuff all the the vocab list that you saw me going through there after that's done the next section is vocabulary quizzes and then this yeah so the section four is vocab quizzes and also memory prompts and section five is uh discussion questions that use all the vocab I'll just give you a a little look so um I'll just kind of like read through some of the vocab quizzes for the vocab that you've looked at just to give you an idea of what's involved so here are here are three vocab quizzes we'll look at the first one which covers items 1 to 22 in the list we actually only dealt with 1 to 19 I think in in this clip but anyway let's have a look can you can you get these questions right so first of all now some of these are going to be easy right some of them are going to be easy and that's fine you know that's absolutely fine some things you'll just get easily which is great when you get an answer you know an answer you just slap yourself on the back and go well done I know that great let's move on um the ones that you're less sure of this is where you can you know you learn if you don't get it right or you don't know you learn the answers are included on the PDF and you can go back and do these quizzes again and make sure you get 100% correct you know anyway do you know the answers so number one this is pretty easy but what does it mean to recover from something so these quizzes are in different there's different types of task this first one is a simple multiple choice what does it mean to recover from something is it a to lose strength B to regain health or strength regain right or C to ignore a problem I'm recovering from a cold obviously it's B to regain health or strength yeah okay now again when you do things like this right as a learner of English when you do deal with these sorts of tasks you might think oh I know the answer easy peasy but there's a lot more that you can do first of all you could make sure that you know all the other words in all the other options for example to lose strength right to regain Health to ignore a problem and another thing is that you should be able to also use the words in a sentence so you should be able to like say I'm recovering from a cold I've been recovering from a cold I'm going to recover hopefully I will recover uh I will hopefully I will have recovered by the end of next week I've got like a big a big presentation to do at work and hopefully I will have recovered by then you know so it's not just do you know the word do you know what it means but can you use it that's a whole other thing and there are some other tasks on the PDF that help you to do that number two if someone catches a cold that's also easy they a enjoy they're enjoying the weather developing a common viral infection or experiencing allergies So it's b again developing a common viral infection again with this one it's a it's a well-known collocation to catch a cold but in my experience working with Learners of English I've noticed people getting it wrong all the time and it's normally the tense that people get wrong what people don't say is they they don't say I have caught a cold or I'm catching a cold what they what people do is they get the the the grammar of it wrong and they end up saying I am catch a cold or I catch a cold right um and you know obviously it should be I caught a cold like when yesterday I think I caught a cold yesterday but often it's in the present perfect tense I have caught a cold cuz that describes you now present perfect I have caught a cold describes the present I caught a cold past simple describes the past so you might say I caught a cold yesterday I think I caught a cold last night so you'd say when cuz past simple describes the past I have caught a cold describes you now so how are you doing oh I'm all right but I'm feeling a bit under the weather I think I've caught a cold right you should be able to do it like that yeah so it's not just knowing the the word or collocation it's being able to use it right number three a remedy refers to a a type of food b a treatment or medicine or c a vacation the again the answer is is B I hope the answer is not B every time it might be God it is as well it is the answer is always B oh dear oh dear I used uh AI to help me do this and it seems that AI just like well I think I'll just make make this a really easy one and just make B the correct answer every time I don't know anyway maybe that's just chance maybe it's random and it's just chance that it happens to be the second option out of each out of five questions anyway a remedy is a treatment or medicine for example you know drinking a cup of tea with lemon or something is a kind of remedy for a common cold uh for if you have a blocked up nose it means a you can breathe easily B you're experiencing nasal congestion slightly fancy language for a blocked up nose or see you feel great obviously it's B again right and five fancy language is characterized by a simple terms B elaborate and complex wording like you are currently experiencing nasal congestion yes I have a a blocked up nose yeah that's fancy language uh is b b is the answer or is it C just casual speech how are you doing not so I'm all right but I've got a bit of a block sorry what I've got a blocked up note I've got a cold and it's affecting my English I apologize no uh how are you doing oh you know I'm all right just got a bit of a blocked up nose to be honest it's a bit annoying I think I might be coming down with a cold oh there's another one I might be coming down with a cold yeah um so that casual speech yeah elaborate and complex fancy language would be how are you doing I appear to be suffering from the onset of a nasal congestion which may be symptomatic of a common viral infection otherwise known in plain English as the common cold like okay is this one of those viruses that that that infect the grammar node in your brain causing you to speak like that this may be the case yes indeed imagine that if I mean maybe it's possible but imagine if there was a a virus which you could get that would affect your English and why is it also that viruses and things you know when we get sick the the symptoms are always bad I mean this is probably a very stupid observation but why is it always bad you know why don't why don't some viruses like help because if the viruses if what they want now I know that viruses don't think do they I don't think so if what they want is to spread among the human race that's what they want they want to proliferate right then they should probably try and ingratiate themselves with us somehow so instead of making us feel terrible they should make us feel great they should improve they should strengthen us and then we'd be like yes please you've got a cold quick cough in my face now you know I've got an English exam tomorrow quick sneeze on me if that was the case we'd be spreading those viruses around the viruses would be really successful instead it's the opposite and they do they're really horrible we hate having flu and stuff and covid and we do everything we possibly can to eradicate them you know we're injecting ourselves with vaccines we're wearing masks you know that are really annoying especially if you have glasses on your glasses get steamed up all these things that we try to do to avoid getting them they they would they would do better if they if they made us feel good just a little tip there any viruses listening just consider that maybe try and help out a little bit maybe we'll be more willing to accept you in that in that case rather than trying to destroy you I don't know H anyway um part two of the vocab quiz is fill the blanks so this is a little bit more difficult when you feel a cold you may want to take preventative measures when you feel a cold so when you feel like you're starting to catch a cold do you remember do you remember when you feel a cold coming on and it's yeah the ing form I can feel a cold coming on right I feel something happening I can feel a cold coming on yeah number seven two hm someone means to annoy or bother them persistently like my lovely daughter constantly requesting stories daddy Daddy can I Daddy can I have a story can I have two stories can I have nine stories please you know I have to tell her I have to tell her I've told her every possible story could ever think of including all the stories I've ever done on Luke's English podcast and every movie plot that I can think of and she wants the scary ones she's like Dad tell me a scary story like should I tell her the plot of alien should I and then I give her like a sanitized child-friendly version of alien like there are some you know people on a spaceship and they've been working really hard and they're traveling back to Earth and there's a distress signal from another planet and they decide because they're helpful they decide to go and investigate cuz some people might be in trouble and when they get there they find all these weird sort of like green pods a bit like seed pods and uh I don't know how I one of them gets um like an alien jumps out and uh oh God Indiana Jones all the Indiana Jones films Back to the Future we actually watched Back to the Future the other day she's six right she's nearly seven we watched Back to the Future and at one point when he was in the 1950 50 s when he'd gone back in time she turned to me and she said dad did they did they really go back in time to make the film I was like what do you mean did they did they actually go did they go back to cuz everything looks everything looks old and I said no no no no they didn't actually go back in time when they made the film that's that's not possible we we can't travel through time no they just they just made it look like the 1950s they used old clothes and everything looked like it did then they just you know it's just a film you know they they they use special effects and then they use old clothes and stuff to make it look like he's gone back but he didn't actually go back in time and she was like all right okay um so to pester someone means to annoy or bother them persistently like my daughter's always pestering me to have a sweetie or tell her a story it's adorable really even though it's a bit annoying number eight a throat May indicate the onset of an illness right a I've got a bit of a throat a sore throat or also a tickly throat or an itchy throat there was the word tickle as well to have a tickle in your throat um number nine if you have a h cold you mainly feel symptoms in your head and nose what kind of cold is that it's a a head cold number 10 he T he tends to hm to his emotions rather than address them he tends to something to his emotions rather than address them huh I can't remember that one what's the answer I could go down and check the answers yeah let's do that he tends to he tends to refuse to acknowledge the truth is it refuse to acknowledge the truth no no no no he tends to succumb to his problems he tends to succumb to his problems rather than address them so instead of like dealing with his problems he lets his problems um um control him right I said before to succumb to a cold when a cold is trying to infect you and you fight against it you fight against it and then eventually like oh okay and you just sort of surrender and allow the Cal to win you could you could arguably you could say you could succumb to your emotions as well for example if you are having negative thoughts you know you might try and fight against them try and find ways to stop them um flip them into more positive thinking but um maybe some people would succumb to those negative emotions and end up being kind of unhappy depressed demotivated yeah okay you get the idea right that that's that's um vocab quiz and there's different types matching exercises short answers uh and then also after that after that you you've got memory prompts because it's important to try to recall the words and phrases from memory and use them in sentences now this is difficult and if and you might not remember them all but that's okay the important thing is that you try so here's a memory prompt for example this imagine you've been sick for a few days how would you describe the process of feeling better and it's it's like I'm I'm uh recovering right I'm getting over it this is what you would say I'm recovering from a cold getting over a cold number two what phrase would you use to describe suddenly coming down with a runny nose and sore throat um uh catch yeah I've I've caught a cold I think I'm catching a cold three if you feel a slight irritation in your throat what phrase would you use I've got a tickle at the back of my throat or I think I've got a bit of a sore throat right and we could go on and move on to other so a lot of stuff about catching a cold there but the episode was full of loads of other stuff I mean this is the cold stuff is just the first 5 minutes um if someone is bothering you persistently what verb would describe their behavior they are pestering you what would you call common complaints involving back pain and Joint inflammation I was describing my parents you know they're getting old unfortunately it's a bit sad but you know it happens to the best of us of course uh arthritis is the joint inflam inflammation condition that makes your joint swell up and is painful back pain that's back ache okay what phrase describ someone having an extreme emotional Outburst that would be to have a tantrum right or to have a meltdown as well okay and there's there's loads there's uh memory prompt questions for all of the vocab in the episode series and then also we've got you you got the answers and then you've got conversation questions for speaking practice so these are ones that you can use to just practice just trying to use the vocab in conversation now you can do this with a conversation partner if you have one someone that you can practice English with or you can do it on your own like this like the way I'm going to do it uh for example let's have a look at uh a hint of something can you recall a time when you sensed a hint of tension in a group what happened h a hint of tension can you remember a time when you when you sensed a hints a hint of tension in a group now you might not be able to think of an an example you might think oh I need to find a real example of when I sensed a hint of tension in a group you can't think of a real one don't worry just make something up it doesn't matter you're just trying to practice the language right it's not lying it's just creative practice so you'd say um I mean if you're with a conversation partner you would say I can't remember time but I'll just make something up and then they go okay and then you say yeah last week I went into um I went into a into a bank and I looked around and everyone was like really seemed really tense no one was moving some people were even like lying down on the floor with their hands over their heads and I was like what's going on here it was like a very tense atmosphere just like was a weird sort of hint of tension in this Bank why is everyone not moving and some people have got guns and they pointing them what's going on here anyway I'll get my money out have a nice day everyone H strange hint of tension in that bank obvious that's a ridiculous situation that I walked into in the middle of a bank robbery but anyway you could also say I walked into uh I walked into the staff room at work and there was a hint of tension in the room I think that maybe someone had just had a little disagreement or maybe that they're unhappy with our boss our new boss is unpopular and he just makes everyone feel really uptight it's not good see that kind of thing and there's these questions for every single item of vocab in the whole episode and then after that there's going to be pronunciation practice and and more so there you go that's that's a sample of LEP premium okay just so you could see what it's like and just enjoy some of the premium content free um again if you'd like to sign up teach a Luke .co.uk premium okay you choose Le premium that option it cost $4 a month plus tax you can quit anytime you like right there are no strings attached um you know anytime you want you can just cancel your membership and it'll end at the end of that month uh but if you do that you you will lose all access to all the files and everything you won't be able to just do a month and download all the files and haha off you go no you'll lose access to everything you know so you get all of the premium content you can add it to a podcast app on your phone which is definitely the best way to do it also all the free episodes are ad free there are video versions for the premium episodes you just uh in the show notes in your podcast app you'll see a link video version tap that you can jump to the video version on YouTube PDFs for every single episode and now over 200 episodes like this uh with deep dives into f vocabulary and all sorts of other things and you know I try to keep the sense of fun going as well uh during proceedings so that's the end of uh this episode where I've given you a sample of what Luke's English podcast premium is like on the free podcast I hope you've enjoyed it I hope you found it useful um you can email me whenever you want luk teer hotmail.com if you've got questions about this otherwise the best thing to do is go to the frequently asked questions or premium information page on my website teacher sho. co.uk premium info and there's like loads of questions answered there and other information to help you okay it can be a little confusing at first to understand the system but when you realize that you sign into your account add LEP premium to a podcast app on your phone Apple podcasts or uh pocketcasts or something like that and then use the phone app to access the premium episodes and then you can probably send stuff to your computer and open it on your computer but it's based in your phone because most people these days just use their phones for everything um so that's it's primarily designed to be used on your phone but you can you know send the stuff to your computer like the videos uh listen there you can send the PDF to your computer all the rest of it okay that's the end of this I'll be back um of course next week uh with a normal free episode um and um I think we're going to continue the bits and Bobs series next week with bits and bobs part two premium subscribers you will get the rest of p64 hopefully this week if I can manage to make it all happen but certainly over the you know over the next week or two you'll get the rest of p64 and it's going to be quite a long series I think quite a long detailed series okay thanks so much for listening have a lovely morning evening afternoon night uh late evening early morning middle of the night listening session driving your car uh walk down the street or lovely comfortable sit in an armchair whatever it is you're doing wherever you are in the world thank you for listening and I'll speak to you next time but for now it's time to say goodbye bye bye bye boy boy

hello listeners welcome back to Luke's English podcast this is episode number 97 and the idea with this one is that I'm going to share with you a couple of extracts from my most recent series of Luke's English podcast premium so I've been working on premium series 64 uh Parts one and two of that were published just a few days ago so if you are a premium subscriber then check them out um and so what I thought I would do with this episode actually is share on the free podcast some extracts from clips from part one and part two of this premium series that I've been working on what you'll get is uh the clip for part one which I'm going to play to you in a moment I recorded it just a few days ago at the end of last week in part one what I did was first of all I had a bit of a ramble so I talked about catching a cold and trying to recover from a cold and I talked about a recent trip I did to England with my two kids and the uh experience of traveling with little children and what that's like and then after that I went for this idea where I would randomly choose several books from my bookshelf here in my podcast room and just read a couple of pages from those books and then use them to teach you English it was a sort of like um an improvised uh rambling premium episode involving a little bit of reading from books and what ended up happening was I think quite interesting and quite entertaining and certainly valuable in terms of learning English so I'm going to play you about 10 minutes from part one and then in part two I'll play you the section where I go through lots of vocabulary that I used in part one so you'll hear me going through about 20 items of vocabulary words phrases that that came up sort of spontaneously in part one okay so as you listen to this clip which I'm about to play to you you can just try to perhaps predict which words and phrases I might be dealing with uh in the second part okay um that's it basically all right premium subscribers by the way you might have already heard this of course you might have heard this stuff already if you haven't you can go and check out the full episodes uh but of course you'll be getting part three part four and other parts of this series later on this week as well so you'll get the full load where I go through all the vocab and do all the other stuff the pronunciation and everything so you'll get the whole series premium subscribers but anyway this is a chance for my free subscribers to just have a little sneak peek a little taste of LEP premium so let's go back a few days now and listen to about 10 minutes of me talking uh at the beginning in part one of premium series 64 here we go hello welcome back to Luke's English podcast premium how are you doing listeners you're doing okay welcome back to to the show so first of all I need to say this that you're you're listening to me right you are hello you are listening hello you you're listening good pay attention um you're listening to me and you might be thinking what happened to your voice Luke right um well uh yeah I've I've been uh recovering from a cold I mean I'm still recovering from a cold so I caught a cold like five six seven days ago I can't remember uh sometime last week I woke up with that feeling at the back of my throat you know the feeling just that little I don't know what it is really just that Sensation that uh uh something's up like I've got a maybe a little tickle at the back of my throat or maybe just the hint of something uncomfortable at the back of the throat and I thought ah oh I think a cold is coming on now what do you do in that situation when you feel like you've got a cold coming on what do you do I mean is there anything you can do I suppose there are different remedies that I don't know about I mean what are they you quickly drink a cup of green tea with lemon and honey in it or something or you quickly you know dunk your head in a bucket of hot water filled with onions I don't know what what's what's the method for dealing with that I don't really know uh for me I do try to you know drink a hot drink keep myself warm um and stay positive and just get on with things but sometimes there is no denying the virus which uh has inadvertently infected the body your body somehow and you succumb to a cold why why did I say that in such fancy language what I meant was that in the end there's nothing you can do and you just have to accept that you're that you've you've caught a cold and uh you know there's no way to escape it so anyway I got a cold um and it was just kind of a head cold really this is an expression we use to describe just like a little cold that you catch that only affects your head it doesn't kind of make you feel especially tired it doesn't really give you aches and pains in your body or anything like that um it's just in your head so I got a kind of a blocked up nose I got a kind of a slightly sore throat bit of a cough I've still got a bit of a cough uh but I'm absolutely fine just in case you are worried because I know my listeners when they when you hear that I've got a bit of a sore throat people are concerned and they say to me please look after yourself please look after your throat um but I'm fine and uh in fact I quite like the sound of my voice don't you think don't you think it sounds good it's got a kind of uh slightly grally deeper quality to it which is perfect for recording an episode of this podcast so this is a a premium episode there is as usual there's a video version for this which hardly anyone will watch because um I mean premium subscribers I've got a certain number of Premium subscribers right and yet the episodes don't get the same number of listens so the audio episodes um video versions the com the combined number even is not is usually not as high as the number of Premium subscribers that I have which suggests to me that there are quite a lot of people who've subscribed to Le premium but just don't listen to the episodes or maybe don't know how to do it because it's slightly complicated um I mean I I would talk to those people now and say if you don't know how to listen to the episodes just go to teacher luke. co.uk / premium info but of course that's pointless to say because obviously those people who uh don't know how to listen are not listening so it's difficult to know how to get through to those people an email probably would would be the way to do it which I might do anyway um if you are watching the video version of this which you can find a link to the video in the show notes of this episode which I hope you are listening to in a podcast app on your phone just open up the episode in your podcast app and look at the episode description or show notes and there's a link in there for the video version so if you are if you end up watching the video version you might think that I look a bit tired and the reason for that is I am I am quite tired today uh because um uh well I spent five days uh I went to it's so it's the school holidays in in France at the moment so my kids are not at school and I went to England with them so that means it was just me my wife stayed here she had like lots of work to do so I took the kids to England to stay with my parents and it was a bit exhausting because well first of all my son my daughter's okay she can kind of like look after herself she's fairly self-sufficient these days entertains herself and stuff except when she pesters me to uh tell her a story and just you know just like please tell me a story tell me another story tell me a scary story and I have to tell her story then I have to and then she's like can you make it that wasn't scary at all can you tell me another story so sometimes she goes into this mode where she pesters me to tell her stories over and over and over again um but generally she's quite self-sufficient but my son is uh 15 months old now and he's you know W up on his feet walking around exploring everything climbing on everything and uh pulling every single object uh that he can find towards himself uh and so that means that he he needs to be monitored constantly um so that was a little bit exhausting for me and my parents you know I really don't want to exhaust them I think it can be a bit exhausting you know and they're they're they're you know fairly old these days um which means that so while I was there at my parents house I basically had to be constantly monitoring ing my son which was lovely of course but also quite tiring and uh I only got breaks to kind of have a shower very quickly go to the toilet sometimes do this that and the other but most of the time I was looking after him every time I had to go away one of my parents had to look after my son and that meant sort of following him up the stairs because he he was constantly climbing up the stairs so they had to follow him up the stairs so they were up going up and down the stairs picking him up bending over you know all the sort of things that I don't really want my parents to have to do very much because it makes them tired you know back ache arthritis and things like that so um so it's you know a wonderful uh little five-day trip but very tiring as well and um also you know dealing with having a cold at the same time and the journey really the journeys were perhaps the most exhausting uh so I had a big suitcase with all our stuff in it and it was quite a lot of stuff for three people you know and a lot of kids stuff nappies milk bottles all the rest of it in a big suitcase and then a backpack on my back full of stuff as well including my computer which I didn't even really use while I was there but I thought I'd bring it anyway just in case actually got a spare moment to do some work which I didn't uh anyway backpack full of stuff um and uh then obviously my daughter with her backpack and then a pram and uh my son as well so traveling like walking to the station or walking through train stations going up and downstairs uh just getting from one place to the next go you know getting through onto the train platform getting this getting onto the train all that stuff managing all those things was actually pretty exhausting especially when I've got this big pram with a person in it and a huge suitcase on Wheels and my daughter who's six trying to keep her keep an eye on her so that was also quite exhausting a lot of carrying heavy lifting and stuff and uh certainly on the train um I mean my son slept a bit I'm just rambling have you noticed this is a a rambling episode on Luke's English podcast premium and I'll explain I'll explain stuff in a moment all right but we just we've just jumped straight into full-on rambling here okay I hope you're all right with that I'll be explaining myself and justifying all of this uh in a moment and also explaining why um this is slightly different to the usual kind of Premium episode but anyway let me just continue and tell you why I might look a bit tired today U perhaps I always look tired these days because you know cuz you know I'm you know not getting any younger um anyway what was I saying so anyway yes luckily my son slept a bit in a carrier you know those things that you can use to carry your child so luckily he slept um quite a lot in the carrier in the on the first part of ah do I need to tell you all about it basically it's it's the journey from from here in the center of Paris to where my parents live involves two train Journeys the first going from Paris to uh to my parents place um uh involves a Eurostar that's the train that goes from Paris to London under the uh English Channel under the water that's 2 hours and 20 minutes and then after that we have to get from s panras Station in London to uh Marley Bone station which is um not too far away but still it's either a an underground Journey a a trip on the Underground plus a bit of a walk or two underground lines or we just take a taxi normally we just take a taxi then we have to get another train from uh Marley Bone station to uh a station about an hour and a half away um in the Midlands okay so that's kind of two possibly three train Journeys or a train journey a taxi ride a train journey and a bit of walking and stuff um so he he normally would fall asleep for about an hour on one of those Journeys but for the rest of the time he can't really be contained i' keep him in the pram right or keep him in the carrier but after a certain amount of time he just cannot be contained and he has a big melt down has he has a big tantrum where he's crying and screaming and grabbing and you know scratching my face and stuff because you can't keep him in one one place like that contained for for too long so at that point I have to let him out and that means he's just loose on the train which means I have to follow him around while he kind of goes up and down on the Eurostar that's all right because there are spaces between sort of at the ends of each train Carriage there's a space with doors and you can kind of hang around there and you don't disturb the passengers too much the other train it's a bit different so anyway you can understand that it involves a lot of sort of improvisation uh for me as a dad trying to make sure that my son uh isn't just all over the floor kind of getting his hands dirty and and isn't disturbing the other passengers and isn't having a crying meltdown and I kind of was partially successful it's sort of like survival really survival parenting um in those situations so so you know two of those trips one there and one on the way back and as a you know that was we got back the day before yesterday so um anyway I'm just still recovering from that I'm a bit frazzled L from that meaning a bit sort of tired a bit worn out but I'm glad to be back doing Luke's English podcast here Luke's English podcast premium okay so that was as I said about 10 minutes I think uh of uh the episode that I did on LP premium just a few days ago and um the rest of that episode includes the moments when I pull a couple of books off the off the shelves here and read some extracts and teach Te You English from them now let me play you a longer clip uh this is about 30 minutes this clip and this is from part two which I recorded actually in the evening when the sun had gone down which is why if you if you're watching the video version of this you'll see that my room was much darker that's why you know cuz the sun had gone down you see my commitment to teaching you English is that I'll even do this in the evening when I should be sitting with my feet up and a nice cup of tea and a hot water bottle no I was was in this podcast room working a way to you know teach you vocabulary anyway right so which bits of vocabulary do you think I'm going to be explaining now which things well you can find out as I now let you listen to a longer clip from part two of premium series 64 with vocab explanations here we go so next you will see the full list with definitions and examples from the episode I'll talk about these things in part two of this series hello that's what I'm doing now after this you can try to do the vocabulary quizzes and any other tasks you find on this PDF below I will talk about all of this and give my answers and responses to the tasks in part two so let's go through the full vocab list number one to recover from something um I'm recovering from a cold I said so to recover from something as you probably can guess is or you may know already is you've been ill and then you get better or you recover right so to recover means to regain health or Str after an illness or a difficult experience okay sometimes it takes a long time to recover from a cold sometimes the cold lingers and it stays with you for ages sometimes you just recover quite quickly um so this phrase emphasizes the process of healing and can apply to both physical and emotional challenges so you can you can recover from sort of any an emotional experience as well you know like a trauma or something like that or uh if you get a shock you know you might need to sit down and recover from it number two to catch a cold okay to catch a cold all right uh for example I caught a cold last week and have been sneezing ever since I don't think I said that I've been sneezing ever since um like I said I've been using some AI tools to help me produce all this work which is why I was able to make this long PDF in quite quick time but using AI occasionally the AI starts to take sort of independent creative decisions and changes things slightly I don't remember saying I've been sneezing ever since maybe I did but I don't think I did anyway I caught a cold last week is the thing so to catch a cold you know um there's a joke there's there's a joke which you won't find funny now because I've already given you the punch line but the joke is what's faster hot or cold what's faster hot or cold well cold no what oh god I ruined it completely what is faster hot or cold well it's hot of course because you can catch a cold um to catch a cold it means just to become ill with a common viral infection like a not a very serious viral infection very common one the common cold characterized by symptoms like a runny nose and a sore throat and a cough and sneezing cough sneezing a chew yeah so catch a cold is a common expression used to describe the onset of this illness have you caught a cold oh I think I've caught a cold you would say I think I have caught a cold yeah I caught a cold last night because I you know I didn't I wasn't wearing my jacket number three a tickle in your throat I said I felt a tickle in my throat I have a little tickle at the back of my throat or I had a little tickle at the back of my throat so that was the feeling that I had um on Thursday morning last week when I felt like I was catching a cold I had a little tickle so a tickle to tickle can be a verb to tickle someone it can also be a noun meaning the feeling of being tickled um if you get a feather you know from a bird you know a feather um part you know a thing from a bird's wing and you take the feather and you rub it under someone's nose stop it it tickles it tickles it tickles stop tickling me right you can feel a tickle in your throat which is like just that little feeling like you you might be catching a cold so it's like a light irritating sensation often in the throat that may prompt coughing or the need to clear one's throats like oh I've just got the I think I might be catching a cold I've got a little tickle at the back of my throat you should have a warm cup of tea with lemon and honey and onion and whiskey and vodka in it just those things okay um yeah and Kuma and papuma and the essence of jinsang and uh tea tree and just everything put everything in the cup of tea literally everything um so I have a little tickle at the back of my throat this phrase is often used to describe the early signs of cold or allergy H okay moving swiftly on number four is a hint a hint of something I had a hint of a cold like little oh is that a cold I think I might be getting a cold little tickle it's just a hint of a cold a hint there's a hint of something uncomfortable in the atmosphere I didn't say that that's AI again being creative but you could say that if you're in a situation where I don't know you've walked into a room and there are people in the room already and you come in and they they stop talking and they all just kind of look at each other and they look at you and then they look down at the floor you're oh uh sorry I didn't mean to interrupt um and they're like no no no no no no no no no fine it's fine it's fine um Can can we help you with anything at all um no no no it's all right never mind right okay okay um great oh okay well I'll just I'll see you later guys all right oh dear what was going on in there there was like a hint of something uncomfortable in the atmosphere so a hint a slight indication or a sort of trace a little bit of a feeling or or condition of something a hint could be an indication something that that helps you realize something but in the case of a catching a cold a little a hint is like a slight clue or light indication that you that you might be catching a cold in the case of that room there was a a hint that something serious was going on or there was something else going on I could just pick picked up on some little Clues um so a hint of something a hint of a cold uh this phrase suggests a subtle presence of something that may not be overtly obvious there was a hint of uh tension in the room or I've uh I got a a little hint of a cold I think um or if you're doing a test and I give you a hint you know well it's a four-letter word starts with s ends in t it's a bit rude H oh is it yes that's the answer what kind of quiz is that I don't know but I gave you a a big hint there as well little clue that suggests something else in this case it was a hint of a cold like that little tickle at the back of my throat and I said I I I felt like a cold was coming on to feel a cold um I felt a cold coming on all right example what do you do when you feel like there's a cold coming on right you can say when you feel there's a cold coming on or when you feel like there's a cold coming on so this is the the the feeling that one is beginning to develop a cold I can feel a cold coming on When You Ah that's it when you can feel a cold coming on so I should change that to can can feel a cold coming on what do you do when you can feel a cold coming on I think I can feel a cold coming on what do you do when you can feel a cold coming on so this this expression is commonly used to discuss preventative measures for an impending illness like when you can feel a cold coming we often will say I can feel a cold coming on and then you would probably talk about things you could do to prevent the cold getting worse what do you do when you when you can feel a cold coming on do you dip your head in a vat of sulfuric acid I mean sure you your head will come off but you won't have a cold anymore um I don't know like there's different that's ridiculous of course um yeah uh but some people you know they do those things like yeah some people like drink a glass of Brandy that's what they would have done in the 19th century for sure or lemon and honey or you know other things inhaling lots of steam from a bowl with a towel over your head things like that so a remedy I'm talking about remedies for a cold a remedy is a treatment or medicine used to cure a disease or to relieve symptoms so what remedy what remedies are there for a sore throat you can get these little lozenges that you can suck which help to um make the the sore throat better that could be a remedy or you can take sort of cough medicine which you drink and it helps to kind of soothe your sore throat um or honey as well so remedies can be natural or pharmaceutical and often vary by culture and personal preference different people have different remedies number seven to dunk your head in a bucket of hot water this was a stupid remedy that I talked about dunk your head in a bucket of hot water filled with onions it's no one uses that as a remedy as far as I know that's not like a Trad traditional British Remedy or anything although it kind of sounds like it could be couldn't it drink a pint of cider and dunk your head in a bucket of hot water filled with old onions works every time in England uh uh to dunk your head so to dunk something in something means to to submerge something briefly okay now in basketball you dunk you slam dunk meaning put the ball in the basket right it's slam dunk but you can dunk other things in other things like you would dunk a Biscuit in your cup of tea and um if you were an idiot you would dunk your entire head in a bucket of hot water so you'd put your head into the hot water and then take it out again so to dunk your head in the water you quickly dunk your head in a bucket of hot water uh here's a comment while while often used in food contexts this verb can also describe a quick immersion for therapeutic purposes yeah all right food context you you might dunk a Biscuit in a cup of tea or you would dunk um um you know if you're frying if you're making tempora or something you would take a vegetable and dunk it in the batter and then dunk that in the in the hot fat or something uh number eight is to deny something to deny something um for example um there is no denying the virus which has inadvertently infected your body there's no denying it so sometimes you have to just accept that you're catching a cold and there's nothing you can do about it there's no denying the virus so to deny the virus would be to to refuse refuse to acknowledge or refuse to accept the existence of it it's like no no I'm not no I I I refuse to have a cold no it's not going to happen sorry not possible there it's not sorry you can't deny the virus which has in inadvertently infected your body there's nothing you could do you just have to accept it another example he continues to deny that he has a problem you know this is a person who maybe drinks too much or something or maybe it could have yeah 39 PS of Guinness uh every day 39 pints of Guinness every day but you know Guinness is good for you isn't it it's good for you I don't have a problem I don't you know it's not like I'm drinking 40 pints of Guinness a day so it's fine isn't it still denies that he has a problem I don't have a problem what are you talking about problem he does seem fairly he's he's quite under control and seems quite sober considering he's had 39s a Guinness I'm absolutely fine I tell you well you should see him when he has 40 it all comes crashing down anyway so to deny something this term can reflect emotional social or psychological resistance which is basically where he like no I refuse to accept it I deny uh that I have a problem nope no problem here and also no I don't have a cold no no no cold here you can't deny it sorry you have to accept that the that you've got a cold sometimes inadvertently is number nine so I said um there's no denying the virus which has inadvertently infected your body I was using quite fancy sounding language but inadvertently it's inadvertently infected your body inadvertently just means without intention or just accidentally I mean you know I don't know if viruses are sentient and they're going hm Luke Thompson I will give him a cold now come on let's go party in Luke Thompson's nose um I don't think they're doing that I think it just sort of happens doesn't it um it just happens accidentally without anyone intending for it to happen like you didn't in choose to have a to catch a cold um so this this adverb inadvertently emphasizes that an action was not deliberate often leading to unintended consequences now I was just using fancy language you might say um when I was talking about catching a cold you could also say things like this she inadvertently revealed the surprise party oh uh it'll be fun at the party on Friday whoops oh Susan you gave away the party yeah okay Bob now you know we're having a surprise party for you thanks a lot Susan oh Susan inadvertently revealed the surprise party she did it by accident without intending to do it number 10 to succumb to something I said sometimes there's no denying the virus which has in inadvertently infected your body and you succumb to a cold which is where at the beginning you're like no I refuse to have a cold and I'll just keep calm and carry on and I'm sure I'll be fine and then after two days you're like okay all right I've got a cold and there's nothing I can do about it by the way listeners you can hear that I've got a bit of a blocked nose but again I'm I'm fine despite the way it's affecting my voice so to succumb to something then yeah to succumb to a cold like oh okay right that's it I've got a cold then there's there's no denying it um so this means to yield to a superior Force so basically the cold is like no no no I'm here and there's nothing you can do about it and then you just kind of go all right then I've got a cold so to yield to a superior force or overwhelming desire often resulting in surrender which is like that feeling of like all right then I'll stop fighting it all right I've got a cold I'm going to stay in bed um this phrase implies a sense of helplessness against an external influence you just succumb to it you can also succumb to other things you might succumb to a Temptation we like no I will not eat chocolate cake NOP no chocolate cake for me uh uh uh no way oh there's a chocolate cake no but I'm not eating chocolate cake no no no thanks maybe just a little bit um just a oh I'll go and have a taste M oh that is very good well all right I'll just have one piece that's one piece is all right if it's just one that's okay all right so Yum Yum Yum Yum Yum Yum a I've eaten a whole chocolate cake not that that happens to me um and if you know I don't mean to make fun of that kind of compulsive eating situation which can be you know a problem but anyway I'm just giving an example of the phrase to succumb to a Temptation right um number 11 fancy language so this is language that is elaborate sophisticated or unnecessarily complex and I said why did I say that in such fancy language which was that previous sentence sometimes there is no denying the which has inadvertently infected the body and you succumb to a cold slightly fancy language why did I say it like that so a bit too complex and elaborate so this term often implies a critique of over complication in communication no need to use fancy language just keep it plain and simple so maybe I could have said sometimes you just sometimes you can't stop it and you have to accept that you've got a cold you know you know that would be more normal plain English sometimes it's fun to use fancy language that's all uh fancy is quite an interesting word as an adjective it can mean um it can mean elaborate sophisticated like oh this is a fancy restaurant isn't it oh look at this really Posh Restaurant look at this look at the look at what what they've done to the ceiling wow it's really a really fancy restaurant this so it could mean that which is a bit like fancy language and as a verb it can have sort of several meanings one is that it can mean that you find someone attractive right you think someone is attractive like oh I think she fancies me have you seen the way uh have you seen the way Sandra has been looking at me I think she fancies me I'm going to say I think so yeah do you think so yeah no you're wrong she just needs glasses yeah she that's why she's staring at you she doesn't know who you are oh oh all right okay so she doesn't fancy me she's just blind um yeah uh so it can be that to find someone attractive but also to fancy could mean to to want something which is related to the the previous example I just gave but to fancy a person normally uh but also you can fancy something else like you can fancy an ice cream oh who fancies an ice cream or anyone fancy a pint which is like would anyone like to have a pint of beer anyone fancy a pint there's a pub around the corner so fancy can be like oh elaborate and sophisticated and Posh fancy language could be elaborate sophisticated and maybe unnecessarily complex a fancy restaurant oh very nice and Posh and lovely gorgeous design uh does anyone fancy an ice cream would anyone like to have an ice cream and all you know what I think Sandra fancies you do you see the way she's been looking at you yeah she laughs at all your jokes yeah I think she fancies you mate all right number 12 a head cold if you remember this one it's like I talked about having a cold and I said it's just a head cold so a head cold is a cold that primarily affects the nasal passages that's your nose and sinuses that's like the you know the area the the parts of your nose on the inside causing symptoms like congestion that's where your nose is blocked and headache that's when your head aches for example uh having a head cold it it doesn't really give you aches and pains in your body or anything like that it's just a head cold so this term distinguishes between different types of colds highlighting where symptoms are primarily felt so it's just a head cold number 13 is a blocked up nose a blocked nose or a blocked up nose which you can kind of hear I've still got that's where someone speak like this hello my name is my name is uh whatever right blocked up no my name is Michael Michael Benson um sorry Michael Benson bichael banson no Michael Benson bichel banson who's called Michael banson no it's Michael banson anyway Michael Manson not bichael banson who's called bichel banson you idiot anyway a blocked up nose so this is nasal congestion that makes it difficult to breathe through the nose example I can't taste my food properly with this blocked up nose like oh I feel terrible i've got a blocked up nose and uh so this phrase is often used to describe a common symptom of colds or allergies you get a blocked up nose you get a sore throat get a headache blah blah blah cough number 14 a slightly sore throat can you say that a slightly sore throat a slightly sore throat sore sore throat I've got a slightly sore throat slightly sore if something is sore it means it's painful you know like if you uh if you're skateboarding and you wearing a pair of shorts just a pair of shorts it's a lovely sunny day you're on you're you're in your favorite shorts on a skateboard going down the road and then suddenly whoa whoa you get that speed wobble where the skateboard starts wobbling like I can't stop it wobbling and then you're flying through the air and then bam you land on the road and you scrape along the road and you end up grazing all of the you know you end up skinning your all the skin comes off your elbows and your knees and then you've got very sore elbows and knees similarly if you catch a cold you might get a sore throat I mean you wouldn't fall off a skateboard and get a sore throat or maybe I don't know if you land on your throat if that possible no it's not you could land on your neck which would be very bad news anyway a slightly sore throat like mild pain or discomfort in the throat often a symptom of illness I woke up with a slightly sore throat today uh so this phase suggests the onset meaning the the beginning of illness without severe symptoms um number 15 a gra voice I said um I said my voice has got a kind of slightly grally deeper quality to it which you can hear now hello you're listening to Luke's English podcast with a slightly grally voice so that describes this kind of tone of voice gravel is like little stones that might be put on a path or on a driveway you know when you drive a car uh and park it in front of a house driving over gravel or walking on gravel so that those little stones that might be on a driveway or a path that's known as gravel and so a grally voice is like a voice that sounds like it's got gravel in it a voice that has a rough or raspy quality a okay a comment this term often describes a voice affected by illness or fatigue but can also be a characteristic of certain individuals so it's and it's it can be described it can be kind of um I think it can be kind of an attractive equality in a person's voice especially uh on a night like this uh number 16 oh my God am I going to get through all the vocab well if I don't then so be it I'll just do the rest in another maybe I'll do 32 items and I'll do the rest in another part you know it is what it is isn't it number 16 self-sufficient I was talking about my daughter saying that you know when I travel with my daughter and with my son my son's 15 months old so he needs to be looked after and monitored all the time but my my daughter's like nearly seven and she's fairly self-sufficient these days so if you're self sufficient it means you're able to uh provide for yourself or let's say look after yourself without assistance um that's without assistance that's not without ass sister like she's okay she can look after herself without a sister whereas my brother he needs a sister I mean sorry assistants how many sisters how many assistants oh never mind she can look after herself without assistance without help right she's fairly self-sufficient so the phrase conveys Independence and self-reliance often in personal or financial contexts so she's you know she's able to go to the toilet on her own you can leave her sitting reading a book and you know that she's not going to get up and pull all the books off a bookshelf or pull all the plants out of the plant pots and spread dirt everywhere you know yeah she's fairly self-sufficient unlike my son who is not um number 17 to pester someone so despite the fact that my daughter is fairly self-sufficient certainly in comparison to my son at this moment in time she does pester me uh for certain things so to pester someone is to annoy or bother someone persistently often asking them can I have this can I have this could you do this for me can I do this can I can I watch something can I watch something on the ipad please Daddy please I won't cry I won't cry I won't complain I won't winch I won't pester you it's like you're you're you're already you you're already pestering me what do you mean you won't you're already doing it but I won't winge I won't I promise I won't you're already winging but please but please can I just just just just 20 minutes just just 30 minutes that's another thing she does she'll start negotiating but instead of like making concessions she goes the other way so she'll say just 20 minutes just 20 minutes please Daddy please and you go 30 minutes 30 minutes 30 40 minutes you're like you you can't negotiate like that you're going the wrong way you have to go you have to be like 20 minutes 15 15 minutes 10 just 10 she goes the other way so like you don't know how to negotiate you're 7 years old um but she pesters me me she entertains herself except when she pesters me to tell her a story can you tell me a story can you tell me a scary story please uh it's adorable I love telling her stories but sometimes I have no stories left um so to pester someone this verb often has a a playful connotation but can also Express frustration stop pestering me all the time can I have can I have a sweetie can I have a sweetie please can I have two sweeties number 18 backache and arthritis so I was talking about my parents and saying well I didn't really want them to have to look after my son all the time because they you know they suffer from little things well little things like back ache which is when you're back aches and arthritis which is a condition causing inflammation in the joints so the joints like the elbows the wrists the knees the hips ankles fingers and toes the they become inflamed they swell up this is arthritis it's a very common condition that affects many adults as they get older and uh my mom has arthritis um blesser um and it must be very uncomfortable and I don't want her going around sort of trying to having to climb the stairs after my son and picking him up and stuff my dad has a bit of back had a bit of back ache this weekend my mom's got arthritis so these are common health issues back ache refers to an ache hear it back ache headache ear ache tooth achee right ache um common health issues back ache refers to pain in the back while AR arthritis is a condition causing inflammation in the joints all right for example you know I've been dealing with a back ache arthritis and things like that so both of these terms highlight chronic pain this is pain that sort of doesn't really go away very easily and can be common complaints among various age groups but especially among elderly people older people let's say uh number 19 to have a meltdown to have a tantrum a meltdown or a tantrum so I was describing the behavior of my son when he gets tired if he's you know hungry or frustrated by something he might have a tantrum or have a meltdown uh a tantrum to be honest is the word that's more commonly used with toddlers that's little kids who have recently started to walk um they have a tantrum a temper tantrum or a tantrum you've seen it they throw themselves on the floor they kick their legs and they cry and and make a lot of noise right that's a tantrum I also call it having a meltdown as well although often meltdown is is uh applied to is used to describe the behavior of adults so you might see a sports player having a meltdown like a a tennis player might have a meltdown on the court where they suddenly get incredibly angry and frustrated and they lose control of themselves and they argue with the referee or they throw their their racket on the ground or scream at someone in the audience or something you know like this tennis player had a meltdown on the court this afternoon but um I use it to describe my wife and I use that word to describe what our son does sometimes he has a meltdown or he has a tantrum so to experience a sudden emotional Outburst a meltdown is often characterized by extreme distress while a tantrum is typically associated with children's Behavior but as I said my wife and I use the word meltdown normally used to describe the behavior of adults to describe what our what our children do sometimes for example he just cannot be contained and has a big meltdown he has uh he has he had a big tantrum where he's crying and screaming and grabbing these phrases often imply a loss of control either emotionally or behaviorally yeah okay um yeah you know what I'm going to stop here okay so that is where I stopped and that was the end of part two of p64 and uh what's going to come next is part three and probably part four I haven't done those yet I'll be working on them this week and in Parts three and four I'll go through the rest of the vocabulary uh from the rest of my ramble where I ended up talking about lots of other things um but I hope you enjoyed that I hope you found it useful if you're a premium subscriber and you can access the PDF um you'll see that it's in sections and after all that vocab stuff all the the vocab list that you saw me going through there after that's done the next section is vocabulary quizzes and then this yeah so the section four is vocab quizzes and also memory prompts and section five is uh discussion questions that use all the vocab I'll just give you a a little look so um I'll just kind of like read through some of the vocab quizzes for the vocab that you've looked at just to give you an idea of what's involved so here are here are three vocab quizzes we'll look at the first one which covers items 1 to 22 in the list we actually only dealt with 1 to 19 I think in in this clip but anyway let's have a look can you can you get these questions right so first of all now some of these are going to be easy right some of them are going to be easy and that's fine you know that's absolutely fine some things you'll just get easily which is great when you get an answer you know an answer you just slap yourself on the back and go well done I know that great let's move on um the ones that you're less sure of this is where you can you know you learn if you don't get it right or you don't know you learn the answers are included on the PDF and you can go back and do these quizzes again and make sure you get 100% correct you know anyway do you know the answers so number one this is pretty easy but what does it mean to recover from something so these quizzes are in different there's different types of task this first one is a simple multiple choice what does it mean to recover from something is it a to lose strength B to regain health or strength regain right or C to ignore a problem I'm recovering from a cold obviously it's B to regain health or strength yeah okay now again when you do things like this right as a learner of English when you do deal with these sorts of tasks you might think oh I know the answer easy peasy but there's a lot more that you can do first of all you could make sure that you know all the other words in all the other options for example to lose strength right to regain Health to ignore a problem and another thing is that you should be able to also use the words in a sentence so you should be able to like say I'm recovering from a cold I've been recovering from a cold I'm going to recover hopefully I will recover uh I will hopefully I will have recovered by the end of next week I've got like a big a big presentation to do at work and hopefully I will have recovered by then you know so it's not just do you know the word do you know what it means but can you use it that's a whole other thing and there are some other tasks on the PDF that help you to do that number two if someone catches a cold that's also easy they a enjoy they're enjoying the weather developing a common viral infection or experiencing allergies So it's b again developing a common viral infection again with this one it's a it's a well-known collocation to catch a cold but in my experience working with Learners of English I've noticed people getting it wrong all the time and it's normally the tense that people get wrong what people don't say is they they don't say I have caught a cold or I'm catching a cold what they what people do is they get the the the grammar of it wrong and they end up saying I am catch a cold or I catch a cold right um and you know obviously it should be I caught a cold like when yesterday I think I caught a cold yesterday but often it's in the present perfect tense I have caught a cold cuz that describes you now present perfect I have caught a cold describes the present I caught a cold past simple describes the past so you might say I caught a cold yesterday I think I caught a cold last night so you'd say when cuz past simple describes the past I have caught a cold describes you now so how are you doing oh I'm all right but I'm feeling a bit under the weather I think I've caught a cold right you should be able to do it like that yeah so it's not just knowing the the word or collocation it's being able to use it right number three a remedy refers to a a type of food b a treatment or medicine or c a vacation the again the answer is is B I hope the answer is not B every time it might be God it is as well it is the answer is always B oh dear oh dear I used uh AI to help me do this and it seems that AI just like well I think I'll just make make this a really easy one and just make B the correct answer every time I don't know anyway maybe that's just chance maybe it's random and it's just chance that it happens to be the second option out of each out of five questions anyway a remedy is a treatment or medicine for example you know drinking a cup of tea with lemon or something is a kind of remedy for a common cold uh for if you have a blocked up nose it means a you can breathe easily B you're experiencing nasal congestion slightly fancy language for a blocked up nose or see you feel great obviously it's B again right and five fancy language is characterized by a simple terms B elaborate and complex wording like you are currently experiencing nasal congestion yes I have a a blocked up nose yeah that's fancy language uh is b b is the answer or is it C just casual speech how are you doing not so I'm all right but I've got a bit of a block sorry what I've got a blocked up note I've got a cold and it's affecting my English I apologize no uh how are you doing oh you know I'm all right just got a bit of a blocked up nose to be honest it's a bit annoying I think I might be coming down with a cold oh there's another one I might be coming down with a cold yeah um so that casual speech yeah elaborate and complex fancy language would be how are you doing I appear to be suffering from the onset of a nasal congestion which may be symptomatic of a common viral infection otherwise known in plain English as the common cold like okay is this one of those viruses that that that infect the grammar node in your brain causing you to speak like that this may be the case yes indeed imagine that if I mean maybe it's possible but imagine if there was a a virus which you could get that would affect your English and why is it also that viruses and things you know when we get sick the the symptoms are always bad I mean this is probably a very stupid observation but why is it always bad you know why don't why don't some viruses like help because if the viruses if what they want now I know that viruses don't think do they I don't think so if what they want is to spread among the human race that's what they want they want to proliferate right then they should probably try and ingratiate themselves with us somehow so instead of making us feel terrible they should make us feel great they should improve they should strengthen us and then we'd be like yes please you've got a cold quick cough in my face now you know I've got an English exam tomorrow quick sneeze on me if that was the case we'd be spreading those viruses around the viruses would be really successful instead it's the opposite and they do they're really horrible we hate having flu and stuff and covid and we do everything we possibly can to eradicate them you know we're injecting ourselves with vaccines we're wearing masks you know that are really annoying especially if you have glasses on your glasses get steamed up all these things that we try to do to avoid getting them they they would they would do better if they if they made us feel good just a little tip there any viruses listening just consider that maybe try and help out a little bit maybe we'll be more willing to accept you in that in that case rather than trying to destroy you I don't know H anyway um part two of the vocab quiz is fill the blanks so this is a little bit more difficult when you feel a cold you may want to take preventative measures when you feel a cold so when you feel like you're starting to catch a cold do you remember do you remember when you feel a cold coming on and it's yeah the ing form I can feel a cold coming on right I feel something happening I can feel a cold coming on yeah number seven two hm someone means to annoy or bother them persistently like my lovely daughter constantly requesting stories daddy Daddy can I Daddy can I have a story can I have two stories can I have nine stories please you know I have to tell her I have to tell her I've told her every possible story could ever think of including all the stories I've ever done on Luke's English podcast and every movie plot that I can think of and she wants the scary ones she's like Dad tell me a scary story like should I tell her the plot of alien should I and then I give her like a sanitized child-friendly version of alien like there are some you know people on a spaceship and they've been working really hard and they're traveling back to Earth and there's a distress signal from another planet and they decide because they're helpful they decide to go and investigate cuz some people might be in trouble and when they get there they find all these weird sort of like green pods a bit like seed pods and uh I don't know how I one of them gets um like an alien jumps out and uh oh God Indiana Jones all the Indiana Jones films Back to the Future we actually watched Back to the Future the other day she's six right she's nearly seven we watched Back to the Future and at one point when he was in the 1950 50 s when he'd gone back in time she turned to me and she said dad did they did they really go back in time to make the film I was like what do you mean did they did they actually go did they go back to cuz everything looks everything looks old and I said no no no no they didn't actually go back in time when they made the film that's that's not possible we we can't travel through time no they just they just made it look like the 1950s they used old clothes and everything looked like it did then they just you know it's just a film you know they they they use special effects and then they use old clothes and stuff to make it look like he's gone back but he didn't actually go back in time and she was like all right okay um so to pester someone means to annoy or bother them persistently like my daughter's always pestering me to have a sweetie or tell her a story it's adorable really even though it's a bit annoying number eight a throat May indicate the onset of an illness right a I've got a bit of a throat a sore throat or also a tickly throat or an itchy throat there was the word tickle as well to have a tickle in your throat um number nine if you have a h cold you mainly feel symptoms in your head and nose what kind of cold is that it's a a head cold number 10 he T he tends to hm to his emotions rather than address them he tends to something to his emotions rather than address them huh I can't remember that one what's the answer I could go down and check the answers yeah let's do that he tends to he tends to refuse to acknowledge the truth is it refuse to acknowledge the truth no no no no he tends to succumb to his problems he tends to succumb to his problems rather than address them so instead of like dealing with his problems he lets his problems um um control him right I said before to succumb to a cold when a cold is trying to infect you and you fight against it you fight against it and then eventually like oh okay and you just sort of surrender and allow the Cal to win you could you could arguably you could say you could succumb to your emotions as well for example if you are having negative thoughts you know you might try and fight against them try and find ways to stop them um flip them into more positive thinking but um maybe some people would succumb to those negative emotions and end up being kind of unhappy depressed demotivated yeah okay you get the idea right that that's that's um vocab quiz and there's different types matching exercises short answers uh and then also after that after that you you've got memory prompts because it's important to try to recall the words and phrases from memory and use them in sentences now this is difficult and if and you might not remember them all but that's okay the important thing is that you try so here's a memory prompt for example this imagine you've been sick for a few days how would you describe the process of feeling better and it's it's like I'm I'm uh recovering right I'm getting over it this is what you would say I'm recovering from a cold getting over a cold number two what phrase would you use to describe suddenly coming down with a runny nose and sore throat um uh catch yeah I've I've caught a cold I think I'm catching a cold three if you feel a slight irritation in your throat what phrase would you use I've got a tickle at the back of my throat or I think I've got a bit of a sore throat right and we could go on and move on to other so a lot of stuff about catching a cold there but the episode was full of loads of other stuff I mean this is the cold stuff is just the first 5 minutes um if someone is bothering you persistently what verb would describe their behavior they are pestering you what would you call common complaints involving back pain and Joint inflammation I was describing my parents you know they're getting old unfortunately it's a bit sad but you know it happens to the best of us of course uh arthritis is the joint inflam inflammation condition that makes your joint swell up and is painful back pain that's back ache okay what phrase describ someone having an extreme emotional Outburst that would be to have a tantrum right or to have a meltdown as well okay and there's there's loads there's uh memory prompt questions for all of the vocab in the episode series and then also we've got you you got the answers and then you've got conversation questions for speaking practice so these are ones that you can use to just practice just trying to use the vocab in conversation now you can do this with a conversation partner if you have one someone that you can practice English with or you can do it on your own like this like the way I'm going to do it uh for example let's have a look at uh a hint of something can you recall a time when you sensed a hint of tension in a group what happened h a hint of tension can you remember a time when you when you sensed a hints a hint of tension in a group now you might not be able to think of an an example you might think oh I need to find a real example of when I sensed a hint of tension in a group you can't think of a real one don't worry just make something up it doesn't matter you're just trying to practice the language right it's not lying it's just creative practice so you'd say um I mean if you're with a conversation partner you would say I can't remember time but I'll just make something up and then they go okay and then you say yeah last week I went into um I went into a into a bank and I looked around and everyone was like really seemed really tense no one was moving some people were even like lying down on the floor with their hands over their heads and I was like what's going on here it was like a very tense atmosphere just like was a weird sort of hint of tension in this Bank why is everyone not moving and some people have got guns and they pointing them what's going on here anyway I'll get my money out have a nice day everyone H strange hint of tension in that bank obvious that's a ridiculous situation that I walked into in the middle of a bank robbery but anyway you could also say I walked into uh I walked into the staff room at work and there was a hint of tension in the room I think that maybe someone had just had a little disagreement or maybe that they're unhappy with our boss our new boss is unpopular and he just makes everyone feel really uptight it's not good see that kind of thing and there's these questions for every single item of vocab in the whole episode and then after that there's going to be pronunciation practice and and more so there you go that's that's a sample of LEP premium okay just so you could see what it's like and just enjoy some of the premium content free um again if you'd like to sign up teach a Luke .co.uk premium okay you choose Le premium that option it cost $4 a month plus tax you can quit anytime you like right there are no strings attached um you know anytime you want you can just cancel your membership and it'll end at the end of that month uh but if you do that you you will lose all access to all the files and everything you won't be able to just do a month and download all the files and haha off you go no you'll lose access to everything you know so you get all of the premium content you can add it to a podcast app on your phone which is definitely the best way to do it also all the free episodes are ad free there are video versions for the premium episodes you just uh in the show notes in your podcast app you'll see a link video version tap that you can jump to the video version on YouTube PDFs for every single episode and now over 200 episodes like this uh with deep dives into f vocabulary and all sorts of other things and you know I try to keep the sense of fun going as well uh during proceedings so that's the end of uh this episode where I've given you a sample of what Luke's English podcast premium is like on the free podcast I hope you've enjoyed it I hope you found it useful um you can email me whenever you want luk teer hotmail.com if you've got questions about this otherwise the best thing to do is go to the frequently asked questions or premium information page on my website teacher sho. co.uk premium info and there's like loads of questions answered there and other information to help you okay it can be a little confusing at first to understand the system but when you realize that you sign into your account add LEP premium to a podcast app on your phone Apple podcasts or uh pocketcasts or something like that and then use the phone app to access the premium episodes and then you can probably send stuff to your computer and open it on your computer but it's based in your phone because most people these days just use their phones for everything um so that's it's primarily designed to be used on your phone but you can you know send the stuff to your computer like the videos uh listen there you can send the PDF to your computer all the rest of it okay that's the end of this I'll be back um of course next week uh with a normal free episode um and um I think we're going to continue the bits and Bobs series next week with bits and bobs part two premium subscribers you will get the rest of p64 hopefully this week if I can manage to make it all happen but certainly over the you know over the next week or two you'll get the rest of p64 and it's going to be quite a long series I think quite a long detailed series okay thanks so much for listening have a lovely morning evening afternoon night uh late evening early morning middle of the night listening session driving your car uh walk down the street or lovely comfortable sit in an armchair whatever it is you're doing wherever you are in the world thank you for listening and I'll speak to you next time but for now it's time to say goodbye bye bye bye boy boy

907. Catching a Cold 🤧 Travelling with Children 👶 LEP Premium Sample Episode [P64]