Learn the English Sayings TOO MANY COOKS SPOIL THE BROTH and MANY HANDS MAKE LIGHT WORK

In this English lesson,

I wanted to help you learn the English phrase

too many cooks spoil the broth.

Now, a cook is someone who cooks food in a kitchen

and broth is like a very thin soup

with not a lot of stuff in it.

And basically, what the phrase means

is if too many people try to make broth at the same time,

the broth might not turn out the way

you were expecting it to.

It might not go very well.

And we use this phrase to describe any job

where too many people are working on the same task.

You could say this at work.

You could say ah, too many cooks spoil the broth

when we all work together on the same job.

And I picked this phrase because it kinda makes me laugh

because there's another phrase I'm going

to teach you in a minute that means the exact opposite.

I might have mentioned this before

but certainly, when you say too many cooks spoil the broth,

it means that if too many people work

on a certain job, that job might not turn out

the way you were expecting it to.

You might end up doing a bad job.

And this brings me to the second phrase.

Many hands make light work.

So too many cooks spoil the broth means

if too many people work on something,

the job might go badly,

but if you say many hands make light work,

it means that if a lot of people work on the same job,

the job might be easier to do

and might turn out better.

So in English, we have two little phrases

that mean the exact opposite.

For me and Jen,

there are many jobs on the farm

where when we work on it together

and even when some of the kids help,

I would say many hands make light work.

You all have jobs like this in your life.

Around the house, in the yard,

maybe even at work where if a lot of people work on it,

if two or three people do the job

instead of one person,

you could say many hands make light work.

So just to review.

Two completely opposite meanings today.

Too many cooks spoil the broth means

that if too many people work on the same job,

it might not go very well.

And many hands make light work means

if a lot of people work on the same job,

it might go really, really well.

Let's look at a comment

from a previous video.

This comment is from Fahmida Jahan

and Fahmida says:

My husband and I do work together

to make short work of certain things.

Sometimes our kid also participates.

Thank you, Teacher Bob.

And my response to Fahmida was that's great.

There's nothing like working together

to get something done quickly.

I like working with Jen or the kids

on the big jobs that I don't like.

So I find on the farm,

and even when we are trying to clean our house,

the jobs that I don't like doing

are the jobs that I like to do with other people.

On the farm, there are some jobs

that just aren't fun.

One of those jobs is unloading hay from the wagons

so that we can put the hay in our barn.

It's a job you do in the middle

of the summer when it's really hot.

It's not fun because you get all kinds of dust on you

while you're doing it.

So that would be a job

where I would say many hands make light work.

So anyways, thank you so much for the comment.

That is awesome.

It's so cool when people can work together

to get a job done that they need to get done.

Hey, I'm standing out here kind

of in a dark area of the farm

because it's really windy today.

We've been getting just strange weather lately.

It rained again last night.

I hope now that it stops raining.

I know a few weeks ago,

I was saying oh, we need rain, it's really dry here

but now we've gotten rain three or four times

in the last three or four days.

It would be really nice if the rain stopped.

I have a little bit of planting to do for fall.

I would really like to get that done.

So it's windy today, it rained again through the night.

Yeah, we're just really hoping

that things turn out and go well.

I wish sometimes that we had a little more control

over the weather but you know,

that's kinda how life goes, isn't it?

There's certain things you have control over

and there's certain things that you don't

and you just have to be at peace with whatever happens.