Learn the English Phrases "to better yourself" and "better off"

In this English

lesson I wanted to help you learn the English phrase “to better yourself”.

When you better yourself, it means you do something that makes you a better person.

Sorry, I'm defining the phrase by using a word in the phrase.

That's not a good way to do it.

Let's say you don't have a very good job.

You might decide to go to school at night

to better yourself so that you can get a better job.

You might go to school so that you know more

so that you have a better chance of getting a better job.

I'm using the word better a lot aren’t I... to describe this.

Let me think of another example.

You're actually doing this right now.

You've decided to better yourself by learning the English language.

Learning a language is not an easy thing to do,

but as you become more and more fluent, you have better job opportunities.

You might be able to visit another country and speak the English language.

You're definitely doing something that will better yourself.

The other phrase I wanted to teach you today is the phrase “better off”.

So this is when you're just...

I keep using the word better, but let's say you were dating someone

and that person wasn't a very nice person.

And eventually you broke up.

A friend of yours might say, Hey, you're better off without that person.

It simply means that your life is going to be happier.

Your life is going to be a lot more fun if you aren't dating that person.

I'm better off when I don't eat a lot of food on the weekend.

I find that as the weekend goes by, I eat a lot of cake and I...

I go to places where there's lots of food,

but I'm better off not eating a lot of food.

I'm better off just standing and saying, You know what?

I'm just going to have a small stack to...

snack today,

not a big one, because I'm better off not eating a whole bunch of food.

So to review “to better yourself” simply means to do something

so that you are more educated or you know more or you're kinder.

You do something to make yourself a better person.

And when you're better off, it simply means that the situation you are in

is more pleasing than the situation you were in.

It's hard to define this without using the word better.

I should probably do a whole English lesson on that word.

But hey, let's look at a comment from a previous video.

This comment is from fellow teacher Konstantin.

Nice spacey classroom you have.

Not all of ours are so vast and echoey.

Pretty handy, by the way,

as you don't have to repeat some words and phrases to your students.

Echo does it for you.

Cheers, teacher.

And my response?

Yeah, it is quite echoey.

It's much better when the students are there.

30 students with their backpacks helps deaden the echo quite a bit.

So thanks Konstantin, for that comment.

We have a variety of classrooms I just happened to have,

I think one of the nicer classrooms, the building I'm in

or the part of the building I'm in doesn’t look great from the outside...

kind of looks like a barn, actually from the outside.

It doesn't look like a school,

but the classrooms are actually the biggest classrooms in the school.

So I'm kind of lucky because I get one of the bigger

classrooms and yeah, and there's no one above me.

It's a single floor.

So I don't hear like students above me.

In the other part of the school, there's two stories

and then if you have a class above you, sometimes it's really, really loud.

Well, hey, we're uh...

we're not winding down the flower farm.

We're not wrapping things up for the season yet, but we're getting close.

All of these Lizzies (lisianthus) need to be harvested over the next two weeks.

We don't have any frost in the forecast, so that's good.

Frost is when it goes below zero just a little bit overnight.

So we're crossing our fingers.

We have three more weeks of market.

So hopefully the weather stays nice.

Hopefully we get everything harvested.

I don't know if you can see I'll spin you around, but close to me

we have the Lizzies (lisianthus) and in the distance we have the dahlias.

I don't really have time to walk over there in this lesson,

but yes, it will be a bit of work, but I think we'll get it all done.

Thanks for watching.

See you in a couple of days with another short English lesson. Bye.