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  • (upbeat music)

  • - Hello, lovely students.

  • And welcome back to English with Lucy.

  • Now if you are a member of my email list,

  • if you signed up to receive my PDFs and my newsletters,

  • then you will know that we have been doing a big focus

  • on idioms recently.

  • Lots of you seem really keen to expand your vocabulary.

  • And an amazing way to do that is to learn idioms.

  • Idioms are so hard because they don't have literal meanings.

  • You can't read the words and understand what they're about.

  • So idioms are really hard to learn,

  • but they are much, much easier to learn and process,

  • and retain if you learn them in context.

  • So this is how today's lesson is going to work.

  • I am going to read you a story that I wrote,

  • and it contains 20 idioms.

  • For the first part of the lesson, I will read the story.

  • You can practise your listening skills,

  • maybe improve your pronunciation,

  • but I want you to listen and see if you can identify

  • all 20 idioms.

  • Hold your hands like this each time you hear one,

  • stick your finger up.

  • Okay, see if you can get all 20.

  • After that, we will go through the story phrase by phrase,

  • and I will help you understand each and every idiom.

  • As always, there is a free PDF and quiz

  • that goes with this lesson.

  • If you'd like to download that,

  • just click on the link in the description box,

  • you enter your name and your email address.

  • You sign up to my mailing list,

  • and the PDF will automatically arrive in your email inbox.

  • After that, you automatically receive all of my lesson PDFs,

  • and all of my news, course information and offers.

  • It's a free service and you can unsubscribe at any time.

  • There is also one other thing that I wanted to discuss.

  • Before we start this lesson,

  • I am running an idioms challenge.

  • It's a 30 day challenge.

  • Every single day,

  • you get a text containing between six and 10 idioms.

  • You get a daily video from me.

  • I read through the text so you can improve your listening,

  • and pronunciation skills,

  • and I talk about the meanings of all of the idioms.

  • After you've read through the text,

  • you've watched the video, you can take the exercises.

  • We have 20 daily exercises.

  • And as you go through the challenge,

  • I start to test you on what you've learned in previous days.

  • This challenge starts on the 1st of February,

  • so make sure you sign up.

  • Before then, this is a 30 day challenge.

  • It has 30 videos, lessons and sets of exercises,

  • but you have lifetime access so you can take it at any time.

  • For the pricing and enrollment,

  • just click on the link in the description box.

  • And just ran a communications challenge

  • and these students loved it, it was amazing.

  • We had such a great time, right?

  • Let's get started with this idioms lesson.

  • As I said, there are 20 idioms in this story.

  • With your hands, see if you can identify them all.

  • Obviously, I don't expect you to have 20 fingers.

  • You might have to do two lots.

  • I want you to use this as a listening exercise as well

  • to see how much you pick up

  • because we're going to go through phrase by phrase.

  • If you do need the extra help, you can turn on subtitles.

  • I woke up in the morning feeling a little under the weather.

  • I took a deep breath and tried to pull myself together.

  • You've got to bite the bullet and attend the interview,

  • I said to myself.

  • I went downstairs to have some breakfast.

  • My mum asked me if I was hungry.

  • I told her that I could eat a horse.

  • She made me a big plate of eggs and I wolfed it down.

  • I started to feel really nervous about the interview.

  • Candidates like me are a dime a dozen.

  • To add insult to injury, I'd been unemployed for six months.

  • Why would anyone hire me?

  • Perhaps I'm barking up the wrong tree.

  • Or perhaps I should throw caution to the wind and just go.

  • The ball is in my court.

  • I have to do this.

  • On the way to the interview,

  • my bus got stuck in a traffic jam.

  • I was really down on my luck.

  • To make matters worse, I spilled some coffee on my shirt.

  • I arrived 10 minutes late,

  • but the boss said, "Better late than never".

  • She said that she would give me the benefit of the doubt

  • which I really appreciated.

  • She was really on the ball and asked me lots of relevant,

  • about my past experience.

  • I managed to give her some good answers.

  • So far so good, I thought to myself.

  • By the end of the interview, I felt a lot better.

  • She said to me that her decision was a piece of cake.

  • She wanted to offer me the position.

  • I was over the moon.

  • Finally, I had my dream job.

  • I told her that I would give her my all.

  • I was on cloud nine for the rest of the day.

  • Oh, lovely, positive story.

  • Parts of that are actually true.

  • I did once spill coffee

  • all over my shirt before a job interview,

  • but I still got the job, yes.

  • I have been rejected from quite a few jobs

  • in my time as well.

  • I really wanted to work at the makeup counter

  • in my local department store

  • when I was younger and I applied three times,

  • and got rejected every single time.

  • So in the first part of the story,

  • I said, I woke up in the morning feeling

  • a little under the weather.

  • And to feel under the weather

  • or to be under the weather is our first idiom.

  • This means to feel ill or unwell.

  • It doesn't mean seriously ill.

  • It just means I don't feel as good as I normally do.

  • An example, I didn't go into school

  • because I was feeling a bit under the weather.

  • I hope to feel better tomorrow.

  • Not that serious, just not feeling that great.

  • Okay, next I said,

  • I took a deep breath and tried to pull myself together.

  • And to pull one self together is our next idiom,

  • idiom number two.

  • To pull oneself together

  • is to recover control of one's emotions.

  • Sometimes if I'm feeling a bit weak or pathetic,

  • I don't want to do something, I tell myself,

  • pull yourself together, Lucy,

  • worse things could happen.

  • An example, calm down and pull yourself together.

  • Screaming isn't going to help.

  • In the next sentence, I was speaking to myself.

  • I said, you've got to bite the bullet,

  • and attend the interview.

  • And to bite the bullet is our third idiom.

  • It means to decide to do something unpleasant

  • that you have been avoiding.

  • Something unpleasant or difficult as well.

  • A big example of this is with me and running.

  • I love running, but I like running in nice weather.

  • And when it's really, really cold,

  • I try to make myself go out on a run, but I don't want to.

  • It's cold, it's unpleasant, it's more difficult.

  • I try to make myself bite the bullet,

  • stop avoiding it and just do it.

  • An example, I've been avoiding organising my finances,

  • but I need to bite the bullet and open that spreadsheet.

  • When you hear the phrase bite the bullet,

  • think of Nike, okay, just do it.

  • Just do it, stop avoiding it, just do it.

  • That's our Nike idiom.

  • The next sentence.

  • I went downstairs to have some breakfast.

  • My mum asked me if I was hungry and I said

  • that I could eat a horse.

  • I could eat a horse is our next idiom,

  • and it means I could eat a lot or I am so hungry.

  • An example, after running the marathon,

  • I could have eaten a horse.

  • I was so hungry.

  • The next sentence in the story

  • is she made me a big plate of eggs and I wolfed it down.

  • I wolfed it down.

  • To Wolf something down is actually a phrasal verb,

  • but it's also slang.