Today I wanted to make a video

To help my students learn a fun way of learning English and of course that is through music so

Today we're going to be studying a song by Kelly Clarkson

and it's called my life would suck without you and this is just a

super-fun song

Every time I hear it

It just makes me want to get up and dance and go crazy and just enjoy myself

So when you listen to this song? It's not gonna feel like studying and of course

That's the key to learn any language is to make it fun. I

chose this song specifically because it has a lot of informal English and slang words, so

You might hear Kelly say some things in this song that someone told you not to say in English

Or someone might have told you that this is wrong well

It's not wrong. Kelly is not learning English she speaks English

She's a native English speaker, and this is just the way she talks

So you should at least be aware that English speakers do talk like this and I want you to be able to?

recognize it and

Understand it when you hear someone say something like this on top of that if you always use the language

That's in your textbook

they're gonna sound like a textbook so I encourage you to listen to this song and

Listen to the way that she talks

And if you try to learn from the way that she talks you're gonna sound more like a native English speaker

When you speak English.

now with that said this lesson is going to be geared a little or towards intermediate or

advanced English learners

Who can benefit from learning the slang and

informal ways of speaking in English

But if you're a beginner then still listen to the song because it's still super fun

And I still think it'll help you learn English, so let's jump into the song. Here's the first verse

So I told you that in this song kelly uses informal English and right from the very start

She's already breaking the rules

Her first sentence is guess this means you're sorry now

You might already know that in English you always need to include

the subject of the sentence so what she's trying to say here is I

guess this means you're sorry we're the subject of the sentence is I

But she doesn't say that here the subject is just understood to be her

So when she says guess this means you're sorry she's really saying I guess this means you're sorry

which means that she doesn't really know for sure and

Maybe no one actually told her this but somehow she just knows

Then in the next line were able to see how

Kelly is able to guess that this guy is sorry

so he's standing at her door which probably means that he left and then came back to her and

From that she's able to guess that he's sorry

Now we don't know for sure yet what he's sorry about but apparently

He's been a bad boy, and he has to come back and he has something to apologize for and we're gonna find that out next

Now I want to talk for a minute about the phrase take back

Because this is two words

But really it's one verb because when you use these two words together

They mean something very specific especially when you're talking about

Take back some words now when you buy something from the store, and you take it back

you're returning it because you changed your minds, and you don't want that thing anymore and

This is a very similar concept

Because the guy has said something to Kelly and then he changed his mind

And he's coming back to her and now he wants to take back the things that he said it's like he's saying

I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said those things. I take it back

Now I really quickly want to talk about why she used the word like at the beginning of this sentence

It's because she was talking about a list of things all the things that he said that he's taking back

Now she didn't tell us what those things are

But they might have been something like you're fat, or like you're stupid or

You might have said something like I hate you or anything else

We'll never know but these are a list of things that he said the one thing that we do know is that he said I

Want anyone but you so here

She's giving an example of one of the things that he said and this is

Really a very serious thing to say to your girlfriend if you say I want anyone but you

That's literally saying that I would be happy with any other person on the planet

But not you so you are the only person that I don't want that's kind of crappy

Now listen to how she pronounces the word wanted

Because she does not pronounce it the way that you might expect

The proper way to pronounce this word in English is

Wanted, but when we're speaking in actual conversations in real life

That's not the way we talk we tends to run our words together and speak fast and we get a little bit lazy

And if you're good you'll still be able to understand English speakers when we're talking like this

so she's dropping the tea out of that word and kind of weakening the D at the end so instead of

Wanted she says wanted just listen to the difference between those two a few times

wanted

wanted wanted

wanted

and this is a very common thing for English speakers to do such as words like painting or

mounted or

hunting

Like I'm going deer hunting this weekend

So pay careful attention to that when you listen to people if you don't

Understand one of the words that they're saying it might be because they're pronouncing it this way

Here is another example of Kelly's informal speech where she takes a sentence and drops the subject

Now what she's saying here is you said you'd never come back

But what she actually says is just said you'd never come back

And it's understood that the guy is the one who said this

because he's the one that she was just talking about so the subject of a sentence kind of carries over to this one and

Now we're going to go into the chorus, and this is honestly the most fun part of the song so here it is

The only thing I want to say about this line is that she does not use the full word

because she shortens it in two cuz and

honestly that is much more kind than using the whole word and

Honestly these two words mean the exact same thing the first one is just more formal the second one is less formal

Now here she's using the word got in the same

sense as the word have and

This is not a correct way of saying that but that's how she talks in everyone understands her

So when she's saying you got a piece of me what she's actually saying is you have a piece of me?

And I don't understand entirely what she's saying there

She's being a little bit poetic but apparently she's saying like

He is captivating her or just that she really cares about him in some way the other thing

I want to point out is her pronunciation of gut

Because she doesn't say you got a piece of me

She says you got a piece of me

And that's another example of how we run words together in English you will never experience an English speaker saying the words

Gut uh at least not a native speaker from the United States

That's just not something we say it's gotta all the time

So what she's actually doing there is taking that T. Sound that and

replacing it with a flap sound the

which you'll be familiar with if you speak Spanish or

Maybe some other language that has these flaps and one of the things you're gonna notice

If you really start paying attention to the pronunciation of English speakers is that T's are very fragile

So they don't survive very long when they're at the end of a word

So that's why Kelly doesn't pronounce this word the way that you might expect by saying gotta

but she sees that T at the end of the word and gets rid of it and replaces it with a flap and

Then matches the two words together into one word and says gotta and that's just what we do in English

So she starts this next line off by saying and

Honestly, and this phrase literally just means that she's being honest

She's not lying to us, but really this is just a filler word that doesn't mean a whole lot

It's pretty common to put this phrase before the beginning of a sentence and you can have it there or you can not have it

there

And it doesn't really change the meaning a whole lot

Now let's talk about the word

Suck a little bit you might be familiar with this word as in sucking from a straw or sucking on a lollipop

Or maybe some other stuff that we're not gonna talk about here

And that is one correct meaning of this word

But that is not the way that she's using this verb here

And this is just a slang way of saying something is really bad

so you can say

This movie sucks, and it basically means, I don't like this movie

Or you can say I suck at basketball and that just means that you are not a good basketball player

now you want to be careful with this word because it does have sexual connotations and

It is a little bit rude

No matter how you say it, so you want to be careful who you say this to um

My mom used to scold me whenever she would hear me say this word when I was a kid

So maybe don't say this in front of children don't say it in front of old people don't say it at church

Or at a job interview, but you can say it with your friends. That's usually okay, so what Kelly is saying here

Is that her life would not be good without this guy and she's saying it in a very informal

slangy way

And this is a way that someone would be likely to actually speak to their boyfriend in real life

Baby

And I want to talk about this phrase where she says pick a fight because really that's three words

But it kind of acts as one verb because you can say pick your nose or pick out a puppy or something and that

word pick really has a different meaning from

what we're talking about here and the

Phrase pick a fight means you're trying to start a fight

so maybe that means you throw the first punch, or you try to talk or

Behave in a way that makes the other person

Want to start the fight so if you know you want a fight?

then you can try to get them to start it and that way you're innocent because

You didn't throw the first punch, and that's what we're talking about when we say pick a fight now the word fights

also has more than one meaning and what she's talking about here is probably not a

Physical fight where you're punching and kicking and biting each other, but rather a verbal fight or an argument?

where you're yelling at each other and making threats and insults and these kind of things and

I want you to notice how she tries to rhyme the word goodbye

With fight and that's another example of a word that ends with a T that she does not

Pronounce it's like a silent T almost, so that's how she can get away with rhyming goodbyes and fight

She just kind of suddenly stops the vowel and that's how we know there was supposed to be a T there

We call that a glottal stop

So she says that she has a bunch of issues and the word issues has a few different meanings here

It just means that she has problems. We don't know what her problems are maybe she has anger problems or

Family problems or maybe she has problems with drugs or something we don't know it could be any of those those are all

issues that she has to deal with and then she goes on and says you're pretty messed up too and

A mess is just something that's really dirty, and it's not clean. It's not tidy its

Unorganized so when she says that you're pretty messed up, too. She's just saying that he also has issues

He also has problems that he has to figure out so really with these two sentences

She's just saying I have problems and you have problems, too

And I like how she says Butcher which almost sounds more like the English word butcher

But it has nothing to do with this sentence

What she did is took the English word, but which ends with a T?

And then the word your which begins with the Y and

In English when those two sounds come together a lot of times. They lose their original sounds and they turn into whatcha

like a CH sound

so instead of saying

But you're which would be a little bit difficult for an English speaker to pronounce if they're speaking quickly

She just says butcher and that's also a very common process that you are gonna hear a lot if you listen to a lot of

Native English speakers talk

And if you ever listen to an English speaker pronounced the phrase don't you there probably aren't gonna say 'doyng to you

They're probably gonna say dontcha and that is the same principle

So dysfunctional

I really shouldn't miss you, but I can't let you go

Now she uses the word

dysfunctional and

Normally that means something is not working properly

Like it's broken or for some reason

It's just not working, but we also use that word a lot having to do with relationships