Improve Your Vocabulary With a Native Speaker

The way native speakers use idioms and expressions. 10 idioms in one conversation.

Conversation with my American accents coach analysis.

In this video I want to analyze my conversation with John, my American accent coach. It was

a very cool conversation, we discussed a lot of things regarding pronunciation. If you

haven’t watched it I’ll link it in the description and in the pop-up link up here.

And after watching this video it’ll be a lot easier for you to watch our full conversation.

This video is sponsored by the Woodpecker Learning App.

I decided to make this video because it was amazing to me how many expressions and interesting

idioms, words and phrasal verbs John used in a one-hour conversation and that’s pretty

much what every native speaker of any language does. But also because a lot of you guys asked

me about some of them and I noticed because John was speaking in his natural pace you

just missed a lot of words and phrases. So that’s why I’ll walk you through those

phrases, words etc. he used during our conversation and you’ll see how they are used in a natural

way and in context. Plus there were a lot of uncommon expressions. So let’s start.

“To touch on” means to briefly mention or talk about something.

And he also said “ I’ll try to keep it under an hour,” which means that he’s

going to try to explain something in less than an hour although he has so much to say

about the topic in question that if he didn’t limit himself it would take a lot longer.

And this what a person means by this phrase. This is why John said this, but it was jokingly

because, of course, he wouldn’t speak about this for hours.

Then he used the idiom “crack the whip” (example) which means to make someone work

harder or make them obey, by exercising your authority in a harsh way.

The next saying John used was “where there’s a will there’s a way.” I love this one.

It means that one will always find a way to do something or achieve something if one wants

it badly enough and is determined, no matter the obstacles.

“That’s how it snowballs”. “To snowball” means to grow and increase intensively. So

he meant that your knowledge will increase quicker if you learn from your mistakes.

So, here he said that if you want to become a native-like speaker of English it’s a

tall order. People call a “tall order” something that is

difficult to accomplish, do or get.

You name it. I talked about this one in my video about phrases you can use when you forget

a word or lose your train of thought. The link is up here and in the description. So,

we use “you name it” when we’re listing something and we don’t want name or don’t

remember every single thing on the list.

“Make use of” means to use something with a particular purpose, especially to get a

benefit from it.

“Trade-off” is a situation in which you need to find a compromise

between two things that you can’t have at the same time so you need to sacrifice one

thing to get the other or accept something bad in order to get something good.

Here we were talking about my situation - that I speak with my son in English even though

I live in Ukraine and very often people judge me or don’t understand me but I’ am willing

to deal with this in order to achieve my goal.

So, there’s an idiom “to open a can of worms” which refers to a situation that

creates a lot more problems once you start dealing with it, or as in our case a question

to which the answer is complicated and leads to more questions. If you imagine a can with

live worms that when you open it, the worms will start to slither out and it’ll be difficult

to gather all of them and put them back inside. John said “That’s opening a can there”

and it’s just a shortened version of this idiom.

Then I got some questions about this word that some people didn’t catch or didn’t

understand, which is “misnomer”. (Example) Misnomer is an inaccurate term or a name that

is incorrectly applied. And John meant that using contractions and connected speech is

not the same as speaking fast and calling this fast speech is

a misconception.

“Get a kick out of something or someone” is an idiom. If you get a kick out of something

you enjoy it very much, it amuses you or you get a feeling of delight from it.

So, it was amusing and entertaining for those people to make John read and say things that

were not in his native language. But not because he was bad, on the contrary he was good at

Polish phonetics, but because he had no idea what he was saying.

Then I’ll take

this sentence. A

lot of people didn’t catch what John said here.

He said “Don’t just blow through it at breakneck speed.”

If you say that something happens at breakneck speed you mean that it happens very fast.

Here, we have the phrase “to put someone on the spot” which means to put someone

in a difficult situation forcing them to answer a hard question and potentially cause them

embarrassment or force them to make an important decision.

And then he said “ We can go into a tangential discussion in so many areas…”

“Tangential” means deviating from the course, to answer erratically.

So, he meant that while he’s answering this question he might start talking about and

touch on a lot of different things because he has so many thoughts on this question.

“The nature of the beast” is a trait, basic part, quality or character of something

or someone you’re talking about especially a negative or difficult one and it cannot

be avoided.

“To fine-tune” means to make some small, subtle changes in something to make it better.

We were talking about language learners who have very good pronunciation and John referred

to them as high-end speakers. He meant that they might’ve made some small changes to

their speech to sound practically perfect. But that’s not necessary of course.

“So that people don’t shy away from talking to you” meaning so that people don’t try

to avoid talking to you. “Shy away from something” means to try to avoid something

because you don’t like it or you’re afraid of it.

Thank you guys for watching this video. I really hope it was useful for you. Love you

guys and I’ll see you in the next video. Take care.