Learn the English Phrases SOMETHING'S UP and UP TO - A Short English Lesson with Subtitles

In this English lesson,

I wanted to help you learn

the English phrase something's up.

If two or three police cars went by my place

with their lights on,

I would probably think something's up down the road.

It means that I think something's going on.

It means that I think something is happening.

It means that I think something's up.

You can also use this when you're talking about a person.

Maybe your sister has been behaving strangely lately

and you're talking to your brother.

You might say, "Hey, I think something's up with our sister.

I think something is happening in her life

that's making her behave just a little bit differently."

Sometimes I see students standing and talking to each other,

and I wonder if something's up.

I wonder if they're planning to do something bad.

Usually they're not, but sometimes you wonder.

The other phrase I wanted to teach you today

is the phrase up to.

This has a couple meanings.

The one I want to focus on mostly today

is when you think someone is doing something.

Usually we have the word no good with this as well.

We'll say we think someone is up to no good.

But you can use it just as up to as well.

You can say, "What are you up to tonight?"

and someone could say, "Oh, nothing.

Do you wanna go out and have a coffee?"

You can say, "I want to know..."

You could say, "What are you up to this weekend?"

and the person can say, "Oh, I'm really busy this weekend.

I have a lot going on."

So when you use up to,

it simply means what the person is doing

or what they have planned or what they're going to do.

So to review, when you use the phrase something's up,

basically, you're talking about the fact

that something is happening or something is going on,

and when you use the phrase up to,

you're talking about what someone is doing.

Like right now, what am I up to right now?

I'm making an English lesson.

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

That's usually what I'm up to after work.

What do I do after work? What am I up to?

I'm usually making an English lesson.

Today I could sit nicely at the picnic table.

Hey, this comment is from Ivan, and Ivan says,

"Dear Bob, would you consider

making a channel about flowers?

With kind regards."

And my response was, "Jen and I have talked about this,

but aren't sure if there is enough time

in our week to do this.

It certainly would be very nice."

So as many of you know, I live on a flower farm.

Jen grows flowers.

I help grow the flowers.

Jen does more of the work that I do,

but it is a beautiful place to live,

and especially in the summer, the colors are amazing.

It's just a really cool place to be,

and Jen and I have talked about

whether we should make another YouTube channel

where we make videos about the farm

and show everyone lots of flowers.

We might do that, but I doubt it.

It's a lot of work making videos.

Maybe we'll make one or two videos this summer

to kind of show what's happening on the farm,

but for now I would say, yeah, thanks for the comment, Ivan,

and thanks for the suggestion,

but I think for now, we probably won't be doing that.

But what I can do is I can take you for a walk,

because even though it's March right now

and it's fairly cold out here today,

it's about four degrees.

I'm back to wearing my winter coat, you'll probably notice,

but I can take you

for a little walk to show you what's outside of our garage.

So around this time of year,

(chuckles) Jen has all baby plants started.

So these are all different types of flowers

that we grow on our farm.

I don't know what half of them are.

Jen knows better than me what each type of flower is,

but we put them out during the day when it's warm

and we bring them in at night,

because it still goes down below zero degrees every night,

so it's very important that we don't leave them out.

It's not a good idea because,

yeah, if they freeze, they die.

I think you probably understood that part of it.

Anyways, we'll see.

Maybe a couple of videos about the farm in the summer

on another channel,

but probably not.

Bye, everybody.