- 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.

So we're including it here as an idiom.

To wolf something down is to eat something really quickly.

If you think how a wolf eats,

(chuckles) it goes down your throat really quickly.

To wolf something down.

Now, if I'm talking about eggs, plural,

why did I say I wolfed it down?

This is because we're referring to the plate of eggs.

Mind that one there

as I often hear students make mistakes with that.

An example, he wolfed down two plates of lasagna,

and still had room for dessert.

That is my husband.

He just loves lasagna.

Italians I hope you appreciate

the British pronunciation of lasagna.

(laughing)

I do apologise.

Okay, next sentence.

I started to feel really nervous about the interview.

Candidates like me are a dime a dozen.

A dime a dozen is our six idiom.

And it's funny because we don't have dimes

in the British monetary system.

That's an American coin, but we still don't use it.

And a dime a dozen means very, very common.

Candidates like me are a dime a dozen.

There are loads of candidates just like me.

I don't have anything special.

An example, I'm sorry,

but your stamp collection isn't worth anything.

Most of the stamps are a dime a dozen.

Most of them are really common.

All right, next sentence.

To add insult to injury.

I'd been unemployed for six months.

Why would anyone hire me?

So number seven is to add insult to injury,

to add insult to injury.

I have specific connected speech there.

To ends in the vowel sound, o.

And the next word starts with a vowel sound.

So we always put a little, wa sound between it.

To add to injury.

If you want to learn more about connected speech,

I've got a whole video about it.

I'll put that into the description box.

If you want to look deeply at it,

you can try my pronunciation course.

The link is also in the description box.

To add insult to injury means

to make something bad, even worse.

If you look at the phrase, insult to injury.

This means that you're already injured,

and now you've been insulted

to the bad situation has been made worse.

An example, he broke up with me,

and then to add insult to injury,

he started dating my sister.

Bad situation, made worse.

The next sentence is perhaps I'm barking up the wrong tree.

Perhaps I'm barking up the wrong tree.

This is a really common idiom here in the UK.

It means to be wrong about the reason for something

or the way to achieve something.

For example, I thought that the best way

to hire a video editor would be to put up posters

around my town but I was barking up the wrong tree.

What I should've done is posted on an online job board.

I was wrong about the way to achieve something.

Another example, she thinks that spending time apart

will solve her marriage problems,

but she's barking up the wrong tree.