How to use GET and HAVE: Describe your vacation in advanced English

Hi.

I'm Vanessa from SpeakEnglishWithVanessa.com.

Are you ready to talk about vacation?

Let's do it.

Today, I'm in beautiful sunny Costa Rica.

Usually, I don't film these videos outside, so I'm sorry if there's some wind.

You're going to hear some birds, some trees rustling.

It's all part of nature, right?

Hopefully, it will help you to relax and enjoy today's lesson.

We're going to be talking about how to describe your vacation in English.

Usually vacations have positive parts, and sometimes a negative parts as well, so I hope

that the expressions we talk about today will help you to naturally describe it.

And also I'm going to show you a little bit around the farm, so you'll get some real practice

with these expressions.

The two expressions that we're going to talk about today are "to get to do something" and

"to have to do something".

Today you're going to get to guess some of the wonderful vegetation that's around me

on this farm.

I'm going to take you on a little tour throughout this lesson, and I want you to guess what

the different plants are.

Let's talk about that first expression: to get to do something.

This expression has a sense of honor, of privilege, kind of a sense of, wow, I get to be in this

beautiful nature.

Wow, I'm so privileged.

I feel honored to be here.

You could just use the simple past or the simple present.

I am in beautiful nature.

But if we want to give a sense of honor, of privilege, wow, I'm so lucky to be here.

We can use get to, I get to be in this beautiful nature.

What about that second expression: to have to do something?

Well, in order to get to this farm, we had to drive on some difficult roads.

They weren't always paved.

There were a lot of potholes.

They were really windy.

We had to drive on difficult roads.

When we use had to, which is the past version of have to, this says a sense of something

difficult, something undesirable, I had to take out the trash.

I had to study for my exam.

It's something that's a little bit of a burden.

So here we have a positive expression.

I get to see beautiful nature.

We got to see amazing Iguanas on the trail.

Or something negative, we had to drive on some difficult roads to get here.

We had to pay $15 to get into the park.

Before I tell you a little story about my experience here in Costa Rica, let's go to

our first question, where you get to guess some of the plants around the farm.

Alright.

First Quiz question.

We have this beautiful tree with these interesting things hanging down.

Can you guess what this is?

What kind of plant is this?

You got three seconds.

Three, two, one.

It is cacao.

This is the outside seed, the outside pod where you'll find chocolate.

I hope you enjoyed that first little quiz question.

There's going to be three different quiz questions throughout this lesson.

Let me tell you a little story about the first night that we arrived in this city.

When we got to the farm, the farmer helped us to find the house that we were staying

at.

It's a little bungalow, a little cabin on his property.

And when he tried to open the gate, he couldn't open it.

He tried one key, then he tried another.

And he ran back to his farm, and we had to wait for about 15 minutes while he looked

for the key.

And then he came back with a key.

He was so excited.

He tried to open the gate, and it didn't work.

Well, he said you're probably going to have to wait for another hour, while we work out

this problem with the key.

For a moment, I was just a little bit worried because we have a toddler, and we'd been driving

all day, so we wanted to just open the door and let him run free finally.

But then he said to us, "Well, we have a dinner available at our eating area.

Would you like to be our guests for dinner?"

Yes, of course we would, so we got to have an amazing dinner at the farm.

We had some rice, and beans, and plantains, and chicken, and some guava juice, all produced

on the farm.

It was our luck really that we got to eat that dinner with them, because we had no plans

for dinner.

We were kind of worried what we were going to eat, because we just arrived here after

a long day of traveling.

So because of this problem with the key, he had defined the key somehow somewhere.

We got to have a great experience.

Before we talk about the grammatical structure of get to and have to, let's go onto the second

quiz question.

Quiz question number two.

We've got these interesting plants here with these little flowers.

What do you think these flowers we'll do some day when they're not flowers?

What will they become?

What will this plant produce?

Something quite important that probably a lot of you enjoy every day.

Let's take a look at these.

I'll give you three seconds.

Three, two, one.

It's coffee.

This is a coffee plant.

The farm here has a lot of coffee as you saw also cacao, and we'll see a third one in just

a moment.

Did you enjoy that second quiz question?

I hope so.

Let's talk about the grammatical structure of using get, and have in the sense of something

positive, or something negative happening.

We got to eat dinner on the farm.

He had to look for the key.

Here we're conjugating that special word get and have into the past tense.

And do you see what's happening after that?

We got to eat, make sure that you add to and then an unconjugated verb.

We got to eat.

He had to look for the key.

Beautiful.

Now that you know how to correctly, grammatically construct a sentence using get to and have

to, let's go on to our third quiz question and then I'll tell you a final story about

our trip using these beautiful expressions.

For our third quiz question, it's quite obvious.

So I want to show you the base of the tree first, and as we go up the tree start thinking

about what is it?

What is this going to produce?

Oh, here we can see a little flower hanging down.

What is it?

What is it?

Are you ready to guess?

Three, two, one.

It's bananas.

So beautiful.

I didn't know that so many grew in a bunch like that, it's wonderful.

I hope you enjoyed that third quiz question, and this little mini tour of the farm.

It's really nice to see nature in other areas around the world.

Now that you know what get to and have to mean, and you know the correct grammatical

structure, let me tell you another quick story about something that we did today, and something

that we plan to do in the future so that you can see the different verb tenses for get

and have.

This morning we got to see an amazing waterfall.

It's one of the famous attractions of this area in Costa Rica, but to get to the waterfall,

you have to walk down 500 steps.

And then to go back to your car you have to walk up 500 steps.

But it was really cool because we got to see the waterfall and then we walked a little

bit down the path, and we got to really relax and feel refreshed, and wade into the water.

It was quite cold.

There were a lot of fish.

It was tons of fun, and a great part was we didn't have to drive too far from the farm.

It was just about 15 minutes.

So not too bad.

Over the next couple of days.

We hope that we'll get to see some more animals, maybe some slots, maybe some more monkeys,

and more iguanas, maybe an anteater or two, some parrots, maybe some macaws.

That would be amazing if we get to see those.

So we're going to go to a national park and then we're going to maybe get to go to a hanging

bridge park.

Maybe we'll get to go to the lake.

We'll see, but you have to drive a little bit of a distance, maybe 30 minutes, an hour,

an hour and a half to get to those locations.

But I think it'll be worth it.

We've already gotten to do a lot of cool stuff in Costa Rica, and I hope that we'll get to

other cool things in the next couple days.

Thanks so much for joining me here on my vacation.

I have a question for you, can you use get to and have to, to talk about a future vacation

or maybe a past vacation?

Let us know in the comments.

Try to create a sentence.

You can use, get in the past, have to in the future.

You can use it however you would like to fit your circumstance.

Thanks so much for learning English with me, and I'll see you the next time for a new lesson

here on my YouTube channel next Friday.

Bye.

There are a couple of other things on the farm that I'm not sure what they are, so if

you know what they are, let me know.

This is the first one.

It's these long seed-like pods.

It kind of looks like hair almost with little seeds, little berries hanging off of it.

Do you know what that is?

Another plant that I've seen around the farm that I'm not sure what it is.

Is this plant.

It's got these really cute orange vegetables or maybe it's fruit.

It looks like it could be a pepper, maybe some kind of gourd.

And the plant is spiky.

It's got really big thorns.

Let me know if you know what it is.

Donkeys.

And of course we've got to say hi to the donkeys.

Would you like some food?

Please don't bite my finger.

Mommy.

Want some water?

Mommy?

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Mommy.

I love you.

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Speaker.

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Thanks so much.

Bye.