Learn the English Phrases "to have a free hand" and "to have free rein"

3,139 views ・ 2023-06-02

Bob's Short English Lessons


Please double-click on the English subtitles below to play the video.

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- In this English lesson,
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I wanted to help you learn the English phrase,
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to have a free hand.
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Now, when you have a free hand,
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it means you have the freedom to do what you want
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in a certain situation.
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My job's really nice, because I have a boss,
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but when I'm in the classroom,
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I have a free hand to do pretty much anything I want to,
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within reason of course.
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So when you have a free hand, you can do what you want.
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When you're your own boss,
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you have a free hand to do whatever you want all the time.
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Jen is her own boss here on the flower farm,
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so she has a free hand,
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she can decide to do things or not do things
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or do things anyway she wants to.
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The second phrase I wanna teach you today
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is to have free rein,
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and this actually means the same thing
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as to have a free hand, but notice there's no a.
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So when you have free rein,
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you can do things any way you want,
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when you have a free hand,
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you can do things anyway you want.
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But the one phrase has this word in it, the letter A,
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a, and this phrase does not, so you have free rein.
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I love doing YouTube,
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because I have free rein to do whatever I want,
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I don't have a boss telling me what to do.
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And again, I do like my job,
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because I pretty much have free rein
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to do what I want creatively in the classroom.
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So to review, to have a free hand or to have free rein,
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they mean the same thing,
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it means to have freedom in any kind of situation.
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But hey, let's look at a comment from a previous video,
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this comment is from Qiu Park, and the comment is,
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"Jen is awesome, she did a great job,
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it's fascinating to be a flower grower, she grows beauty."
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And my response, "Jen always says she grows beautiful things
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and they make people happy.
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I make English lessons and they make people happy,
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it makes us happy when we help people be happy."
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So I guess Jen and I kind of are in the happiness business.
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Thanks Qiu Park for that comment, that was great.
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Yes, in the last video,
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I'm going to walk out here to the peonies again.
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I know it gets a little repetitive, but the cool thing is,
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is they are really close right now to blooming.
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In fact, some of them have been harvested already,
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so you'll be seeing some plants
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that don't have any flowers on them.
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And I know it might look like they're not blooming yet,
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but we do cut the peonies before they actually bloom.
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And there are mosquitoes out here,
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which reminds me of Mohd Ags made a comment
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in the last video about wanting to be a fly
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on the wall on the farm.
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See, this one is already gone, Jen has harvested it.
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We usually pick them
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when they feel a little bit like a marshmallow,
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so that one's almost ready to go.
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This one is not quite ready to go, but we pick them,
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yeah, at what we call the marshmallow stage.
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When they're at the marshmallow stage,
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when you squeeze them,
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they feel a little bit like a marshmallow.
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You know what a marshmallow is?
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It's one of those white things, they come in a bag,
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if you roast them over a fire,
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they end up tasting really, really yummy,
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you can make something out of them called s'mores,
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but we haven't done that yet this year,
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we'll do that in a few weeks.
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There's definitely something flying around here,
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but I don't think they are mosquitoes,
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they must be something else.
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So yeah, actually, let's go to the end,
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and then I'll flip you around and we'll walk back,
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so you can see me walking through the peony row.
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Let's do that, let me flip you around.
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There we go.
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So we'll just kinda fly through here.
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Hopefully, it doesn't shake or move around too much for you.
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I had to stop there for a sec,
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because I wasn't sure how much time I had left.
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But yeah, we certainly grow a lot of peonies
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and we will be harvesting a ton of them
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over the next few days.
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Anyways, let me check my time.
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I'm done, thanks for watching,
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I'll see you in a couple days with another one, bye.
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