🔖 English Idioms Topic

Sometimes you go a whole month without hearing an interesting English idiom, and then a bunch of them come along. Today we talk through an English idiom that my parents would have used and I still do.

Published

April 26, 2021

As you know I love helping English language learners, you could say I’d go to the moon and back to help students learn English. Many moons ago I started Adept English to help speed up English language learning for as many students as possible. When I shared my ideas with some of my teaching friends, they said I might as well howl at the moon. I started small and didn’t promise the moon, and now we’ve grown and helped many people.

Published

April 19, 2021

It’s pretty safe to say the British love their pets. With over 40 percent of British households owning a pet, it is no surprise the English language contains a lot of idioms relating to pets. So today we pick a side, sorry dog lovers, we’re going with cats! A whole English lesson on English idioms that relate to cats.

Published

February 08, 2021

The weather in the UK is suddenly getting cold, with our first proper frosts. Apparently we are getting weather from Sweden and Norway and we might even have a white Christmas, which has not happened in a long time. I guess, this is why I’m hearing so many English idioms related to cold at the moment. It was the Prime Minister who was On Thin Ice in the Brexit negotiations with the EU. Or the NHS being Snowed Under with extra work because of the Pandemic.

Published

December 17, 2020

I think it’s true that positive rewards are a better motivation for most people, rather than negative ones. However, if you need someone to do something, and suitable rewards cannot encourage them to act, you sometimes need to highlight negative or even threatening outcomes. Especially if people will not do what you need them to do. Now that took quite a lot of English vocabulary to explain a simple scenario, a native English speaker would prefer to use an English idiom, a metaphor which explains the scenario in a much simpler idiomatic way.

Published

October 08, 2020

A recent comment on YouTube, which suggested that idioms make English interesting, got me thinking about English idioms. It has been a while since I last did an English idiom lesson, so today we are going to talk about a horse idiom I heard being used on BBC Radio 4.

Published

September 21, 2020