Listen & Learn English with Luke 🎧 This is SOMETHING! (944)

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
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Speaker 4 (00:42):
You're listening to Luke's English Podcast. For more information, visit
teacher Lukes dot co dot uk. Hello listeners, welcome back
to Luke's English podcast. How are you doing today? Welcome
to this new episode of my podcast for learners of

(01:02):
English all around the world. That must be you, right,
I mean right. I guess if you're watching this listening
to this episode, I suppose you're a learner of English
and you're somewhere around the world. If that's the case, Hello,
nice to be speaking to you again. I'm Luke. I'm
an English teacher from England. And yes, this is episode

(01:25):
number I think it's episode nine hundred and forty four
of Luke's English podcast Your chance to do more listening
and learning of English here with me today, Welcome to
the episode. At the moment, I haven't actually decided what
this episode will be called. Yeah, it's exciting, isn't it.

Speaker 2 (01:45):
Hmm?

Speaker 4 (01:45):
I just feel like living on the edge today and
recording an episode which still doesn't have a name. I know,
it's very I'm taking a big risk here, just like WHOA,
what's going on? Haven't even chosen the name of the episode.
That's not to say that there isn't a plan for
the episode. Oh no, I've got plenty of things planned
for this one, as you will see, but still no title,

(02:08):
no name. Maybe the episode name can emerge while I'm
actually doing the recording. Maybe the name will just kind
of right itself. Maybe something will just pop up which
will be a suitable name. So anyway, that's something for
me to think about while I'm recording. What could I

(02:29):
call this episode? And will a good name just kind
of come up naturally? While I'm talking to you? What
makes a good name? What do you think what makes
a good episode name for an episode of a podcast?
What do you think makes a good name? Because you're
the listener, right or you're the viewer, You're the one
that we're trying to whose attention we're trying to attract

(02:52):
right with, and you know the title of the episode
is quite an important one because you know, that's what
us content creators are trying to do. We're trying to
come up with names and titles that will get your
interest and make you listen to our stuff. So what
do you think what would what's a good name and
what is a good name for an episode of my podcast?

(03:14):
What kind of thing is appealing to you? This is
an interesting question for me. Let me know in the
comments section. What do you think you know? Do you need?
Do you need episode titles to be descriptive? Do you
expect the title to explain exactly what you're going to
get in the episode? Or does it really not matter

(03:35):
that much? For example a podcast, I listen to the
Bill Burr Monday Morning Podcast. These days he's adding more stuff,
more details in his titles, but certainly for years the
titles of his episodes were just like Monday Morning podcast
and then the date that the episode went up and
that's it. You know, each episode was like that, and

(03:57):
his podcast is massive successful, so that seems to work
for him. Does it not matter at all? Maybe we
are giving it far too much importance, or maybe you're
one of those people who will, I don't know, click
on something if there are certain things in the title,
I don't know, let me know, let me know. But
it's a good question. I'll come back to that in

(04:19):
a moment, because right now I've just realized I do
need to set the usual timer. So let me just
set myself a timer here thirty minutes. I think that
is to remind me to drink some water, because obviously
it's very important to stay hydrated. We are, what is it,
seventy percent of our bodies is water. Seventy percent. We're
just like big bags of water, aren't we walking around,

(04:42):
sitting around talking into microphones. We're just made of water.
Isn't that mad that we're just seventy five seventy percent water?
So we've got to keep I suppose we have to
keep topping up the level of water so we don't
get dehydrated. Right anyway, minutes in thirty minutes time an
alarm will go off, and I will drink water from

(05:05):
a non plastic water container, just to make the people happy. Also,
another thing I should say is that there are subtitles
available for this episode. If you're watching on YouTube and
there's a full episode transcript available for everyone, you can
find the link in the episode description for the subtitles.

(05:25):
If you're watching on YouTube and you would like to
see subtitles in English, you can just turn them on
just using the generic subtitle function on YouTube. And I
hope that you know about that right That all YouTube videos,
well most of them have some kind of subtitles. Either
they are automatically generated ones, or they are sort of

(05:47):
subtitles that have been added by the video maker. The
subtitles for this video are not automatically generated. They are not,
I mean, not by YouTube's system anyway. But there a
transcript which I've generated with the help of AI transcript
making software, which these days has got to the point

(06:08):
where it's really brilliant. I mean it's amazing. It's almost flawless,
especially when it's just me talking. And so what I
do is I upload the audio into that and it
transcribes it, and it's normally very correct and it uses
the right punctuation and stuff, and then I export that.

(06:28):
This is fascinating, isn't it. This is just fascinating stuff. Anyway,
I export that as a text file and upload it
into YouTube, and then it converts that into subtitles for
the video, so anyway you can switch on subtitles for
the episode in English. I tend to just put English
subtitles on my videos because the idea there is that
I want you to do everything in English. Sometimes people

(06:52):
write to me and they say, can you add subtitles
in this language or that language? And for some reason
I often get comments from Turkish listeners. Well not that often,
but sometimes I get comments from Turkish listeners. Sometimes they're
a little bit upset, and I've had things in the
past like why are there no Turkish subtitles available for

(07:13):
these videos? Is this some kind of prejudice against Turkish people. Well, no,
it's not that. There's no subtitles in any languages as
far as I know, except English, because the idea being
I want you to practice your English. I want you
to listen in English and read in English. This is
the whole idea, and I think that that's much better
for your English rather than listening in English and reading

(07:36):
in another language. I think, really you should just be
operating only in English. That's why my episodes only have
English subtitles. So that's YouTube subtitles are available. Find the
option to switch them on, and switch them on if
you want to. You could survive without them. I think.
If you really just want to focus on your listening,

(07:56):
then don't bother with the subtitles. But they are there
if you want to use them. For everyone else, you'll
find a transcript in the episode show notes with every
single word transcribed for you, so you could use that
however you want to. All right, yeah, so watertime, a

(08:16):
subtitles transcript. I've mentioned those things. Is there anything else
in terms of housekeeping? I don't think, so let's continue
with that stuff. About what makes a good name for
an episode, I don't really know, really, I mean it's
I think it's probably something that makes you the listener
a bit curious, something quite catchy, something that tells you
what to expect from the episode while also making you

(08:40):
compelled to listen to it. I don't really like clickbait, right.
You know what clickbait is. It is the sort of
over the top exaggerated title for a video or a
podcast episode or an article that you might see online,
and it's the sort of extremely exaggerated thing that is

(09:03):
meant to get your attention and make you click on something,
and often the actual content doesn't really deliver on the
promise of the title, you know, So it would be
something like these three fluency secrets are what the English
teachers don't want you to know, or doctors hate her

(09:25):
because of her skincare routine, you know, things like that.
So I don't like clickbait, but it actually does work.
It does make people click on your stuff. So maybe
I should be using more clickbait in my titles, because
ultimately what I want you to do is just start listening,

(09:47):
you know. It's just like a way to get you to,
you know, just to click play. Maybe I should use
more clickbait, but I'm against it on sort of moral
and esthetic grounds, But it does work. I think probably
the main thing is that the episode delivers on the title.
If you get a title and the content doesn't actually

(10:11):
give you what you expected from the title, then that's
going to make people annoyed. So if I did call
this episode something like the one fluency secret that English
teachers don't want you to know. If I called it that,
then I would certainly need to deliver on that. I
would need to give you some sort of incredibly powerful

(10:32):
fluency secret. By the way, there are no fluency secrets.
There are no secrets that English teachers are not telling
you about how to be fluent in English. There really
are no secrets, okay. In fact, there is an entire
English teaching industry which has existed for decades, including people

(10:53):
writing course books, people delivering English courses in classrooms and online,
and a whole load of other things in this English
language teaching and learning industry that has existed for a
long time. There's an entire industry which is devoted to,

(11:16):
you know, telling you and teaching you every single bit
of language learning advice, and that includes for fluency that
we have, right, And this also includes a lot of
academic research into how people achieve fluency in a second
language in adulthood and converting that research into actual materials

(11:40):
which could then be used to deliver English courses.

Speaker 2 (11:44):
Right.

Speaker 4 (11:44):
So there's no secret knowledge. We are literally giving you
everything that we know, doing our very best trying to
find the best method for helping you learn English. There
is no secret knowledge which is being held back from you.
As an English teacher, I'm constantly telling my English learners

(12:05):
everything i possibly know about the best ways to develop fluency,
and there are thousands of other English teachers like me
doing the same thing. So please do not be fooled
by the titles of some YouTube videos, for example, promising
to tell you language learning secrets. There are no secrets.
This kind of thing is clickbait. Also, while we're on

(12:27):
the subject of this kind of thing, I would like
you to be aware that a lot of English learning
content online, especially on YouTube these days, is AI generated.
Were you aware of this? Are you aware of this
the sheer volume of AI generated English learning content? So

(12:50):
I want you to just think twice about the content
that you're consuming. Does it sound like the most generic
slop that you've ever heard, with two generic hosts with
almost no personality talking to each other in the most

(13:13):
generic way possible. If that's the case, well yes, it's
probably an AI generated podcast. Maybe that's what you want.
If that is what you want, bland, generic, faceless English
language teaching slop, then you know, obviously go ahead fill
your boots there's plenty of it for you. Maybe it's
going to get better. I mean I talk like this,

(13:34):
maybe in imagining, just even just in five years, it's
probably going to be astounding, and we won't be able
to tell the difference. And my words right now will
be redundant as well as my job and yours as well.
I mean, God, has your job been replaced by AI? Yet?
Is there any Is there a hint of it happening?

(13:55):
It's probably going to happen slowly, by degrees, slowly, but surely,
as the AI gains more traction, as it is able
to do more and more things, the employers will realize, Oh,
wait a minute, we could save so much money. I
could put so much money in my pockets by using
this software. I don't know when's it going to happen.

(14:16):
When's the tide going to turn? I don't know. But anyway,
so I don't know what this episode is going to
be called yet, all how exciting, I do know that
it will be episode number nine hundred and forty four.
And actually this episode marks a huge monumental moment, perhaps
even a tectonic change, a tectonic shift tectonics that means

(14:40):
the sort of the tectonic plates of the Earth's surface.
You know, tectonics is large rock plates that move and shift.
There are what are those places called fault lines, and
where the tectonic plates meet each other and they rubb
again to each other at these fault lines, causing earthquakes

(15:03):
and volcanoes and things. So, tectonic shifts are large shifts
of huge pieces of rock on the Earth's surface. We're
talking about the most monumental changes. This episode marks a
huge monumental tectonic shift in the way that I do
this podcast. And I know what you're thinking now, You're thinking, loop,

(15:25):
what is that? What is this huge monumental tectonic shift
in the way that you do this podcast? Are you
going to are you changing things? How are you going
to change things? You're going to be doing eight minute
podcast episodes? No, I'm not. Although, actually, if you're interested
in short form episodes from me, check out my other
podcast called a frasal verber Day. It's available wherever you

(15:47):
get your podcasts. You'll find a link in the description
A phrasal verber Day. There are over one hundred short
phrasal verb episodes in which you can learn of frasal
verb in each episode. Each episode is just a few
minutes long, just to prove to the world I can
do short episodes. But no, I'm not going to be
reducing the length of episodes or something. No, this is

(16:08):
the first episode in which the episode number appears at
the end of the episode title, not at the beginning. Yeah,
big changes at Luke's English podcast. Like I said, monumental
tectonic changes here at l EP. So just to explain
what I'm talking about. The last episode of the podcast

(16:30):
was was this. The title was something like this nine
four three dot Sherlock Holmes Colon the Adventure of Silver Blaze.
That was the title, but in the new style that
would simply be Sherlock Holmes Colon the Adventure of Silver
Blaze brackets nine four three How exciting. So that's the change.

(16:54):
The number is going to be moved to the end
of the title and put in brackets now that. Yeah,
don't send me your messages saying don't change it, don't
change anything. I know that sometimes when a big, serious
change like this is announced in the thing that you love,

(17:15):
then the instinct is to throw your hands in the
air and go, no, it's going to be different. Let
me explain the reasons. Obviously, no one's doing that. No
one cares. Of course, I'm joking about the monumental tectonic
change thing. But you know, having said that, for fifteen
years or whatever it is and more, I've been doing

(17:37):
the same doing it the same way with the number first. Originally,
that was because a lot of the time people used
to download the files. Some people probably still do. You
can download the MP three's of these episodes from my website,
and I felt it was important to put a number
at the beginning of the file name so that you
could get all the episodes in the right order in

(17:58):
your MP three player or something. These days, you know,
with streaming that's not so important. But anyway, the reasons
for this huge change are a industry specialists have recommended
this to me. Yes, industry specialists. They've recommended that I
do this because it makes the episodes so much more

(18:18):
appealing and exciting. I expect this is the main reason
you chose to watch or listen to this episode. In fact,
you looked at the title and you thought, look, there's
no number, no distracting number, like a sort of barrier
at the beginning of the episode. That is essentially, you know,

(18:38):
causing me to lose interest and listen to something else.
You thought, No, there's no number at the start. I'm
definitely listening to this, that's what you thought. Anyway. Industry
insiders have recommended that I moved the number to the
end because it will essentially make the episode more appealing.
And also the other reason is that I'm getting close

(19:00):
to a thousand episodes in about a year, I think
it will be I'll be hitting episode one thousand of
the podcast, and I don't really want to have a
four figure number at the beginning of every podcast episode.
I don't really want that. I mean, I could almost
I don't know. Is that a good thing?

Speaker 1 (19:19):
Is that?

Speaker 4 (19:20):
Will it be somehow good marketing for the podcast that
you think, Wow, this guy's done over a thousand episodes,
this podcast must be brilliant. Or this guy's done over
a thousand episodes, Oh my god, he's wasted his life.
I don't know what you would think. Let's just say
it's an experiment, but I don't really want a four

(19:41):
figure number right at the beginning of the episode. I
think it would be wise just to go straight in
with the episode title. So there is This marks a
sort of title change, a sea change on Luke's English podcast.
Where previously the episode number came first, now it comes last.
Will things ever be the same? I don't know. So

(20:01):
in today's episode this still feels like the introduction. But
who cares? In this episode? Hang out with me? Continue
to hang out with me for the duration of the episode.
You don't have to listen to all of it in
one go. You know how podcasts work, don't you. You
know how YouTube works, don't you. You don't have to
listen to the whole thing in one go. You can
stop and come back to it later. That's how I

(20:23):
listen to my podcasts. I'll leave the house to go
to work, and I'll have a look at my podcast
app of choice, which for me is pocket Casts, and
I see which episode is up next, and I play it,
and then I get to work and I stop listening
to the episode, and guess what, the podcast app knows
where I was, and then when I come home again,

(20:45):
I can continue listening from where I left off. The
same thing with YouTube videos. When I watch long form
YouTube content, which I love, if I decide I'm going
to stop watching for whatever reason, a press pause, and
often I'll put the episode in a playlist. I put
the episodes in the watch Later playlist, which is a
private playlist in my YouTube account, and that way I

(21:08):
can go back and find the episodes that I was
watching and carry on later and YouTube remembers where I stopped. Right, So,
you know, hang out with me for as long as
you want, as I ramble about this and that, including
these things, the trials and tribulations, the trials and tribulations

(21:29):
of traveling to England with my one year old son.
So trials and tribulations, this just means the sort of challenges,
the difficult things that you have to do, the trials
and tribulations of learning English, you know, the difficult obstacles
you have to overcome, the challenges you have to deal with,
in this case, the trials and tribulations of traveling to

(21:50):
England with my little boy. Yes, this topic never grows old.
Whenever I make a long journey with my kids, I
have to talk about it, mainly just I suppose, just
as kind of therapy for me. I got back just yesterday, no,
the day before yesterday, and I'm still coming to terms

(22:11):
with the trauma of traveling on two trains and a
taxi with.

Speaker 2 (22:15):
My little boy.

Speaker 4 (22:17):
I'll tell you about that at some point in the episode.
The episode I've talked about that kind of thing before,
so I might be running over the same old ground,
but in this case, to spice things up a bit,
I've converted my account into a dramatic Hollywood action movie screenplay,

(22:38):
because why not. Also there's a grammar question, yeah, grammar
on Luke's English podcast. Again, a grammar question about the
verb tenses we use when we are describing stories. A
listener wrote in to ask me a grammar question, and
I am very happy to oblige by answering it. So
that's coming up an amazing new way site which is

(23:00):
bound to shock the world of English language learning. What's
that you're thinking, Well, listen on to find out. And
also some random chokes, some random chokes, no jokes, some
random jokes explained. So I will be dissecting some imaginary
frogs on the podcast. If you don't know what that means,

(23:22):
keep listening. And also some other responses to recent episodes.
And by the way I've mentioned is rambling. I call
these rambling episodes in a sort of make fun of
myself self deprecating kind of way. But I was actually
thinking about this yesterday evening, and actually, this is not

(23:43):
just rambling, which means talking without a particular aim or
particular direction. This is not just rambling. I mean, to
be completely fair to myself, and after for nine hundred
and forty three episodes plus two hundred and fifty odd
premium one, so it's over over a thousand episodes and
over fifteen years. To be fair to myself, this is

(24:05):
not just rambling. I've been doing this. I've been doing
this fifteen years now, all right. I've been in this
rap game for twenty five years. I mean not a
rap game, I mean teaching English for over twenty five years.
I've been doing this podcast for fifteen years. You could
even say, no, I'm not saying this, but you could.

(24:29):
You could say that I have single handedly defined an
entirely new medium of English language learning and teaching. You
could say that I'm not saying that, but you could
that I've defined I've opened up new horizons in English
language learning. The podcast monologue this is my medium. I've

(24:53):
changed the world. Basically. Now, you could say that I
wouldn't because it would be arrogant, and I'm far too
modest and humble to make an outrageous claim like that.
It's not for me to say, it's for other people
to point out. Of course, so you could say that
I'm a pioneer of English teaching in podcast form, and

(25:15):
I don't just ramble. In fact, everything I do here
is crafted to help you learn English, carefully crafted, every word,
every syllable, carefully selected and delivered. So it seems like
a stream of consciousness of unplanned bollocks. But hiding within

(25:36):
that trojan horse of unplanned bollocks, hiding inside that trojan horse,
there is an army of English teaching pedagogy. Does that
make sense. I'm basically, I'm a smuggler of the English language.
I'm a professional smuggler of English. I smuggle English vocabulary, grammar,

(25:57):
and pronunciation into your brain, right, all of these things,
discourse management, the principles of communicative competence. I smuggle all
of these things into your brain under the guise of
it being some sort of lighthearted rambling chitchat. But no,

(26:20):
this is not just rambling. This is nothing less than
a revolutionary form of direct language facilitation and activation, the
sort of industry shaking innovation in English language teaching that
saw my podcast get nominated for a British Council Elton
Award in Digital Innovation in twenty sixteen. Yes, a British

(26:43):
Council Elton Award for Digital Innovation. Okay, I didn't win,
I got nominated, But that really is something, Okay, that
is definitely something, and this is something Okay. Just in
case you had any doubts about whether or not this
was something, this is something, Okay. So as you listen,

(27:05):
I do just want you to remember one thing. This
is something you could think to yourself, I am listening
to something. I'm definitely listening to something. Okay. Now, just
in case you're not convinced, there will be grammar, well
let me start that again. There will be grammar. There

(27:25):
will also be vocabulary teaching in this episode. So settle
in and stick with me for the long run. And
remember there is method in my madness. And this really
is something that you're listening to. That could be a
good title for the episode, actually, couldn't it. This is
something I'll think about that that could be I don't know,

(27:48):
would that be good? I don't know. I'll think about it.
But anyway, there is a candidate for the episode title
right there. This is something anyway. So here's a question
from a listener on YouTube. This is a question in
response to episode nine hundred and forty one, which was

(28:10):
that story called the Man Who Could Work Miracles. If
you remember, in the story, I told the story, read
it out to you, and also I kind of summarized
the story myself in my own words and then described
some of the themes and discussed some of the interpretations
and meanings of the story. Right popular episode. People seem
to like it, but I got lots of comments, But

(28:32):
this one I saved because I thought that I could
respond to it in an episode like this. So the
comment was from neo brain. I think the user's name
is longer than that, but that's all I can see
here in this screenshot Neo brain. So anyway, here's the comment. Hi, Luke,
thanks for your hard, long lasting and extremely effective work

(28:53):
for people. You're welcome. That's nice, isn't it. Would you
be so kind as to elaborate a bit on what
tents we should use for verbs while retelling a story
about somebody else, For example, while retelling this story in
your own words, you use the present simple for example,
he thinks, he points out, etc. Is that conventional? Or

(29:18):
should we use the past continuous? After all, we're describing
the ongoing events. I'd really appreciate it if you answered,
this is a way how I use your podcast for learning,
trying to listen carefully, what grammar constructions you use? Praying emoji? Okay,
so that's great. The thing you said at the end,

(29:41):
this is I wouldn't say this is a way how
I use your podcast. I would just say this is
how I use your podcast, or this is a way
I use your podcast. So either this is a way
I use your podcast or this is how I use
your podcast's podcast. Right, but not this is a way
how I use your podcast. Okay, but that's great. Though

(30:04):
you use the podcast and as you're listening, you are
paying attention and trying to listen carefully for which grammar
constructions I'm using. This is a very good thing to do, right.
You should always be paying attention, listening carefully, thinking to yourself,
how is it that Luke puts this? Because obviously Luke
is the ideal user of Luke is the example that

(30:28):
we should all follow in terms of English usage. I'm
being self deprecating there, but I mean, you know, that's
a good thing to do. You should always be noticing,
be mindful of the English that you're hearing in the
way it's being constructed, not just the vocab, the pronunciation,
but also the grammatical structures that are being used. So yes,

(30:49):
neo brain, you noticed that when I was describing the
story the Man who Could Work Miracles. When I was
retelling the story, I actually used presents simple tense. I
used present tenses, and you quite rightfully thought to yourself,
wait a minute, is that normal? Okay, so here's the thing. Yes,

(31:11):
that is completely normal. So thankfully I wasn't just making
some terrible mistake or giving you an example of lazy
English usage or anything. No, that's completely normal and completely conventional.
So here's what's going on, right, I've got So this
is a question that I have been asked before. So

(31:33):
let me give you my full answer in as a
carefully described way as I possibly can. Here are some
questions that are going to help me. So, first of all,
and you can think about these questions too, how do
we describe events or stories that happen to other people?
Because that is in your question, right, yeah, would you

(31:54):
elaborate on the tense we should use for verbs while
telling a story about somebody else? So, how do we
describe events or stories that happen to other people? Real
events and stories that happened in the past. For example,
if I was describing my brother's skateboarding injury when he
dislocated his shoulder, how would I actually describe that? And

(32:15):
second question, how do we talk about the plot of
a book or the plot of a film or TV show?
A lot of books are written in the past, you know,
in past tenses. This is normal, right, stories they're often
written in past tenses. So let's say if I've read
Lord of the Rings and I then want to describe

(32:37):
the story to you or we discuss it, what tense
do we use in that conversation? So that's two questions
I'll deal with the first question. First, how do we
describe events or stories that happen to other people? Well,
we use exactly the same verb tenses that we would
use when we're describing things that happen to us. Okay, So,
for example, if I talk about a car accident that
I had when I was much younger, I was in

(33:00):
the car with my friend Mike. I talked about this
on nep Premium recently. This is maybe why it's in
my mind. I was in the car with my friend Mike,
my mate. My friend Mike used to give me a
lift to college sixth form college when I was nineteen.
So Mike picked me up in the car and we

(33:22):
were driving along quite fast because Mike drove his car
much too fast. He was one of those young guys
who drives their car too fast, so he was driving
far too fast. We were driving in a His car
at the moment at the time was a Reno five
GT Turbo, which is a notorious car for boy racers.

(33:44):
Just like Mike, anyone who drove a Reno five Gt
Turbo probably drove it far too quickly and probably ended
up crashing it at some point. I would be surprised
if there were any Reno five Gt turbos that still existed.
I suppose they'd all they'd all been destroyed in various
car accidents over the years. So we were driving round

(34:06):
this main road going too quickly. We were going too quickly.
Mike was fiddling with the stereo, trying to change the
volume or something. He didn't notice that a big truck,
big lorry was pulling out of a farm. I shouted Mike, Mike,
look out. He slammed on the brakes, We skidded and

(34:30):
we hit the truck. That's a timer. I don't need
to give you more details of the story. You could
listen to Lukes English Podcast Premium episode p. Sixty nine,
Part four if you want more details of that. But anyway,
that's an event that happened to me. You could see
that I was using past tenses. We were driving along,
Mike was driving too fast, he was fiddling with the stereo.

(34:53):
I saw the truck. He slammed on the brakes, We
skidded and we crashed into it. I actually used past
continuous and past simple. There we were driving, we crashed. Okay.
If I was to describe what happened to someone else,
if I'm talking about real things that really happened, I

(35:14):
use exactly the same tenses. For example, if I'm talking
about my brother's skateboarding injury. Did you hear about James
he dislocated his shoulder. Yeah, he's in hospital. Yeah, Oh
what happened? Well, he was skating and he was trying
to do a rail slide, A board slide on a
block in the skate park, and he jumped orlid up

(35:36):
onto the block and slid along and the board fell out,
slipped out from under him, and he fell really awkwardly
on the side of the block and pop. His arm
came out of its socket. He went to hospital. They
gave him morphine and stuff. He's okay. So just the
same past tenses. Did I use any pass continuous in

(35:58):
that he was skating? Maybe he was skating, he tried
to do a board slide, you know, he lost his
balance and he fell over. Okay, So just past tenses
in the same way. So, whether we're talking about ourselves,
whether we're talking about someone else, if we're talking about
real events in the past, we use a range of
past tenses. I'm going to talk about those different past

(36:20):
tenses in a moment, because there are three of them.
What about my second second question, how do we talk
about the plot of a book written the text of
the book is written in past tenses, or the plot
of a film or a TV show. How do we
have a conversation about that? Well, this is actually where
we often use present simple tens to do it. For example,

(36:42):
if I talk about the story of the man who
could work miracles. So the story is about George Fotherington.
He's a normal guy. One day he's in the pub
and he is debating with this other guy and they're
talking about miracles, and Fotherington doesn't believe in miracles. Of
his point, he points his finger at a lamp and
he says, flip upside down in the air, and the

(37:05):
lamp actually does and then it smashes on the floor
and so on and so forth. Okay, and you could
see there I was using present tenses. So this is
just totally normal, okay. And I guess the reason that
we do this when we're talking about the plot or
the story of a book or TV show or film
or something. It's because the book exists permanently. Okay. It's

(37:32):
not just some events that happened once in the past,
but these are events that are permanent, always, always true.
If someone opens up the book and reads it, then
the events will be there. They're always there. So we
do use present tenses to describe the story of a film,

(37:54):
TV show, book or something. So that is just totally normal. Okay.
For example, the story of Star Wars, Luke sky Walker
is a lad who lives on a farm, but he
dreams about having a bigger life. And then one day
he meets these droids and he discovers a hidden message
inside one of the droids, and he decides he has

(38:15):
to help this girl, and so he finds ben Kenobi,
who apparently is in the message, and they go off
on an adventure and blah blah blah. Right, so we
do use present tenses for that. So there you go.
Does that answer the question? Now? You could think about

(38:36):
that yourself. You could just practice it yourself. Think about
your favorite book, think about a film, think about about
a TV show, and just describe what happens in present tense.
In the present tense, you can think about those storylines
as permanent, always existing, always true, rather than just single
events that happened once in the past. You see. That's

(38:59):
the reason why. Also I should add that sometimes when
we're giving anecdotes, when we're telling stories, we do actually
use present simple tense as well. We use present tenses
sometimes when we're telling stories. Right, that's a kind of conversational,
almost colloquial way of telling a story, especially if it's

(39:20):
an anecdote. For example, what was the one oh that's it.
The car accident. So I was in the car with Mike,
and we would know that's past simple past tenses again, Okay,
we could use present tenses even if it's a past
story because it kind of brings the action. It brings
you into the action a bit more. But it's kind

(39:40):
of colloquial, conversational, informal style. So did I tell you
about the car accident? Yeah, okay, let me tell you
what happened. So I'm in the car with Mike, right,
and he's driving and were and we're listening to music
and Mike's not really looking at the road, He's looking
at the stereo. And I look up and what do
I see but a truck. There's a huge truck pulling

(40:03):
out of a side road. So I shout, Mike, there's
a there's a truck. Mike slams on the brakes. We skid,
and I think, oh my god, what's going to happen,
and everything where everything goes into slow motion.

Speaker 2 (40:18):
Woo.

Speaker 4 (40:23):
We slam into the side of the truck and the
whole thing explodes in a huge fireball like that. Mike
goes flying that way. I go flying this way. Luckily,
I use my kung fu skills to land on my feet,
and then I use my webs to save Mike, rescue
him with the webs and the driver of the truck,

(40:45):
I fly through the air and put a big web
net in the air and it catches him and we
all survived. Oh yeah, I didn't forget. I forgot to
tell you that I'm Spider Man as well. Anyway, that's
just an example of using press and tenses to describe
a story, an anecdote that's happened to you in a
sort of very dramatic way. The present tenses there. Yeah,

(41:07):
it's kind of colloquial, it's informal conversational English. In all
other situations, we would use past tenses to tell a
real true story that's happened, to describe past events like that. Okay,
I thought I would take this opportunity now to have
a bit of a ramble about narrative tenses in English,

(41:30):
because it's always quite an interesting subject for English learners. Right,
which verb tenses do we use when we're talking about
past events?

Speaker 1 (41:41):
Now?

Speaker 4 (41:41):
I have done episodes about this before, Right, I've talked
about narrative tenses on the podcast in some detail before
notably in an early episode, episode number twenty nine, which
was called Mystery Story Narrative Tenses. I told you a
mystery story that I'd written, and then it used it
as a way of explaining the different narrative tenses. But anyway,

(42:04):
let's let's have another look. So which verb tenses do
we use when telling a story set in the past,
for example, describing something real that happened to us or
someone else in the past. Which verb tenses do we use?
Will we use three different verb tenses? Past simple, past continuous,

(42:26):
past perfect? Which verb tenses are the most common? Past continuous,
past simple, past continuous, or past perfect. It's right, So
past simple is I booked my ticket, I went to
the station, I got on the train, I fell asleep.
Those are past simple. I did this, I did this,
I did this. Past continuous would be while the train

(42:47):
was moving, While the train was moving, the door suddenly
opened and three of the passengers were sucked out and
they died while the train was moving. The train was moving,
So that's past continuous. It was at that moment I

(43:08):
realized that the train had been hijacked. Some hijackers had
taken control of the train and were taking us to
the same destination, because how I don't know how you
hijack a train, because like, where are we going? We're
going to hijack this train? Where are you going? We're going? Well,
we're going to Paris. Good, just speed up a bit.

(43:33):
It was at that moment I realized the train that
some guys had hijacked. The train had hijacked, or in
this case, had been the train had been hijacked. That's
past perfect had plus a past participle. So which verb
tenses are the most common of those three? How do
which tents do we use to simply describe events one

(43:54):
after the other? How do we set the scene by
describing the situation at the start? How do we describe
an action which is interrupted by another action? And how
do we make it clear that a certain action actually
happened before another one?

Speaker 2 (44:09):
You know what?

Speaker 4 (44:09):
I'm actually just going to answer those questions right now.
I've got some notes here, and I'm slightly confused by
my own notes because I've added a lot of information
here both yesterday evening when I was falling asleep and
this morning, and it's all a bit confused. But I'm
going to kind of clean it all up and explain
it to you. So let me answer those questions that

(44:29):
I've just asked right now, and I'll also give you
various examples. So which verb tenses are most common? Past
simple is definitely the most common. I did this, then
I did that, Then this happened, and then this happened.
Those are definitely the most common ones. And then in
terms of past continuous and past perfect, they're sort of
quite similar. Really, I think they're actually quite comparable in

(44:52):
terms of how frequently they are used. But they've both
got different functions. They both help us to describe context
and sequence, provide sequences of events in ways that are
more sophisticated than simply this happened, then this happened, then
this happened. I'll show you in a moment. So how

(45:16):
do we set the scene by describing the situation at
the start? Often we used past continuous to describe the
context or situation at the start of the story. For example,
I was traveling to Paris on the Eurostar. Okay, I
was traveling to Paris, or I was traveling to London
on the Eurostar. The sun was shining, the birds were singing,

(45:39):
I was sitting reading a book right. Then suddenly there
was a big noise from the roof of the train,
and one of the doors came flying off its hinges,
and three guys in camouflage with hoods over their faces

(46:01):
and machine guns jumped into the train. Right so, the
sun was shining, the birds were singing. I was reading
a book. I was traveling to London. They go past continuous.
That was all were plus an ing verb, and that
just describes, think the general situation, things that were in

(46:24):
progress at the start of the story. So it's very
normal to use past continuous to sort of set the scene.
I was walking down the street. I was listening to
Luke's English podcast, when suddenly I achieved total consciousness and
I ascended to Nirvana and became immortal, you know, the

(46:46):
sort of thing that happens just on an you know
normally when you're listening to this podcast. Suddenly I understood
all grammar. I achieved total English understanding. Passing tinuous. Right,
how do we describe an action which is interrupted by
another action? This is basic stuff, isn't it. This is

(47:07):
pass continuous as well. For example, what would it be
Mike was turning down turning up the volume of the music,
or while Mike was looking at the stereo, I noticed
a big truck. Okay, So it's kind of like the

(47:31):
same as I said before, pass continuous being used to
describe the situation. But also it's like Mike looking at
the stereo. This is a long action that starts he's
looking at the stereo, and then it's interrupted by me
seeing the truck. Right, So you can see that it's
sequencing the events. Mike was checking the stereo when I

(47:52):
saw a truck. Okay, the truck was pulling out of
the side road. That means it started pulling out before
we arrived, and at the moment we arrived, that pulling
out of the side road was in progress. Yeah, you
get it. Which verb form do we use to make

(48:13):
it clear that a certain action actually happened before another one?
So that would be past perfect, right, So we use
past perfect to show that certain actions actually happened before.
For example, I don't know what. As we were skidding
towards the lorry, I was really scared because I had

(48:34):
never had a car crash before, and I was thinking, oh,
so this is what a car crash is. Like, everything's
in slow motion. I hope I don't get hurt. I
was feeling quite strange because I'd never had a car
crash before. Now let me let me demonstrate. Then I'll
go into those tenses again in a bit more detail
in a moment. But right now, let me demonstrate how

(48:55):
it's important to use past continuous and past perfect to
be able to give slightly more sophisticated, nuanced narratives or
anecdotes or stories. Okay, I'm going to give you an
I'm going to show you this by telling you about
how I moved to Paris. So I've been living in

(49:17):
Paris since twenty twelve, and let me tell you about
how and why I originally moved here from London. I
was living in London, then I moved to Paris. So
let me describe what happened. But first I'm going to
explain that I'm going to describe that only using past
simple tents, the most basic, easy one, and you'll see

(49:41):
how sure it does the job. But it's a bit
too basic. So here's a description of the day I
packed my stuff in a car and drove from London
to Paris. But it's all given only in past simple tents.
So this is the basic version now it's not that bad,
as you will see, but it is basic and to

(50:01):
be honest, while I was preparing this, I struggled a
little bit to describe certain things with this limited range
of grammar. This is actually interesting, I think, because it
makes you realize how a limited range of English makes
it frustrating to try and communicate. So the bigger range
you have, the more fluency you have. Of course, So anyway,
here is my description only using past simple tents. So

(50:23):
I was in a relationship with a French girl. She
lived in Paris and I lived in London. Basically, I
decided I had to move to Paris to be with
this girl. I rented a car and I packed everything
into it. I felt nervous. It was my first time
driving to Paris from London. That driving that's not past continuous.
That's because after first time we use a ger and form.

(50:46):
It was my first time doing something right. It was
my first time driving to Paris from London. Of course,
they drive on the other side of the road in France.
That's a permanent fact, so present simple. I drove to
the U D Tunnel in Dover. I loaded the car
onto the train. The train went through the tunnel. I
sat in the car and waited. It felt cool. I

(51:09):
was in a car on a train in a tunnel.
I turned around and looked at my bike. My bike
was in in a car on a train in a
tunnel under the sea. Maybe under a boat, I hoped. So.
Then I drove from Calais to Paris on what felt
like the wrong side of the road. I felt nervous,

(51:29):
so I listened to country music to keep me relaxed.
I arrived in Paris and it was a nightmare to
find a parking space. I parked the car and unpacked
my stuff into my girlfriend's flat. That night, somebody in
the street saw my British car and they spat on it.
In the morning, I noticed, I noticed the spit, and

(51:52):
I thought, oh, that's not a nice welcome. And then
I drove the car back to London because I'd rented
it in London. Oh, I used pass perfect by mistake.
So that was okay. But here's another version using pass
continuous and past perfect, and it should be better because
it allows for a more sophisticated telling of the story
with background information and a more complex explanation of the events. Okay,

(52:14):
so here we go again. So this happened a few
years ago when I was living in London. I'd been
seeing this French girl for over two years and we
wanted to be together. She'd been planning to move to London,
but had just been turned down for a job in
London she was hoping to get, and she was very disappointed.
So I decided that I could move to Paris instead

(52:37):
and find work as an English teacher. I'd lived abroad
before and I'd loved it, so I thought it could
be time for a new adventure. I rented a car
and packed everything into it. The day of the drive,
I was feeling nervous. I'd never driven from London to
Paris before, and in France, of course, they drive on
the other I mean wrong side of the road, and

(53:00):
I would be driving a car, a UK car I
mean with the steering wheel on the wrong side, so
I was feeling a bit nervous. I drove down to
the euro Tunnel in Dover. I loaded the car onto
the train. The train went through the tunnel, I sat
in the car and waited, and while I was sitting
there behind the wheel, it felt pretty cool. I was

(53:23):
in a car on a train in a tunnel going
to Paris. I turned round and looked at my bike,
which I had squeezed into the back of the car
earlier that morning. And yeah, my bike was in a
car on a train in a tunnel under the sea.
Maybe at that very moment a boat was sailing above me,
I hoped. So when we arrived in Paris, I drove

(53:44):
from Calais to Paris. Sorry, when we arrived. When I
arrived in France, I drove to Paris. While I was driving,
I felt nervous about the whole thing. Was this a
huge mistake? It wasn't, so I listened to country music
to keep me relaxed. I arrived in Paris and it

(54:06):
was a nightmare to find a parking space. I parked
the car and unpacked my stuff into my girlfriend's flat.
In the morning, I had to drive the car back
to London. When I found the car again in the street,
I noticed that during the night someone had spat on it.
What a lovely welcome for an English guy in Paris,
I thought to myself. So, I think you'll probably agree

(54:27):
that the second version is better, right, because it allowed
for a more nuanced telling of the story. So now
let's go through that. Extract that story, the last one
with the three different tenses in it. Let's go through
that step by step and I'll I'll identify every instance
of the past continuous and past perfect. I'll quote it

(54:48):
and I'll explain its use in context. No need to
explain past. Simple, you understand how that works. Oh, I
need to drink some water. Let me drink some water first,
and then we will analyze the grammar. Cheers.

Speaker 1 (55:02):
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Speaker 4 (55:42):
Right I'm fully topped up with water again. I think
I dropped down to about what maybe like sixty nine
sixty eight percent water there, so don't worry. I've topped
myself up back to back to seventy percent water again.
Is that true that we are that humans are seventy
percent water? Is that true? Or is that just a myth?
I don't know. You can tell me in the comments section.

(56:04):
I can't be bothered to check right now because we're
in the grammar zone. So I have to carry on
with this. Right, So let's consider past continuous, which of
course is was and were was or were depending on
the subject, plus an ing verb form and that's not
a gerrand, that's a present participle, was a were and

(56:25):
an ing verb. This is used for an action in
progress at a past time. It's often used for background situations.
I was traveling. I was traveling to Paris when this happened,
you know, So at number one, I was living in
London at the time. So this sets the background situation
at the time. It describes an ongoing state over a
period in the past. Right, I was living in London.

(56:47):
Note that we don't say how long now. If I
said how long, then I would need to use past
perfect to describe that pass situation, And how long I
had been living in London for ten years, but I
don't say how long, so it's just past continuous. I

(57:10):
was living in London right. Another one, while I was
sitting behind the wheel, it felt pretty cool, So this
shows what was happening at the exact time something else happened.
So sitting at the wheel is the long action or
continuous or repeated action that's interrupted by that feeling of

(57:31):
it being cool. So I was sitting there and then
who this feels pretty cool. And also while I was driving,
I felt nervous, so again this describes what was in progress.
That's the driving when I felt nervous. Okay, pretty simple stuff.
Past perfect. In fact, in this story there were more

(57:53):
examples of past perfect than past continuous in this particular anecdote.
So past perfect of course had plus a past participle
that's verb three, and it's used to show that something
happened before another past event. For example, I'd been seeing
this French girl for over two years. This is actually
past perfect continuous. It describes an action that's seeing this

(58:17):
girl that started before you know, the main events of
the story, So this is background information. It started before
and continued up to this point. And because I say
for over two years, that's why it's past perfect continuous
and not past continuous. The same thing is true for

(58:39):
present perfect continuous. For example, it's now one hour. I
started this podcast an hour ago. I'm still recording the podcast,
So we don't say I am recording this podcast for
one hour. We do say I have been recording this
podcast for one hour, okay. And similarly, we don't say

(59:02):
I was seeing this French girl for over two years.
It's I had been seeing this French girl for over
two years. That's just one of the ways that we
use past perfect continuous when we're talking about how long
for a past like a continuous past. Action number two,
she'd been planning to move to London. Again, it's past
perfect continuous. It shows an ongoing intention that was happening

(59:26):
before she was turned down for the job. The assumption
is that when she was turned down for that job,
she stopped planning to move to London. She was like, oh,
you know, that kind of ruined her plans. She'd been
planning to move to London, but she had just been
turned down for a job. Again. These things are all

(59:46):
background information before the main events of the story being
me driving to Paris. She had been turned down for
a job. It's actually passive. She had been turned down.
Someone had turned her down for a job. If you
get turned down for a job, it means you get rejected.
You're not given the job. They said no, So she'd

(01:00:10):
been turned down for the job. This shows the rejection
happened before the main story decision, which was me deciding
to move. I'd lived abroad before, so I thought it
was a good idea because I had lived lived abroad before,
really right in Japan, of course, as you know, so
this I had lived. This indicates that my earlier experience,

(01:00:33):
you know, I had that I had an earlier experience
before deciding to move to Paris. Again, background information before
the main events of the story being me moving to Paris,
all the stuff you heard in the first account. I'd
never driven from London to Paris before. Again a life
experience in this case, never done this before up to

(01:00:56):
that point. Notice that we often use past perfect with
other words. We use it often with before. Okay, for
over two years, I'd been seeing this French girl for
over two years. I'd lived abroad before. I'd never driven
to London from London to Paris before I noticed that

(01:01:17):
someone had spat on my car. When I arrived. When
I found the car, I noticed someone had spat on it.
So this shows that the spitting on the car happened
before I found it. Okay, right, so there you go. Now,
past perfect is often the one that causes people problems.
Here's some more rambling about pass perfect, and then we're

(01:01:39):
going to move on to something else. Okay, so a
little bit more rambling here we go. So, first of all,
I should say that past perfect does not just mean
a long time ago. Okay. Now I'm saying this because
this is a common error. I've seen in my students
many times where learners of English first encounterpass perfect and

(01:02:02):
the teacher tells them, well, it's passed in the past,
and they sort of do this motion with their arm
showing you've got a past event, and then things that
happened before that. So a lot of learners assume, oh,
so it's just like past events that happened a long
time ago, And then you hear people saying things like,
you know, when I was when I was a teenager,

(01:02:23):
I had studied maths, and what they mean is when
I was a teenager, I studied maths. It's just that
it was a long time ago. You don't need to
say I had studied maths. In fact, if you say
when I was a teenager, I had studied maths at university,
it suggests that you went to university before you were
a teenager, and you studied maths before you were a teenager,

(01:02:44):
which is strange. So instead you should just say when
I was a teenager, I studied maths. You know, so
it's not just a long time ago. Remember, it is
a way to sequence events. Think of it in those terms.
At this example. Listen to this example. There was a
party at my friend's house. So this is past simple.

(01:03:05):
There was a party at my friend's house. Everybody was there,
then everyone left, and then I arrived and I was
disappointed because there was nobody there. Right now, let's tell
that story again, but use past perfect. So there was
a party at my friend's house, but when I arrived,
everyone had left, so I was disappointed. Now, using had

(01:03:30):
left clearly shows that they left before I arrived. Now,
there are other common uses of past perfect. I mentioned
that it's used with before. It's used when you're talking
about how long for past repeated actions. Here are some
other examples of this. We would say this structure. When

(01:03:53):
I did this, I had done that before, right, or
when I did this, I hadn't done that. For example,
when I went skiing, I was a bit nervous because
I had never done it before. When I went to London,
I was excited because I had never been there before.
Right when I was moving to France, I felt okay

(01:04:13):
because I had lived abroad before. So when I did something,
I had done something before. And that had done something
before shows that this happened, you know, emphasizes that it
happened before the first verb in that sentence. When I
moved to Paris, I was okay because I lived abroad before.

(01:04:37):
That works as well because you've got the word before,
So that does contextualize it. But it's better we prefer
it in English if you use past perfect for that sentence.
Other cases when we often use past perfect is with
phrases like this, by the time, and when and after
and before. So examples, by the time we arrived, the

(01:04:59):
film had started. When I got to the station, the
train had already left. After I had finished my work,
we went out for dinner. Now that's arguably unnecessary. There
After I finished my work, we went out for dinner.
Also works, I left before he had said goodbye. Now

(01:05:22):
you often see that past. You often see past perfect
in the event that happened first. It shows that this
happened first. But past simple is also common if the
order is clear. So there are cases where you can
use past perfect or past simple if the sentence makes
it completely clear. I'll give you examples of that in
a moment, We're nearly finished with this bit. Also we

(01:05:44):
use past perfect in sentences with already, just, never, ever,
and yet wheh as I hit the microphone. These adverts
fit naturally with past perfect to stress the completion of
something before another past moment. For example, she had already
gone when I called, so she wasn't there. I had
just sit I had just sat down when the doorbell rang. Oh,

(01:06:07):
I'm gonna have to get up again. I'd never seen
such a mess before. When I went into her room,
I was shocked because I had never seen such a
mess before. Had you ever visited Paris before you moved there? No,
i'd never visited before. It was my first time. Or yeah,
I knew the city quite well because i'd visited quite

(01:06:29):
a few times, and he hadn't finished yet when they arrived. Okay,
those are just examples of how it's often used. Now,
I mentioned before that there are some cases where past
simple or past perfect could both either of them could
be used. Sometimes you can use past simple or past
perfect if the context of the sentence makes it clear

(01:06:51):
that one action happened before the other. Right, So, there
are quite a few situations in English where either the
past perfect or the past simple could be used. You know,
it could be either or because the sequence of events
is already clear from context, there's a logical order or
time expressions that show it. So in these cases, the
past perfect becomes optional, often adding emphasis or clarity, but

(01:07:12):
is not strictly required. Examples so this is for example,
when the order of events is obvious from context or logic.
For example, I finished my dinner and went to bed. Obviously,
you finished your dinner first and then went to bed.
Past perfect isn't really needed. You could say I had
finished my dinner and went to bed, but it's not necessary.

(01:07:34):
She packed her suitcase and left the hotel. Obviously she
packed her suitcase first and left the hotel. You could
say when she had when she had packed her suitcase
she left the hotel. Okay. Otherwise, it's when she packed
her suitcase she left the hotel. Sounds like they happen
at the same time. I had finished my dinner and

(01:07:58):
went to bed. Okay. Not not really necessary, though, What
about when time words or clauses make the sequence clear,
words like after before by the time when once already
signal the time relationship? For example, after I finished my work,
I went for a walk, fine, or after I had
finished my work, I went for a walk fine as well,

(01:08:20):
by the time we arrived, the movie had started. Fine,
or by the time we arrived the movie started okay.
I prefer the past perfect in that one because it
makes it more obvious and clear. By the time we arrived,
the movie had started, so we missed the first five minutes.

(01:08:41):
One more thing, past perfect, as you may have noticed,
is often used after certain verbs. Realize is the most
obvious example. For example, when I got home and saw
the door the broken door. The door was off its hinges,
meaning the door had come off the wall. When I

(01:09:02):
got home and saw the door, I realized someone had
broken into our flat. So I realized someone had broken
in so realize is often followed by past perfect when
you realize something happened before right. So verbs like realize
often introduced clauses with the past perfect to show that
something happened before the moment you realized. For example, so

(01:09:26):
let's have a look at some examples. We've got realize, notice, discover, understand, remember, forget, see,
or hear, no, say, think, hope, decide, learn, For example, realize,
I realized I had forgotten my keys. So I forgot
my keys before I realized, but then I realized. So

(01:09:46):
when I arrived at the door, I realized I had
forgotten my keys. She noticed he had already left, so
he left before she noticed. Right, So she noticed he'd left.
They discover she had lied. He understood, they'd been waiting
for hours. I remembered I had locked the door. He forgot.

(01:10:10):
Had he forgot that he had promised to call? Oh God,
I I promised to call, didn't I? And so on
and so forth. So all those verbs right often have
passed perfect after them, or can do. There's also past
perfect continuous as well, which emphasizes the duration of an activity.
If it's a repeated thing, I think I probably need

(01:10:33):
to stop here and leave the grammar zone. Get out
of this grammar hole that we found ourselves in, down
this rabbit hole of grammar. We're going to leave that.
In fact, I have to go out now, so I'm
going to put the pod. I'm going to put the
podcast on hold. Okay, I'm going to put the podcast
on hold, and I'm going to go out for a

(01:10:55):
band practice and lunch. When I come back, we'll continue
and there'll be more podcast rambling with some fun stuff
and responses to other episodes. Anyway, I hope you found
that grammar stuff interesting. That took a bit longer than
I expected, but that's always the way it is, and

(01:11:15):
we can have another break. Now you can just do
something else for a bit or In fact, through the
magic of podcasting, the edit will be seamless. I'm just
going to click my fingers and when I've finished clicking
my fingers, i'll be back and an hour or two
will have passed and i'll be back at it. Okay,
so let me click my fingers and I'll continue after

(01:11:36):
lunch and ban practice. So I'll see you in a moment.
Here we go, and I'm back again, and it's three
hours later, and I'm slightly hotter, slightly less hungry, slightly
more sweaty and disheveled than I was three hours ago.
But let's continue. How are you doing. You're still out there,

(01:11:58):
You're still alive, good, still listening, your head is still
attached to your body. Everything's still functioning. Let's continue. So
I got stuck into quite a big grammar hole, there,
didn't I Before I had to go off to band practice.
Band practice was good, by the way, quite dramatic. During
the practice, our guitarist hurt his back. I think it's

(01:12:20):
an injury he already had, but he's done something to
his back. He's got like a slipped disc in his
lower back and so at the end of the practice
he almost couldn't move. He was in so much discomfort,
the poor guy. I don't know if this is going
to affect our concert that we're doing at the end
of next week. So we are preparing to perform live

(01:12:44):
music at the British Ambassador to Paris's leaving do so
the British Ambassador to Paris. The British Ambassador, right, you
know the way these things were wanted to, you know,
someone on a diplomatic mission in France, representing the British State,
the British Ambassador to Paris. So we're performing at her

(01:13:06):
leaving do because she's leaving. Her term is finishing and
she'll be leaving, and she's requested that we play at
her big leaving party, which is going to be this
big outdoor summer party next week, and she has requested
that we do britpop songs. I don't know if you're
familiar with britpop. It was a kind of musical movement

(01:13:30):
in the nineties in Britain and it's basically British guitar
bands from the nineties. So I'll give you a quick
selection of the songs we're We're doing Girls and Boys
by Blur, Live Forever, Roll with It and Don't Look
Back in Anger by Oasis, No wonder Wall controversially no
wonder Wall because our bass player vetoed it. He just refused.

(01:13:53):
He flatly refused to do wonder Wall. I don't know
how people are going to react to No wonder Wall,
but we won't be doing that, and a few other
britpop classics like Disco two thousand by Pulp, all Right
by Supergrass. We are doing road Rage by Catatonia. Arguably
that is kind of post britpop, maybe right at the

(01:14:15):
tail end of britpop, and a few others. We're doing
Bittersweet Symphony by the Verve, We're doing there she goes
by the La maybe pre britpop that one, and a
few other songs which I can't think of at this
moment in time. But it's gonna be good. It's gonna
be good. As long as our guitarist is actually able
to stand up, we'll we'll be doing that. Right. Let's

(01:14:36):
carry on then with this episode, even though I'm all
boiling hot now, but that's all right. I'm going to
cool down as we continue. So the next thing I
want to talk to you about is something that was
sent to me. I guess it's a month or two
ago now by one of my listeners. I think this was.
Is this on YouTube? I think it is. It could

(01:14:57):
have been on my website at te eight eight four eight,
you know at Tish eight eight four eight, don't you
Maybe you don't at Tish eight eight four eight wrote
this to me, and this is this is this is
potentially huge, potentially huge. Okay, So this is the message

(01:15:20):
in response to my birthday episode that I did a
few episodes ago. So this is it small but hopefully
useful project is the name of the message. That's the
sort of the subject line. Hi Luke, happy birthday, Thank
you very much, thank you very much for your podcast.
It's brilliant. Thank you very much for saying thank you
very much and for saying nice things. So I'm a

(01:15:42):
lepster since last year. That year I started listening to
a few episodes a week, but this year I listen
for an hour every day. This improved my English. This
improves my English skills a lot. I work as a
software engineer, and recently I started learning a new technology.
Some new technology. Technology is uncountable, so we don't tend

(01:16:04):
to say a new technology. We might say some new technology.
When I learned something, I follow your five P rule.
Remember what that is? Everyone, practice, practice, practice, practice practice.
So I decided to make a small project with this
new technology. On your YouTube channel, you mentioned sometimes the
website Unglish. Everyone, listeners, Have you heard me talking about Younglish?

(01:16:30):
Have you heard me talking about English? English is a
website that allows you to search for samples of words
and phrases being used. It's a bit like a kind
of a sample library, you can hear words being spoken.
And what it does is it searches YouTube videos which
have subtitles in them. It searches all of the videos

(01:16:52):
on YouTube with subtitles, and then it presents the results
to you. So, for example, if you're looking for the
word I don't know what fish. Looking for the word
fish for whatever reason, I don't know, you'd want to
know how to pronounce the word phish. I think you've
probably got it, but who knows. Oh, or excuse me
while I drink some coffee. Decaffeinated coffee is disgusting. Well,

(01:17:16):
I don't know why I'm drinking it because I've got nothing else. Anyway,
if you want to know how to pronounce the word fish,
you would type it into Younglish, hit enter, and it
will give you loads of results of people saying the
word phish within the context of lots of videos on YouTube.
It's actually very useful for exploring vocabulary. One of the
many different tools you can use to explore vocabulary in context.

(01:17:40):
So that's Younglish, right, not YouTube. It's like YouTube meets English,
so English right, So the message then on your YouTube
channel you mention sometimes or you sometimes mention the website English.
I like the idea of the website, and I created
my own simple version of it, but focused on your channel.
I called it Lukeglish. Like you Glish, this allows you

(01:18:04):
to find videos by words, but there is a big difference.
You Glish searches for exact matches, so if you have
a typo in the word, it won't find anything. But
Lukeglish searches by relevance. So if you have the word,
for example, shurlock, but with a missing letter, so that's
shurlock s h E R l c K, it will

(01:18:28):
find suitable videos. It's clever. If you want to try
it yourself, luke Glish lukeglish dot com, you can. You
can do that. Maybe you will find this project useful.
Maybe you will even want to share this project with
your listeners and maybe they will find it useful to
that would be great. Please let me know what what
do you think of this project? Actually that should be

(01:18:49):
let me know what you think, because that's not a question.
It would be what do you think of this project?
That's a question, what do you think? But let me
know this is no longer a question, so it's you
If follows the same normal structure of a sentence. Let
me know what you think. Let me know what you
think about this project. Thank you very much again for

(01:19:11):
your work. I'm looking forward to your reply. Okay, So
this so this listener, this lebster has created a search
engine okay for my YouTube channel, okay, And what it
does is it searches all my videos for instances of
a certain word being spoken. Right now, let's let's just

(01:19:33):
try this. So I'm going to just search for the
word fish. That's just the first word that came into
my head. Let's see what happens. So apparently, apparently there
are nine hundred and eighty nine instances of the word
fish being spoken by me on my podcast over the years.
Let's have a little look. I know it's one fish,
two fish, three fish, four fish, right, but fish is

(01:19:56):
also a word and it means different types of fish.
There you go. So that was me explaining the fact
that fish is one of those irregular nouns that where
the singular and plural forms are the same one fish,
two fish, three fish, but we do also have the
word fishes, which means different types of fish.

Speaker 2 (01:20:13):
They go.

Speaker 4 (01:20:13):
That was interesting. That was episode. That was That's when
I got my first YouTube shiny thing a few years ago,
when I'd reached one hundred thousand subscribers. Look at me now, folks,
one million, five hundred thousand. Now this week I hit
the one point five million subscriber mark on YouTube, which
is nice. Thanks very much for the subscriptions everyone, Thanks

(01:20:36):
for the sub If you did sub recently, you might
have helped me breach that one point five million subscriber number,
which is stunning. I mean, it's amazing, isn't it. The
thing is, though, that not everyone who subscribed watches my episodes.
I've got one point five million subscribers, but my videos,
you know. I mean some videos get nearly a million,

(01:20:57):
some get over one hundred. A lot of them get
between fifty and one hundred thousand views. So that's a
tiny portion of my one point five million subscribers. So
what's going on? Subscribers? You click subscribe all this looks interesting? Subscribe.
I will now never watch his videos again. Is that
what's going on? Anyway? Let's have a look at the

(01:21:17):
next instance of me saying fish on this podcast. It
was in an episode called Meditation and Learning English with
Anthony Rattuno. Here it is clapping fish, slapping each other's
faces with fish and it's wonderful. Okay. That's where I
was talking to Anthony about the fish slapping dance from

(01:21:37):
Monty Python. From the Monty Python TV show What Else
Learning English with Carl Pilkington episode seven hundred and forty eight,
to catch fish seals and they go like that, Okay,
that was a seal impression. You know what seals are, Well,

(01:21:58):
they're animals that swim around the water. They catch fish
and they go, oh, that's my impression of a seal
catching fish and celebrating. I mean, it goes on and
on and on. It was actually a whole story called
the prawn Story from years ago, an improvised story fish
in the ocean. The sharks they're amazing, they're movie stars

(01:22:19):
people as they get respect from humans. Sharks are definitely
the coolest. And Christian said, well, I prefer killer whales myself.
I think, Okay, so you get the idea. I mean,
there's a lot more you could do what Else, just
random stuff. It's quite fun to just play around with
this and see the kinds of things I've said. Golf,
When did I talk about golf? Ok don't you think

(01:22:42):
across the golf of space golf meaning across the gulf
of space. A golf is like a large open area, right,
like the Gulf of Mexico. Or is it the golf
of America? Donald Trump?

Speaker 2 (01:22:55):
Right?

Speaker 4 (01:22:56):
Golf not golf? Have I ever talked about golf? Put
snooker on It relaxes me. Watch a bit of golf.
I'm talking about watching golf. It helps me to relax.
I mean, there's so much right. For example, in golf,
you swing the golf club to hit the ball, and
then the bit after you've hit the ball where the
golf club continues swinging. That is the follow through. There

(01:23:19):
was me talking about the phrase of verb to follow through,
like when you swing a golf club, you hit the
ball and you follow through. I mean, is this website
is very interesting and I think there is a lot
of potential here. What could you know? Okay, we think
of vocabulary. We think of the big nouns like fish

(01:23:42):
and golf and so on. But sometimes a good way
of exploring vocabulary is to look at the little things,
the grammatical words, the prepositions follow through. That actually led
me to do a long premium series about the word through.
Everything you always wanted to know about the word through,

(01:24:04):
but we're afraid to ask. And I covered noun phrases
and phrasal verbs and all sorts of other collocations and
things every time the word through is used in English,
all the different phrases and situations it's used in And
I could have used Lukelish to research that. So if
I type in through, there's bound to be a lot

(01:24:25):
of results. Yeah, we've got ten thousand results with the
word through. So let's just let's find five different examples
of the word through being used. And right now we'll
just consider what those examples are, okay, and what they
how to classify them. Maybe you'll learn a phraseal verb
or something. Here we go, Oh tough thorough thought though,

(01:24:46):
Oh god, it's that okay, let me just back. All
those words are very difficult, but it can be understood
in you know, detailed thought ought though. So English is difficult,
but it can be understood through tough thorough thought.

Speaker 1 (01:24:59):
Though.

Speaker 4 (01:25:00):
English is difficult, but it can be understood through tough
thorough thought though. That is one of those little word
jokes that comes up sometimes in things like English learning forums.
English is difficult, it can be understood through meaning by
the method of through tough thought. So tough meaning difficult

(01:25:23):
thought meaning thinking. So English can be understood by means
of difficult in depth thinking. And in fact it's tough
thorough thought. Thorough means in depth looking at every single detail,
every step of the way. So through tough thorough thought. Though,
we use though at the end, a bit like we

(01:25:44):
would use butt in the middle of the sentence. English
is difficult, but it can be understood through tough thorough thought.
English is difficult. It can be understood through tough thorough
thought though. So though goes at the end, in the
way that butt can go at the middle, or that
all the beginning or in the middle. Okay, So there's
that English can be understood through tough thorough thought though.

(01:26:08):
All right, that's one instance of through. Let's have another
one next. That's from the same okay. The next one
is from the same episode, so I'm assuming it's the
same thing. Okay. This one is from episode eight two
three Chat GPT and Learning English, Part three. Here we
go more carefully thought through in English grammar in use

(01:26:31):
which are a fee? Okay, hold on or indeed, the
exercise is presented in English Grammar in use which are
more carefully thought through. Okay, So in this episode, I
think I was evaluating the usefulness of chat GPT as

(01:26:52):
a way of practicing your grammar, and I was using
it to generate grammar practice exercises, and I can illusion
was it's probably better to use a published course book
or practice book like English Grammar and Use by Raymond Murphy,
in which the exercises are more carefully thought through. So

(01:27:13):
to think through something is to think about it in
a careful, detailed way from one end to the other.
And the exercises in the book are carefully thought through.
They are carefully thought through. So that's passive people. The
author thought them through carefully. They were carefully thought through.
So to think through something, think about it carefully from

(01:27:36):
one end to the other. All right, let's have another
one rambling about the Beatles in episode eighty five to one.
Here we go carefully thought through. So, okay, it's exactly
the same phrase. He used it again. What did I
What was the context? Something you worried about when you
needed to eat? And now I have to plan everything

(01:27:58):
carefully in advance. Everything has to do he carefully thought
through Okay. I was talking about at the beginning of
the episode worrying about leaving the apartment because I was
cooking some chicken. Do you remember this. I had to
record this episode at home because I put a chicken
dinner in the oven and then I thought, oh no,
I can't just leave the chicken dinner cooking in the

(01:28:19):
oven and leave the apartment. So I stayed at home
and recorded it there, and I was talking about how
these days with kids, you know, you need to plan
everything in advance, and everything has to be carefully thought through.
It's the same phrase again that I used. Apparently I
like that one. What else have we got eight seven
eight From Learning to Teaching and Beyond with Elena Mutunoo.

(01:28:42):
Is that her name.

Speaker 3 (01:28:43):
Them through the process, even though you're not an active speaker.

Speaker 4 (01:28:47):
So through a process, to guide them through the process.
To guide someone through a process, okay, through a process
that's pretty easy one preposition plus noun. Through a process,
through a complex, difficult process. This is what teachers do
to an extent. We guide learners through the process of

(01:29:09):
learning English. Okay, So that's how many it's at four
carefully thought through, understood, through thorough thought. Then another thought through.
Now guide someone through the process. Let's have at least
one more. Okay. This is from an episode called Ielts
Q and A with Ben worthing Something Worthington worthing Shore

(01:29:31):
from episode five seven nine. Very very carefully thought through?
For that I used it again. I love this phrase. Apparently.
What was I talking about? The Iolts questions are carefully
thought through, how in depth it is, and how much
time and effort is spent on the way that the
test is designed. So everything is very very carefully thought

(01:29:53):
through for various reasons. So yeah, I was talking about
how in Iolts they very carefully plan and prepare the test.
Everything is very carefully thought through for various reasons. There's
that phrase again. If you learn nothing from this nothing
else from this episode, you will at least learn the
phrase to think something through carefully. Are you the sort

(01:30:15):
of person who thinks things through very carefully before they
do them or are you the kind of impulsive person
who just does stuff without really thinking it through. Oh
I'm sorry, I didn't think it through. Let's have one more.
This is from eight episode eight one seven Parsons Pleasure
the short story as though in deep thought, HM you

(01:30:36):
know what he said, looking back at the commode, I've
wanted a set of legs something like that for a
long time. I guess that's because of the word thought
and so thought and through are quite similar. So because
this search engine searches by relevance, I guess that it's
kind of conflated the two words thought and through together.
So let's move on to another one. Then there's a

(01:30:57):
conversation with my dad from eight eight about the UK's
general election and Euro twenty twenty four, twenty twenty something.
We're talked about football as well, get through to the
knockout stages and there it is if we perform like so,
I was talking about England football, saying we might get
through to the knockout stages to get through to the

(01:31:19):
next round, meaning to qualify in a job interview process, right,
so you have the first round, you're interviewed and if
you're successful you will get through to the next round.
Same in football. If you win your game, you get
through to the next round, you get through to the
final like that. So you know we'll probably get through

(01:31:40):
to the knockout stages, but I don't really fancy our
chances of getting through to the final, even though before
the competition people were saying lots of very complementary positive
things about England. Okay, there you go. So anyway, that's
Luke Glish, which I have to say could be a
really useful thing. It's just luke Glish dot com. Check

(01:32:01):
it out, have fun, play around, search, use it. There's
some homework for you. Use that to search for samples
of English. You don't have to just look for big
words like nouns. Look for parts of speech like through
or into, over, things like that, and search for fixed phrases,

(01:32:22):
you know, find the word and work out what other
words it's used in connection with. Is it part of
a fixed phrase with a noun, is it a phrase
or verb. It's quite a good way to discover and
explore vocal. Okay, so thank you so much for that, listener,
Tish eight eight four eight for doing that. That's wonderful.

(01:32:43):
Thank you so much. Let me just drink a little
bit more coffee here and then we're going to do
some jokes. We're going to enter I don't know what
to call this section now, we'll see. I know, I'll
calling it Luke's Comedy Corner. Okay, let's enter comedy Corner,

(01:33:07):
where I'm going to tell you one, two, three, four
or five six jokes. Okay, I have to give a
shout out to Kermode and Mayo's Laughter Lift on their
podcast which is called Kermode and Mayo's Take. They do
film reviews, but they also have this mini section called
the Laughter Lift, which is like going into a lift

(01:33:28):
and there are jokes. Yeah, and I took a lot
of these jokes from them. I think their jokes admittedly
have been sent into them by their listeners, and they
are the sorts of jokes which don't really have authors.
They're just the sort of authorless jokes that get shared
around on the internet and stuff. And so anyway, I've
just got these six jokes. I'm going to tell you
the jokes. See if you can get the jokes, and

(01:33:50):
then I will go back and I will dissect them
and you will hopefully learn one or two things from them. Okay,
there's music. I'm going to play a little bit about
music to set the tone here in the comedy Corner.
Here we go, all right, as we play this background music.
Some people hate background music in my podcast, so it

(01:34:13):
happens rarely these days. There used to be a time
when I would put background music behind everything. And I
got some comments from people saying I don't like the
background music, or I got one saying I was listening
to this podcast and it was interesting, but then I
heard some horrendous background music. Huh. It was really that.

Speaker 2 (01:34:32):
Kind of thing.

Speaker 4 (01:34:33):
So I'm a bit cautious about playing too much background
music on the podcast. Recently, I did the what was it?
Asmr Zen School of English, which was a bit of
a laugh. Most of the comments were good. One person said,
is there a version of this without the background music?
And I thought, that's just another way of telling me

(01:34:54):
that you really don't like the music, which is fine.
That's fine, that's fine, I don't mind. Maybe I should
maybe I should upload a version of that without any
of the music. Anyway, welcome to the comedy corner. Here,
we're going to share a few jokes. Let's get started.
So did I tell you about my wife? I was
having a chat with her the other day. We were

(01:35:17):
having a deep and meaningful conversation. I told her I
gave her some wisdom. I told her that she should
embrace her mistakes. Right. I told my wife she should
embrace her mistakes. She gave me a hug. Welcome to
the comedy corner everyone. Okay, let's keep the humor rolling.
Moving on to the next joke. News in from Sweden, News,

(01:35:40):
just in from Sweden. Yes, Sweden. The chief executive of Ikea. Yes,
the CEO CEO of IKEA has become the Swedish Prime minister.
Did you know this? It's not actually true. The chief
executive of IKEA has become the Swedish prime minister. He
is currently a semi bling his cabinet. Welcome to the

(01:36:03):
comedy corner everyone, Let's move on to the next joke. Now,
obviously you're an English learner, so you know that the
work that the phraser I apologize and I'm sorry mean
the same thing, Right, I apologize and I'm sorry. They
mean the same thing. Don't they accept when you're at
a funeral?

Speaker 1 (01:36:22):
Mmm?

Speaker 4 (01:36:24):
Moving on? So, my English teacher, did I tell you
about my English teacher? I wanted to marry my English
teacher when she got out of prison. Did you get
that I wanted to marry my English teacher when she
got out of prison? But apparently you can't end a
sentence with a proposition. Oh, welcome to the comedy corner.

(01:36:48):
Moving on back to my wife. So we've you know,
we've been talking a lot, and she she thinks I
need to keep fit. She thinks I need to do
more exercise. She's very keen for me to to stay fit,
stay in good shape. And she suggested that I do
some lunges, you know, to work my hamstrings and my glutes.

(01:37:08):
She thought you should do some lunges, Luke, and I agree.
That would certainly be a big step forward for me,
wouldn't it. Who I'm to the music, Yes, doing some
lunges would certainly be a big step forward. Okay, it's
just one more, It's just one more, Okay. So yeah,
did I tell you about the police detective who knocked

(01:37:30):
on my door?

Speaker 1 (01:37:32):
Mm?

Speaker 2 (01:37:32):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:37:33):
And the other day a police detective knocked on my door, knock, knock, knock. Hello.
It was a police detective and he said, hello, mister Thompson,
I'm looking for a man with one eye. I'm looking
for a man with one eye. And I said, well,
if you used both eyes, you might find him a
bit quicker. This has been a comedy corner. Thank you

(01:37:53):
so much for listening. All right, so let me dissect
the frog Now I told my wife she should embrace
her mistakes. She gave me a hug. Right, So this
is really a joke on the word embrace. So you
can embrace something meaning you totally accept it completely, Like

(01:38:15):
for example, you know when you're learning English, you need
to embrace your mistakes. You need to accept them, pull
them close to yourself, become friends with them. Even learn
to love your mistakes because you realize your mistakes are
opportunities to learn. So you need to embrace failure. See
it as an opportunity. Right, embrace your mistakes to embrace something. Also,

(01:38:36):
to embrace a person means to hug them, like when
you love someone, you hug, give them a hug. So
I told my wife she should embrace her mistakes. She
gave me a hug. Well, yeah, because apparently I'm a mistake.
That getting married to me was a mistake. So I'm
her mistake, so she's embracing her mistake by giving me

(01:38:57):
a hug. I mean, these these are good jokes. You
have to take it from me. If you didn't get it,
then you missed something. They're definitely jokes. Next, the chief
executive of IKEA has become the Swedish Prime minister and
he is currently assembling his cabinet. This is a good joke, right,
It works on two levels, so he is assembling his cabinet.

(01:39:21):
In terms of politics, when a prime minister assembles their cabinet,
it means they choose, they select their ministers, their government
ministers who are going to be responsible for the different
government ministries. This is the group of high level government
ministers who work closely with the prime minister. That group
of people is called the cabinet, right. But also in

(01:39:45):
if you ever go to Ikea, you might buy a cabinet.
A cabinet can be a little wooden cupboard and as
we know, when you go to Ikea, you buy the furniture,
but it's not being constructed already. You have to take
it home and you have to build it yourself. You
have to ass it. You would have to assemble your cabinet.
So assembling a cabinet could mean two things. Could be

(01:40:06):
when a prime minister chooses ministers for their government, or
it could be when you literally build a wooden cabinet
from Ikea. The chief executive of Ikea has become the
Swedish PM and he's currently assembling his cabinet. That's a
good joke. If you disagree, you're just wrong. Next is

(01:40:26):
I apologize and I'm sorry mean the same thing, except
when you're at a funeral. This is true. Oh, if
you spill a drink, oh, I do apologize. I'm sorry.
If you spill a drink on someone, they both work.
But if you're at a funeral, this is because I'm
so sorry. Also, is a statement of sympathy, even if

(01:40:49):
you didn't do anything. For example, if someone lost their
you know, someone's, someone's dog died. Oh, I'm so sorry
to hear about your dog. I'm so sorry. Is there
anything I can do. I'm very sorry for your loss. Obviously,
it doesn't mean that you're the one who did it,
right in this case, it just means I'm sympathetic. I'm

(01:41:10):
so sorry to hear about what happened to your dog. Right,
So in that case, it's different. So that's why i'm
sorry and I apologize most of the time mean the
same thing, meaning it was my fault, and I would
like to apologize, accept at a funeral when they don't
mean the same thing. And if you at a funeral,

(01:41:32):
if you say, oh, I do apologize. That means it's
your fault that the person died because of you. What
do you mean you apologize, Oh, well you didn't know. No,
oh it was me who was driving the car at
the time. What you know? Quite dark? Next, the English teacher.
This is a good joke. This is a really good joke,
although the setup of the joke is a bit convoluted.

(01:41:55):
I wanted to marry my English teacher when she got
out of prison. But apparently you can't end the sentence
with a proposition, okay, to end a sentence with a proposition.
So on one hand, this is to end a sentence
like an English sentence with a preposition. Actually on into
at and so on. The old rule is that you

(01:42:18):
mustn't end a sentence with a preposition, right, so what
are you looking at? Would be wrong? It should be
at what are you looking? They said, was the more
grammatically accurate sentence. I mean, it's not true. I have
to say it's a myth, that whole thing. But anyway,
it's a common sort of grammatical rule that people think

(01:42:40):
of when they think about English teachers. You can't end
a sentence with a preposition. But also it could be
end a sentence. End a prison sentence. The prison sentence
is a period of time that someone has to spend
in prison because of a punishment. That's a sentence, a
prison sentence. You can't end a prison sentence with a proposition.

(01:43:00):
Proposition is when someone proposes to someone asks them to
marry them. Quite difficult to explain that one. You can't
end a sentence with a preposition. You can't end a
prison sentence with a proposition. I wanted to marry my
English teacher when she got out of prison, but apparently
you can't end a sentence with a proposition. Oh, dear, lunges.

(01:43:21):
So a lunge is in maybe in when you're doing
exercise like pilates or maybe yoga or something. It's where
you step forward and lean forward and stretch your legs
and stretch all the muscles and things down the back
of your legs by leaning forward and stretching out your

(01:43:42):
leg behind you. This is a lunge, right. These are lunges.
So my wife is very keen for me to keep
fit and has suggested that I do some lunges to
work the hamstrings. These are the tendons down the back
of your leg and the glutes. These are your muscles
in your bum to work the hamstrings and the glutes.

(01:44:05):
That would certainly be a big step forward. So a
big step forward has got two meanings. Literally, it means
stepping forward. Doing a lunge is a big step forward.
But also in a more idiomatic sense, it means making
progress doing exercises. Doing lunges would be a big step forward.

(01:44:31):
And then the detective who knocked on my door, he said, hello,
mister Thompson, I'm looking for a man with one eye.
I said, well, if you use both eyes you might
find him a bit quicker. So that's got two meanings.
I'm looking for a man with one eye means he
is looking for a man, and the man he's looking

(01:44:52):
for has one eye, a man with one eye. This
is an example of when English can be ambiguit. It
can mean two things at the same time. Because of
an ambiguity, I'm looking for a man with one eye,
I'm looking for a man who has one eye, a
man with one eye, or I'm looking with one eye
for a man. I'm looking for a man with one eye,

(01:45:15):
meaning he's got the police detective has got one eye
closed and he's only using one eye to look for
the man. I'm looking for a man with one eye,
but I just can't find this man. Like Well, if
you use both eyes, that would help. I'm looking for
a man with one eye. Well, if you use both eyes,
you might find him a big I like that joke

(01:45:37):
a lot. Anyway, there you go. That was the comedy corner.
Thank you very much. Tune in next time for more
stupid jokes. Now, actually, I wanted to say if any
premium listeners hello, Hello, Hello, Hello, premium listeners, Hello, hi there.
This is just a quick message for premium listeners and
normal listeners. I will let you listen to this too.

(01:45:58):
You don't have to pay to listen to this message.
But this is just a desperate attempt to get the
message out to all my premium listeners. It's quite difficult
to get through to the premium listeners because if I
send an email, a lot of people just don't open
the email, because this is just the way email is
these days. Right you mean, you know you get so
many emails that we just don't open them all. We

(01:46:19):
don't really read them. If I talk to you in
the premium podcast. This is part of the problem, right,
The problem is a lot of I've noticed that a
lot of premium subscribers are not listening to the episodes.
What's going on there? A lot of premium subscribers are
not listening to all the premium episodes. The number of

(01:46:40):
subscribers I has, I has what I think I need
to listen to? Clearly I need to listen to LP
Premium too, A lot of the subscribers that I have. Sorry,
so I have this many subscribers, but the number of people,
the number of people listening, what's wrong with my mouth?
I don't know the number of people listening? About half?

(01:47:01):
So about fifty percent of my premium subscribers apparently are
not listening to the premium episodes. Is that you are?
You subscribed to LP Premium, but you don't listen to
the episodes? What is going on? Why is that? This
is a call to all premium lobsters. What's going on? Now?
Here are the possibilities? I think option number one? Now

(01:47:23):
you let me know. If you're a premium subscriber, you
let me know what's going on. Option number one is
this you don't know how to listen to them. You've
got a premium subscription, but you just don't know how
to listen. How that's possible, I don't know, considering the
amount of time I spend going on about it. All
you need to do is log into your account teach
a Luke dot co dot uk slash account okay, and

(01:47:47):
just take it from there. Add the show to a
podcast app on your phone. It's easy. When you've logged in,
look on the left side of the screen. There's a
big logo. Under the logo, there's a plus click that
follow the steps. You will need a podcast app on
your phone so that maybe that you don't know how
to listen to them right, or maybe you don't get

(01:48:08):
email notifications of new episodes and so you don't know
that they exist. You don't know that they've been published.
These days, when I publish new premium episodes, I send
out an email with it saying hi everyone, new premium
episode is here. Here are the links for the PDF
and video versions. You can listen to it now in
your supercast account or in your favorite podcast app of choice.

(01:48:28):
But a new episode is now available, Yeah, hey, I
think you need to be You need to have email
notifications switched on to get those emails. You can manage
your notifications in your account teacher Luke dot co dot uk,
slash premium or slash account either they go to the
same place. Or maybe you haven't added the show to
a podcast app on your phone. What I mean, what

(01:48:51):
are you doing? Just do that? Do that? Don't you know?
Whatever it else? Whatever it else know whatever else you
were considering doing after listening to this, like eating, going
to the toilet. Don't do those things. Just sign in
to teacher look dot co dot uk, slash premium and
then add LP Premium to a podcast app on your phone.

(01:49:12):
You will need a podcast app on your phone first,
so if you don't have one, just get pocket Casts.
Search your app store on your phone for pocket Cast.
It's free. Get it and then you'll be able to
listen to LP Premium with that really good idea. So
maybe that's what's happened. Or maybe you've added LP Premium
to a podcast app on your phone, but you don't

(01:49:33):
have push notifications turned on for LPP in your podcast app,
in which case, go into your podcast app switch on
push notifications for l EPP. Or maybe you just want
to support the show with your subscription and you're not
interested in the premium episodes. Maybe that's the case and

(01:49:54):
you're just like, nah, a new episode is available. I
know it's there, but I'm choosing not to listen. But
I'm still happy to be a premium subscriber, which is great.
You know that is great. Thank you for your support.
Or maybe you just don't have time to listen to
all of the stuff, which raises the question should I
publish less premium content? And at this stage I am
sort of part of the way through P. Sixty nine,

(01:50:17):
which is a seven at least a seven part series
looking at English that came up in the episode story
The Man who Could Work Miracles, and I'm doing a
really in depth deep dive into the vocab that came
up in that story, going through the story again explaining

(01:50:38):
and highlighting bits of vocab, giving more examples, more relevant examples,
then in the episode giving you a memory test, quickly
testing your memory, see if you can, seeing if you
can remember the words and phrases I taught, and then
giving you discussion questions to help practice using the vocab.
That's the process in NEP Premium P. Sixty nine, Parts

(01:51:00):
one to about one to four, maybe one to five
of that series are available for you right now. So
if you're a premium subscriber, that is there, all that
stuff is there for you, so go ahead and listen
to it. If you don't listen, please let me know
why what's going on? Which of those reasons is it?
Is it because you don't know how to do it,
You don't know they exist, you don't know how to
sign in, you don't know how to add them to

(01:51:22):
an app on your phone. You just don't want to
listen to the episodes because you don't have time, or
you don't listen to the episodes because you don't like them.
Why Why would that be the case? I don't know,
for whatever reason, Just let me know, please, Okay, Teacher
Luke dot co dot uk slash premium. That's how you
get into your account. You can contact me in any

(01:51:43):
way you want with your feedback on my website Teacher
Luke dot co dot uk, by email Luke Teacher at
hotmail dot com, or in the comments section of this
wherever you are listening to it. You can add lap
premium to Spotify these days. Just wanted to add that right.
Let me just give some more get to the end
of this. Some more responses to recent episodes. So where

(01:52:06):
I am now recording this I've last Monday, I uploaded
the asmr Z School of English. Before that, it was
the Man who Could Work Miracles. Before that, we had
Walk and Talk London and the episode the audio episodes
called our favorite things to do in London and also

(01:52:27):
the Life of Brian the film club episode about my
Life of Brian. So the one about Life of Brian,
I consider it to be a bit of a flop. Actually,
a flop means like a film. Let's say a film
that gets released and it kind of fails, not enough
people see it, and it's considered to be a bit

(01:52:47):
of a failure. That would be a flop. I'm trying
to think of good examples of flops. I can't think
of a good example of a flop these days, but
maybe one of those recent Marvel movies, these like The
Eternals Marvels. The Eternals a complete flop. It was bloody
awful and I think it did very badly at the

(01:53:08):
box office. It's considered to be a flop. But yeah,
the Life of Bryant film Club Life of Brian episode
as a conversation with Anthony Rattuno about this very very popular,
much loved British comedy feature film by Monty Python's Flying Circus,
all about the life of this guy called Brian, who

(01:53:28):
lives a sort of parallel life to the life of Jesus.
It flopped on YouTube, I think on the podcast. On
the audio podcast, it did okay. It got a similar
number of listens to most episodes. Episodes on the audio
podcast are generally a bit more consistent, but on YouTube

(01:53:49):
it kind of goes up and down. It's a bit
of a mysterious dark art understanding how to make sure
every video you publish on YouTube gets a similar number
of views. Some of them get loads of views, like millions,
and some of them barely get more than about twenty thousand.

(01:54:09):
Life of Brian The Life of Brian one. I understand
it's quite a specialist sort of maybe special appeal, a
certain specific appeal. It's not the sort of thing that
would appeal to everyone. But I know that I've got
lots of listeners who love Monty Python and love that
kind of thing. But anyway, I consider it to be

(01:54:30):
a flop on YouTube. And that's if you consider twenty
thousand views to be a flop. That's not bad. It's
nothing to be sniffed at. But still, in my opinion,
that's a flop, which is a pity. But I suppose
it just didn't quite catch the algorithm on YouTube, probably
because not enough people clicked it. The title wasn't appealing enough,

(01:54:54):
you know, going back to that thing about titles, maybe
if I chosen a different title, it would have made
a big difference if I'd said, you know, this film
shocked the world some something hyperbolic like that. Instead it
was film Club Monty Python's Life of Brian with Anthony Ratuno,
you know, not exactly clickbait, but still I got some

(01:55:18):
nice comments on that video, for example, one from agnescag
nine to five eighty one, who said it's not easy
to follow the message always look on the bright side
of life, by the way, that's the message at the
end of the film. The end of the film, the
lead character Brian is killed and he's being executed, but

(01:55:40):
he's surrounded by other people and one of them ends
up singing a song. It's a famous, famous song, always
look on the bride side of life, right that song.
I think it's a really famous bit of British culture
that so many people know that song, and it's all

(01:56:01):
basically about the fact that, yeah, ultimately we all die
at the end of our lives. It would be, you know,
be strange if we died at another part of our life. Normally,
you die at the end of your life, don't you.
That's normally the way it happens. But anyway, we all
die blah blah blah, and this, you know, it's it's
kind of shit and there's nothing we can do about it.
And so ultimately you just kind of have to try

(01:56:24):
and stay positive and try and enjoy the time you've
got and always look on the bright side of life.
Stay positive, don't forget to love your life as well
as live your life. You know so Agni Eskag. It's
not always easy to follow the message always look on
the bright side of life. However, Luke's English podcast brings

(01:56:46):
a dose of optimism, positive vibes and simply good old
human kindness into my life. A wonderful, engaging conversation with
Anthony Rattuno. It could have gone on and on and on.
Thank you, Thank you Gag for writing that. I really
appreciate that kind of feedback and I'm very much, very

(01:57:06):
happy that you enjoyed the conversation. I put a lot
of time into that episode with clips and pictures and
all the rest of it audio and video in ju Juan,
in ju Ju, I don't know how to pronounce your name.
This is a long running trope on this podcast of

(01:57:27):
me not knowing how to pronounce people's names, especially their
user names. Anyway, Blessed are the podcast doers. What are
the Romans ever done for us?

Speaker 2 (01:57:36):
Well?

Speaker 4 (01:57:36):
There was sanitation? Except for sanitation? What are the Romans
ever done for well? Well, the roads, of course, all right,
except for sanitation and the roads. What are the Romans
ever done for us? Well, that's the aqueduct, right, Well, obviously, yeah,
obviously the aqueduct. But apart from the aqueduct, the roads
and the sanitation, what are the bloody Romans ever done

(01:57:57):
for us? Well, there's always the why. Well, of course
there's a wine, right except for the wine the aqueduct,
that you get the idea. That's a scene from the film.
Blessed are the podcast doers? What have the Romans ever
done for us? Brilliant show, and your podcast really does
justice to the legendary film. Loved it. Thank you, Thank

(01:58:18):
you very much. I'm very glad that those people who
watched the episode, listen to the episode enjoyed it. And
you know, your feedback does mean a lot to me,
It really does. So if you have similar things to
say when you listen to my episodes, do right. It's
not too difficult to find and find a way to
leave your comments wherever you're listening, So do you know,

(01:58:38):
do write that? And do that now? Okay, everyone write
a comments under this episode. Please do. It really helps.
It helps me because I get the sense that I'm
connecting with human beings. There are actual people, real lebsters
out there really listening to these episodes, So leave your comments.
It makes a big difference to podcasters live me. The

(01:59:01):
walk and Talk London video was a big hit that
seemed to have caught people's attention. Also the audio episodes too,
so a reminder on YouTube, I published a walk and
Talk in London, but on the audio podcast, you've got
two episodes where I spoke to my friends and family

(01:59:22):
about things they like to do and they gave some
tips and things. So that's two audio episodes and one
video and they were really popular, which is good. I'll
do more walking and talking when I can. It's quite
rare that I get to be in London on my
own like that. I'd like to do another one in London.
I love walking around the streets of London in various places,

(01:59:45):
so I'd love to do another walk and talk in
London when I get the chance. But like I said,
it's rare that I'm there on my own, you know.
But I'll try and do that as soon as I can.
And next time i'm doing that in London, I'll try
and maybe do some more research so that I can
give you more facts, you know. If I can plan
out my route in advance and actually prepare a list

(02:00:06):
of information that I can tell you about for each location,
that would be good. But having said that, it does
seem that just rambling, just talking about whatever you know,
I think of without really thinking it through too much
in advance. That's also great, apparently, which is nice. The
next one of those might be in Paris. Of course
I have done ones in Paris in the past, but

(02:00:28):
obviously because I live here, it's going to be easier.
Have you seen the ones I've done in Paris? Have
you seen them? I did two outside and one inside
in the medieval Museum. But hey, video viewers, did you
listen to the audio episodes of the London That London series.
There were lots of recordings of my friends and family,

(02:00:48):
So this is episodes nine, three, nine and nine forty
recordings of my friends and family, plus some extra rambling
and vocabulary explanations with top tips for visiting London, including
stories like the time a red London bus jumped over
the gap on Tower Bridge. That's that bridge that separates

(02:01:10):
to allow ships through. One day in the nineteen sixties,
the bridge was rising and a bus went through the
barrier and had to jump across the gap and actually
made it. So that story is in there. You find
out from my daughter how to get the best sausage
role in London, why you should definitely what you should

(02:01:31):
definitely visit or pop into Intrafalgar Square, some historic old pubs,
plus my mum, my dad, my brother, my daughter and
loads of other people talking in those episodes, so check
them out. Seven thirty nine and seven forty. Last week,
as I'm recording this now, it was the asmrs N

(02:01:51):
School of English for you. The last episode is the
Sherlock Holmes Adventure of Silver Blaze, which I at the
time of recording this, I haven't published that yet, so
I've got no idea what people will think of it.
I hope that it'll be popular generally people like the
Sherlock Home stories, and that one's been updated into modern English.
So I'm very curious to see what people are going

(02:02:12):
to think about that when I publish it on Monday.
But anyway, for me now, the last episode was the
asmr Zen School of English, which for me was really
a kind of a chance to do two things. One
thing was I genuinely wanted to create something peaceful and
calming to help keep you serene and peaceful and all

(02:02:35):
those other things, right, So that was one of the
things I wanted to do. But also I wanted to
just have a bit of fun and do some stupid jokes.
And I quite like the idea of getting you into
a kind of meditative, relaxed state where you're listening, maybe
lying down in a dark room, and you're paying complete

(02:02:57):
attention to everything I'm saying. You've got your eyes close,
you got the headphones on, and you're listening to every
single word. And then I tell you some really stupid
jokes and make you laugh. If I've got your complete
undivided attention. The chances are I'm really going to be
able to make you laugh a lot more. And I
was happy to see that some people did write that
they were like, I was trying to relax with this,

(02:03:20):
but I couldn't stop laughing, Or how am I supposed
to fall asleep when I can't stop laughing? This was
brilliant good that was the idea. But this episode also
flopped on YouTube. But I want to just say hi
to those people who listened and enjoyed it and got
the jokes. I think some people listened to it and
didn't realize that there were that I was making fun

(02:03:42):
of things. I think some people just took it on
face value and didn't really realize that it was all
a bit of a joke. But it was meant to
work on several levels. On It was meant to be
genuinely relaxing but also a bit of a comedy show
as well. So props to those people who got all
of the stupid joke. If you liked it, you could
listen to episode three hundred and fourteen of the podcast,

(02:04:06):
which was a similar thing that I did a few
years ago called Luke's Guided Sleep Meditation for more of
the same kind of thing, And I genuinely challenged you
to listen to episode three to one four without falling asleep,
because there are lots of let's say, hypnotic techniques that
I used in that episode to make sure that everyone

(02:04:27):
would fall asleep while listening. And of course there are
quite a lot of stupid jokes and things in that too,
but yeah, that's perfect for those of you who like
to use my episodes to fall asleep, right, And so
at the end here I'd like to just tell you
about my recent trip to the UK with my son. Now,
I would just tell you what happened right about the

(02:04:49):
journey with him, my little boy, I would just tell
you about it, but I thought that it would be
fun and maybe more interesting to rewrite this as a
Hollywood action movie, because that's what it felt like to me.
So here it is now. First of all the basic events. So,
just last week I went to visit my parents. My

(02:05:11):
daughter and my wife were off in the French countryside
doing something else, so my son and me, the two
of us, we went to England to visit my parents
and stayed with them for about a week, and that
involved two train journeys. Two train journeys. One is about
two and a half hours long, the other one is
about an hour and a half long. Not too bad,
but still. Now you know when you're on a train

(02:05:36):
and somewhere on that train there is a small child
screaming and having a meltdown, and you kind of roll
your eyes and you get annoyed with the noise, and
you silently judge the parent for whatever reason, and you
think to yourself, why can't parents just do X, Y

(02:05:57):
and z, Why can't parents handle all their kids? Why
can't parents do this? Why can't parents just stay at
home with the kids, or why can't parents just never
have children in the first place? You know that, well,
on this trip, I was that parents. That was me
with the crying child. I was the one dealing with
the crying child. So the basic events, I'll give you

(02:06:18):
the basic events, the boring version, and then I'll give
you the Hollywood dramatic mission impossible version. So I went
with my small son to visit my parents in England.
My wife and daughter were away in the French countryside.
We traveled on the Eurostar from Paris to London. Then
we had to eat a little bit of lunch in

(02:06:38):
the station. Then we took a taxi to Marleybone station
and we took another train to the Midlands where my
parents live. I was worried that my son would be
restless and would run around, be unruly and would have
a melt down. To have a meltdown means to get
very upset, to lose your to get extremely emotional, probably angry.

(02:07:01):
So when like a tantrum, and when a child has
a tantrum a tantrum, A meltdown actually is more something
you would say for let's say a tennis player, you know,
who has an emotional argument with the referee and throws
their racket on the floor. That's a meltdown. Or maybe
a director of a Hollywood movie and the director is

(02:07:21):
under a lot of pressure and they have a meltdown
and shout at all of the actors and the staff
on the movie set. Normally, for children we say that
they have a tantrum. That's when they roll on the
floor kicking their legs and screaming and crying. But for
some reason, my wife and I always talk, we always
say this is a meltdown. So I was worried that

(02:07:42):
that would happen. I hoped he would sleep on the Eurostart.
So we left early in the morning. We got a train.
It was delayed. We had to wait an extra hour.
That was difficult, but the train was about nine thirty
ten o'clock in the morning right. So on the Eurostar
we sat next to a girl who thankfully didn't complain.

(02:08:04):
I sat down next to her, and my first thing
when I arrived with this child, I said to her,
we're probably not going to sit here very much and
she said, oh, no, no problem like that, and that
was nice. Makes a big difference. But my son couldn't
sit still at all, and so I couldn't just keep
him on my lap, Absolutely impossible. It was like trying

(02:08:26):
to keep a wild animal on your lap. So I
had to just follow him around the train as he ran.
He just ran down the train, from one car to
the next car to the next car, running between, running
down the aisle. That's the aisl e. The aisle is
the middle walkway of the train with seats on both sides.

(02:08:50):
And as he ran down, often running past the same
people again and again, with me following after him. Different
passengers had different reactsctions. Some of them obviously thought he
was cute. Others just stared at him and stared at
me as if they disapproved like that, and I just
stared back at them. And I had to divide the

(02:09:13):
journey into ten minutes sections because he can't really do
one thing for more than about ten minutes, So it's
like ten minutes running down the train, ten minutes fooling
around on the floor of the restaurant car, ten minutes
spent changing his nappy in the toilet, ten minutes looking
out the window, naming things we could see, ten minutes
watching some cartoons on my phone. Ten minutes sections. He

(02:09:34):
didn't sleep at all on the Eurostar. Then we arrived
in London, and I had to be strategic because I
had to make sure that he didn't sleep until we
got onto the next train, because I needed him to
sleep on the next train. I knew he would fall
asleep at some point, but I needed him to stay
awake until we got onto the next train, so that

(02:09:54):
we could spend that train journey with him asleep, and
then I could actually live in peace, because it's much
more difficult to have him loose on the train. On
the Eurostar, there are spaces between the carriages where you
can sort of hang around. But on the other train
there are no spaces like that. There's just people everywhere
and it's really really impossible, and plus it's dirty on

(02:10:16):
the floor, oh dear, So I needed him to stay
awake until we got into that next train we arrived
in London. I was carrying our large bag with all
our stuff in it on my back, my backpack as
well my son and the pram. Yeah, he had a
big melt down on the Eurostart about twenty minutes before

(02:10:36):
we arrived in London. He was tired and hungry. And
in these situations he scratches and bites me and writhes
around in my arms like an alligator or a fish. Yeah,
he scratches and bites, scratches. I've actually got a scratch
on my face and this is from his nail, so
I have to keep sort of like what's the word

(02:10:58):
for it, filing his nail to make sure they're not sharp.
So he scratches and bites, and he cries and he screams,
and he writhes around in my arms like an alligator.
Most of the time he is adorable, like the sweetest, cutest,
loveliest little boy. But when he's very tired or hungry,
he becomes sort of a monster and he bites my
shoulder and scratches me. Yeah, twenty eight years old. He is, yeah,

(02:11:23):
twenty eight years old. He's not really, that's just a joke.
I have to say every single time. But seriously, no,
he's not twenty eight. He's like nearly two years old.
He'll be two next week. But seriously, I hope he
grows out of this phase because when he's twenty eight,
when he is twenty eight, it will be very tricky

(02:11:43):
if he's still biting me, throwing you know, bits of
banana at me and stuff. So I had to show
him a cartoon while sitting on the floor of the Eurostar,
and that kept him entertained, stopped his melt down. I
managed to wrestle him into the pushchair, clipped him in,

(02:12:04):
you know, hold him down and clip him in, and
then we headed quickly to a cafe in the station
to get lunch. I knew he needed lunch. Walking along
the platform, he fell asleep. His head was lolling around
like this, and I was trying to stop him sleeping.
I was like, don't fall asleep now, no, no, don't
fall asleep. I was had to gently wake him up

(02:12:26):
to stop him sleeping. Whatever you did, don't fall asleep, because,
as I said, I needed him to sleep on the
next train. We got to the table in the cafe
and he had another meltdown in his pram while we
were waiting for the food. I had to order the
food quickly. I said, look, can you I know exactly
what I want. You know this before I'd even sat down.
I know exactly what I want. I want a croc monsieur,

(02:12:46):
which is a toasted cheese sandwich. It was like a
French cafe in London. Croc monsieur, Please and some water,
thanks very much. We're in a bit of a hurry,
and I was like, please come quickly. As he had
a meltdown the food awry, I managed to cut it up.
I got him on my lap. I started as soon
as I presented him with a fork of toasted cheese

(02:13:07):
on toast, toasted cheese on toast, melted cheese on toast
with ham. His crying switched to giggling almost instantly. So
Ha he started giggling and laughing. He was so delighted
to get food. I fed him up filled him up
with food. I ate as well. Oh, it was just wonderful.
There was a moment where the guy next to me

(02:13:29):
at the next table, when my son was crying, I
looked over at him and I was like, oh, sorry.
The guy just stared at me, stared at my son,
stared at me like that, and I was great, thanks
for being understanding. I apologized, but he just looked at us.
Food arrived, We ate, he giggled. He did also try

(02:13:49):
to slide everything off the table at one point, and
I had to use my cat like Spider Man reflexes
to catch the glass, the salt, the pepper and stop
it leaving the table. This is what it's like to
have a small child. We took a taxi to the
next station. Taking a black taxi in London is my
guilty pleasure. I absolutely love it. I love black taxis
in London. They've got so much space in the back,

(02:14:10):
the seats, the doors open the other way. There are
massive seats, the seats fold down. Just amazing. He fell
asleep instantly in the back of the taxi, which was
perfect because when I got onto the train he was asleep.
I let him sit in the pram in the pushchair sleeping.
He slept for about forty five minutes on the train,

(02:14:31):
just absolute bliss. Then he did wake up with about
thirty minutes to go, and he continued to run around,
play on the floor, wrestle with me, kick his shoes off,
attempt to press every single button he could find, including
the power plug and even the emergency door opening thing,
which he kept trying to play with. And I was like, no,

(02:14:55):
I entertained him as best as I could. I am
now covered in scratches and bite marks, but still adore
this boy. He is so cute and amazing most of
the time, but he is like a gremlin from the
movie Gremlins. Certain conditions turn him into a sort of
homicidal maniac. Thank goodness he's small. If he was any bigger,
it would be a serious problem. Finally we arrived at

(02:15:17):
the station in the town where my parents live. We
spent a wonderful week in the fresh air. That was lovely.
He is obsessed with birds or cat cac as he
calls them. So he'll see a bird out of the window,
he'll go, oh, a cat cac. But he's obsessed with
birds and the bird songs, the bells from the nearby
church which ring every fifteen minutes. They play different melodies.

(02:15:38):
He's obsessed with all of that. He was like really
wide awake, noticing everything, having a great time. It was
a very healthy thing. Now we are obviously back in Paris,
but it was lovely to be in England. I felt
very at home. I love just walking through the park.
It was lovely and it was very important for me
to take him there and have that good time in

(02:16:00):
England being immersed in English. I'm sure it's very good
for his English as well. And then of course we
had to come back to Paris and do it all again.
So those are the basic events. But now here's a dramatic,
over the top Hollywood action movie screenplay based on my
UK trip. You can think it's like Taken meets planes,

(02:16:20):
trains and automobiles with a dash of die Hard. All right,
and the film is called Eurostar. The run so fade
in external Paris garden or at dawn the low hum
of city traffic. Boob glow. Right, it's just Paris. Luke

(02:16:40):
forty seven, I'm actually forty eight, but thanks forty seven. Rugged,
charming but slightly disheveled. Okay, rugged if you describe a man,
this is very flattery, of course, but it's you know,
just painting me as a typical action movie hero. If
someone is rugged, it means that they're sort of handsome
with strong features. I think the chat GPT is being

(02:17:05):
very flattering to me. Rugged could also describe a landscape.
A rugged landscape would be one with like large rocks,
cliffs and large rocks and things, a bold rugged landscape
like in a cowboy film or something. But a person
who's rugged, a man who looks rugged, it's kind of

(02:17:27):
looks rough but tough, strong features. Yes, that's me, Luke
forty seven, Rugged, charming, but slightly disheveled. If someone is disheveled,
I used that word earlier when I talked about how
I looked after coming back from band practice. If you're disheveled,
it means you look a little bit untidy, a bit messy, right,

(02:17:48):
But it's kind of a positive word if you're using
it to describe a man like, you know, Indiana Jones
is kind of rugged and disheveled after he's had a
fight with someone. You know. Luke strides into frame, so
I walk with big, powerful steps with a determined look

(02:18:10):
on his face. Slung over one shoulder is a massive
bag on his other arm. A pram. Inside the pram
sits Joe. My son's name is not Joe, but I've
decided to call him Joe in this screenplay. Inside the
pram sits Joe, almost two years old. A cherubic dynamo

(02:18:30):
of unpredictable energy. A cherub is like a little a
baby angel, right you see them in sort of? Is
it Renaissance paintings and things? A cherub like a little
baby angel. Cherubic is the adjective. A dynamo is like

(02:18:51):
a thing spinning full of energy. A cherubic dynamo of
unpredictable energy. Luke voiceover, My wife and daughter were on
off in the French countryside. It was just me and
my son, a simple trip to England to see my parents.
What could possibly go wrong? Cuts to internal Eurostar terminal

(02:19:12):
security checkpoint. Luke's eyes dart like a secret agent scanning
for threats. So my eyes dart, meaning they move around
quickly like a secret agent. Joe wriggles, So he moves
like he's trying to escape from his chair. He wriggles,
trying to break free. Security guard, motioning to the conveyor belt, Sir,

(02:19:34):
the pram. So the security guard says, I have to
put the PRAM on the conveyor belt. Luke looking grim,
meaning serious and um, the kind of serious and negative.
Oh no shit, I've got to put the PRAM on
the curnveyor belt. And you know what that means. I

(02:19:56):
need to remove Joe from the pram. So, Luke says,
I know. He collapses the pram one handed. While holding Joe,
expertly managing the chaos, passengers stare. Joe kicks off his shoe.
It skids across the floor like a dropped handgun. You

(02:20:16):
know in every action movie there's a moment where a
gun falls on the floor and skids away. It's like that,
but with my son's shoe. Very dramatic. Internal Eurostar train moving.
Luke and Joe settle into their seats next to a
young woman wearing AirPods. Luke, h, he'll be a sleep

(02:20:39):
in a few minutes, hopefully. So I'm going to be
Sean Connery in this In this film, I'll be Sean Connery.
Either I'll be Sean Connery or I'll be Liam Neeson. Oh,
I think for a change. I'll be a Sean Connery.
Don't worry. He'll be asleep in a few minutes, hopefully.
And the young woman says, oh, no worries. Luke breathes

(02:21:01):
a sigh of relief. Luke, it was going to be fine.
He'd sleep. I'd even read a book. Yeah right. Imagine
cut to ten minutes later, Joe bolts. If someone bolts,
it means they run away quickly. Similarly, we say to
make a bolt, like to make a bolt for the

(02:21:21):
door means to quickly run to the door, right, which
is like that joke. I bought a dog from a locksmith.
When I got him home, immediately made he immediately made
a bolt for the door. Do you get that I
bought a dog from a locksmith. When I got him home,

(02:21:42):
he immediately made a bolt for the door. So that
means either he immediately tried to escape by making a
bolt for the door, running towards the door, or because
this dog was from I bought this dog from a locksmith,
and locksmith's is their job to make locks and bolts
on doors. Because the other meaning of a bolt is
a metal bar that goes across the door. I'm sure

(02:22:04):
I explained that in p. Sixty nine, Part four as well. Anyway,
the dog made a bolt for the door because it
was a locksmith's dog bonus joke for you there. Anyway,
Joe bolts, Luke sprints after him, runs fast down the
narrow train aisle. The camera follows hand held shaking as
if it's the Bourne Identity older passenger with a disapproving glare.

(02:22:29):
Control your child, Luke, fighting for breath, I'm trying. They
burst into the restaurant car, where Joe immediately drops to
the floor, giggling and rolling under tables like a tiny
secret agent evading laser beams. To be fair, they don't
actually have tables in the Eurostar restaurant car. It's just

(02:22:51):
a sort of open area, so it's not as bad
as it seems. It's the sort of place where you
can kind of sit on the floor anyway. Internal Eurostar
top toilet. Later a claustrophobic close up of Luke changing
a nappy with military precision. This is actually true. I
did have to change his nappy twice, once on the

(02:23:11):
Eurostar and secondly on the other train where there was
there were no baby changing facilities at all, and my
son dropped a poo in his nappy. That was like, shit,
he's done a shit in his nappy. What am I
going to do? There's no baby changing on this train,
so I had to just take him into the toilet,

(02:23:34):
stand him on the toilet, the closed toilet. I was like,
do not touch anything, okay, you cooperate. You just stand
there for two minutes and whip down his trousers, carefully
removed his nappy with military precision, like I was like
diffusing a bomb. Carefully, remove the flaps of the nappy

(02:23:59):
lower than nappy. Carefully. I've already prepared my wet wipes
on my arm, you know, and I'm holding him up
making sure he doesn't fall off the seat, and then
like remove the nappy, make sure the poo is in
the nappy, close the nappy, quick wipes in the bump.
Pam pam, pam, pam. In the bin, open the bin

(02:24:19):
with my knee, slide the dirty nappy in new nappy,
open it out with one hand, whack in place, pam, pam.
The tabs are on, the child is safe, the nappy's
clear shorts go back on. Back in business. Luke voiceover

(02:24:41):
every ten minutes, something new a meltdown, a giggle. A
chase scene. Internal cut train area twenty minutes from London.
Joe is red faced and screaming Luke, this is a
long shot, but it might just work. Luke sits on
the floor, arms around Joe, showing him a cartoon of
Pettitosa brand, which is a famous French cartoon about a

(02:25:05):
little bear. Sweat drips down Luke's temple like an episode
of Mission Impossible. Other passengers watch like it's a gladiator fight. Luke,
just keep your eyes on the bear. Internal London station cafe.
Luke battered and bloodied, scratch marks, bite marks on his

(02:25:27):
arms like from a zombie encounter. Sits at a cafe table.
Joe is in mid tantrum. Neighboring customer silent, judging Luke
with an awkward grin, sorry about the noise. The neighboring
customer gives a blank stare. He has no idea what
Luke has been going through. Eventually, a waiter arrives with

(02:25:48):
a croc monsieur that cheese sandwich thing. Joe stops wailing instantly,
ping his eyes light up a soft giggle. Luke's exhales.
Adorable scenes as Luke and Joe share food together. It
would be a nice montage. External London taxi moving. Luke
watches Joe finally doze off, meaning fall asleep in the

(02:26:11):
back seat. A moment of peace. London flashes by outside
the window, like a dreamy montage of red buses and
black taxis. Luke voiceover, I always loved London, but this
was the start. This was just the start of our journey.
Internal Midlands train moving. Joe is asleep on Luke's chest.

(02:26:34):
Actually he was in the pram, but anyway. Luke leans back,
closing his eyes for forty five minutes, pure bliss. The
soundtrack music swells with peaceful violins. Then Joe wakes up. Dun, Dun, dun.
Suddenly it's wwe the wrestling. Joe launches himself of Luke's lap.

(02:26:55):
Your lap is the your legs, where you were like
a cat would sit, or where your son would sit.
He launches himself onto the floor, giggling. Luke struggles to
catch him. Luke through gritted teeth, it's okay, you're okay,
I'm okay, We're okay. To an elderly couple sitting on
the seats, we're okay, You're okay, everyone's okay. External Small

(02:27:18):
Midland Station day. Luke steps off the train like an
action hero after the big finale, battered for victorious. Joe
eyes wide, listens to birds and the distant bells of
a church. Luke in voiceover, we'd made it fresh air
Family English Belsh burge. This is how Sean Connery used

(02:27:39):
to speak. It was everything we needed. Cut to a
montage of me and my son in England, Joe chasing
butterflies in his grandparents guard and laughing at the church bells.
Luke with a pint of beer, smiling with his mum
and dad. Joe pointing at robins, repeating cat caak. External

(02:28:00):
Midlands train station. One week later, Luke, now a battle
hardened veteran, hoists the big bag over his shoulder. Joe
in the pram looks up at him innocently. Luke smiles,
so ready for the sequel, Joe lets out a mischievous giggle.

(02:28:21):
Mischievous mischief. Mischief is like doing naughty things, doing bad things.
Mischievous is the adjective. Cut to black text on the screen.
On the screen coming soon, Eurostar The Run to Paris
or Bust don't don't do don't There you go. That's

(02:28:41):
the end of that. That was a bit silly.

Speaker 2 (02:28:43):
Uh.

Speaker 4 (02:28:45):
It's quite fun to use chat GPT to do that
sort of thing.

Speaker 2 (02:28:48):
You know.

Speaker 4 (02:28:49):
It's quite a fun way of If you just tell
it about an experience you had and ask it to
write a I don't know, like a action movie screenplay
or experience soliloquy or something to describe it. It can
do that, and that's quite a good fun thing to do.
That's the end of this episode. Listeners, thank you very

(02:29:10):
much for listening all the way through to the end.
It's been about two and a half hours of podcasting fun.
And I think I'm going to go with that title,
which was this is something, this is something? This Shall
I have it as this is something? Or just this

(02:29:30):
is something? I think? I don't know. I'll work it out,
but you can let me know. I had questions earlier.
What do you think about the titles of episodes? Do
you think it makes any difference to you? And just
have yourself a lovely morning, afternoon, evening, or night, and
just think after two and a half hours of listening
to me waffling along, remember right though, Remember I'm a

(02:29:54):
man with a plan. This is something I know what
I'm doing. I've been doing. I've been in this game
fifteen years plus. And you're not just listening to Luke's
English Podcast. You're getting English natural English injected directly into
your brain here. So now, after two and a half hours,

(02:30:14):
just think how many English words, phrases and so on
have found their way deep inside your very being. Yes,
those words will stick with you. They will be with
you forever. Some of the things that you've heard here
you will never forget until the end of your days. Right,
think about those poor fools maybe around you right now,

(02:30:38):
who are not who haven't listened to this. Those poor idiots,
you can just look at them and sympathize, feel pity,
pity for the fools who don't listen. So this award
nominated podcast for learners of English, Luke's English Podcast, well done.
You chose wisely. Thank you for listening. Leave your comments

(02:31:01):
in the comments section. Don't forget to sign up to
LP Premium Teacher Luke dot co dot uk slash Premium
and I will speak to you next time. But for now,
it's just time to say good bye bye, bor, bor Bor.
Thanks for listening. To Luke's English Podcast. For more information,

(02:31:23):
visit teacher Luke dot com dot UK. If you enjoyed
this episode of Luke's English podcast, consider signing up for
Luke's English Podcast Premium. You'll get regular Premium episodes with stories, vocabulary,

(02:31:48):
grammar and pronunciation teaching from me, and the usual moments
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