Meaning of NOTHING BUT TROUBLE - A Really Short English Lesson with Subtitles

So in English when we say that something, or someone is "nothing but trouble" it means

that they're only trouble.

It's kind of a funny phrase that we use.

Let's think of an example, maybe your cousin has a friend and that friend is always getting

into trouble, maybe they are always breaking the law, maybe they are always stealing things.

You would say to your cousin, "Your friend is nothing but trouble!", and what you're

saying there is that your friend is trouble.

Your friend is a bad person and maybe you shouldn't be hanging around with them.

We can also use this to describe things.

You could say, "The car I bought has been nothing but trouble since the day I bought

it.", and what you would mean then is that it's always breaking down.

It's always broken and you're always needing to fix it.

We use the phrase "nothing but" in front of other things as well, not just the word trouble.

You could say, "I drove to work the other morning and there was lots of fog and I could

see nothing but fog on the way to work."

So that means you could only see fog.

So we do use the phrase "nothing but" in front of other things as well.

Maybe you were down by the river and you were throwing some fish food in the river and you

could see nothing but fish in the water in front of you because so many of them were

coming to eat the fish food.

So we do use the phrase "nothing but" in front of other things as well.