Learn the English Phrases WINDOW OF OPPORTUNITY and NEXT DOOR

In this English lesson I wanted to help you

learn the English phrase, window of opportunity.

A window of opportunity is a period of time.

It's an amount of time.

Here's an example,

I make these videos late in the day,

but the days are getting really short right now

because it is winter.

So when I get home from work,

there's a small window of opportunity

where I can make this English lesson before it gets dark.

There's only a certain amount of time

where I can make this video.

Another example would be this.

Maybe your uncle works somewhere

and you are looking for a job.

And he knows that there is a job available at his company.

He could say, Hey, they're going to advertise

that there's a job.

But there's a window of opportunity right now

where you could apply for the job before they advertise.

Before everyone else knows there's a job there.

So a window of opportunity is just a period of time.

The second phrase I wanted to help you learn today

is the phrase, next door.

I thought, since we talked about windows,

we should talk about doors

or at least a phrase with the word door in it.

When you say that someone lives next door,

it means that they are your neighbor.

They basically live in the house right beside you.

In fact, if you call someone your next door neighbor,

they are the person that lives immediately beside you.

Because you can have a neighbor

that lives one or two doors down from you,

but your next door neighbor

is the person who lives right beside you.

You can also use this phrase to refer to a building

that's right beside another building

or a store that's right beside another store.

When we're shopping, if I was in a store and Jen says,

"I'm just gonna go to the store next door,

I'll be there when you're done shopping here."

So you can refer to stores and buildings as well

as being next door.

So it simply means the next building beside you

or the next house beside you.

So to review a window of opportunity is a period of time.

The window of opportunity for me to make a video

is slowly coming to an end out here.

You can see I'm in the shadows.

It's a little sunny over there,

but it's gonna be dark in about an hour.

And when you say that somebody lives next door,

it means that they live right beside you

or that they are your next door neighbor,

which means they live right beside you as well.

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

This comment is from ILSUR and the comment is this,

"By the way, Katy Perry has a song wide awake.

And my response are yes.

Sometimes when this song comes on the radio,

we sing along, I'm wide awake."

I was gonna try and sing it there,

but I'm not a good singer.

Thank you ILSUR for that comment.

This was from the previous lesson

where I talked about the phrase wide awake,

which means to be completely and totally awake.

And yes, Katy Perry has a song and the chorus or the reframe

in the song is she sings, I'm wide awake.

When this song comes on the radio though,

the kids and I sometimes make up new phrases,

we sing things like I baked a cake,

instead of saying I'm wide awake

or the leaves fell down we need to rake

instead of I'm wide awake.

I know it sounds silly.

We're a bit of a silly family.

So sometimes when the Katy Perry song comes on the radio,

we make up new lyrics for it.

But I do wanna talk a little bit about singing out loud

because for you as an English learner,

I think it's a very important thing to do.

It's hard to do when there's other people around.

But I think when you're learning a language like English,

there's so many different cool things you can do

to practice

and one of those is that you can memorize the lyrics

to a song and then play the song and sing it out loud.

Maybe you're out for a walk, maybe you're running.

It's a little awkward to do it when you're on the bus

or on the subway

'cause other people might look at you funny,

but you should do it even if you can't sing very well.

I listened to a lot of French music to practice my French.

And when I'm out walking, listening to French music,

you better believe I'm singing along.

Anyways, see you in a couple of days

with another short English lesson.