Learn All About English Phrases For New Year
Well, as we say goodbye to 2020, and are on the eve of welcoming 2021, I wish you all a better year from now on. In the UK, we are preparing for the least festive and celebratory New Year’s eve in my lifetime. 2020 is going to go out with a whimper for many people. 2020 was a great year for Adept English. Today we continue helping people learn new English phrases as we learn to speak English through listening.
For us 2020 has been as busy as ever and we published over 1000 minutes of FREE English lessons in 100+ episodes. With our English lesson podcasts being listened to more than 6 million times this year. Our website traffic and our podcast listeners grew massively this year. So we thought you might be interested in some of our podcast stats for 2020.
Our peak listen times on Spotify this year were in Brazil at 8am and in Poland at 5pm, we also had listeners in 85 countries just on Spotify. And people seem to like what we produce as over 57,000 people listened to us more than any other podcast they follow on Spotify.
We grew a lot this year as well, with listeners growing 217% in Brazil, 196% in Mexico, and 106% in Germany. Overall we had 160% growth in new followers on Spotify. Our Learn English through listening podcast was in the top 50 charts for Language Education in 35 countries this year and we are the 9th most popular Education podcast in Germany.
And that’s just for Spotify! We also grew on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Deezer, Amazon, TuneIn and many more. But I didn’t have time to pull all the numbers together but you can be sure people like what we do, they find it helpful in learning to speak English and with your help we intend to grow even more next year.
Remember to tell your friends about us, if you like what we do, please leave reviews wherever you can on your podcast apps. It really helps us when you like our episodes on your podcast app and when you follow our podcast.
Most Unusual Words:
Countdown
Resolution
Embracing
Expressions
Most common 3 word phrases:
| Phrase | Count |
|---|---|
| New Year’s Eve | 7 |
| The New Year | 3 |
Listen To The Audio Lesson Now
The mp3 audio and pdf transcript for this lesson is now part of the Adept English back catalogue . You can still download and listen to this lesson as part of one of our podcast bundles.Transcript: English Phrases For A Happy New Year 2021
Hi there and welcome to this latest podcast from Adept English. If you’re looking for something to listen to, over the holiday period, over the period of the New Year, then you could always sign up for our free course, the Seven Rules of Adept English.
This course gives you a really good plan, a really good set of strategies for learning the English language, which will speed up your learning. Go to our website and sign up – you can start straight away and make 2021 the year that you really conquer the English language!
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Well, the New Year, 2021 is nearly here and we are all hoping for better things. New Year is a time when people pause to think about their lives, the past year. It’s a review point, rather like those birthdays with a zero on the end, when we enter a new decade.
It’s a point where there is opportunity to reflect on what’s past, what has been and to think about the future. All of our hopes, our aspirations, the things that we want to happen. And of course, the things that we want to do differently, that we want to do better. This is worth thinking about as well.
New Year’s Eve Eve, Eve
Let me share with you first of all, a family joke that my children say, at this time of year. It’s not a ‘Ha ha super funny’ joke, it’s more of a ‘play on words’. Today is 30th December, so as my daughter’s shortened name form is ‘Eve’, E-V-E, my children say ‘Oh, it’s New Year’s Eve Eve, Eve!’.
So let me explain. Of course, you probably know that 31st December is New Year’s Eve – that’s when we celebrate the end of the old year and the start of the new. So in English, the 1st January is New Year’s Day – the first day of the new year. So 31st December is New Year’s Eve – because it’s the evening before new year.
So we use this rather old fashioned word in English ‘eve’ to mean the period before an event. So you could say that 30th December is New Year’s Eve Eve. That means the eve of New Year’s Eve. And if you’re addressing someone with the name ‘Eve’, also spelt E-V-E, then you can add this on the end. So ‘It’s New Year’s Eve Eve, Eve’, is something that we get to say once a year on 30th December. Well, it entertains my 12 year old son!
The countdown
So an idiom that we use connected with New Year’s Eve – is ‘count down’ or ‘the countdown’. The verb to ‘count down’ really means when you count the days, or the hours or the minutes until something happens. So you might say ‘Oh we are counting down the days until we go to the Caribbean’ or ‘We are counting down the days until we go to Iceland’. Well chance would be a fine thing – no one in the UK is going anywhere at the moment.
📷
Happy New Year from Hilary. As we count down to a new year of English language learning.
But we can dream – hopefully we’ll all be travelling again in the year 2021. So we also ‘do the countdown’ on New Year’s Eve. We enjoy ourselves for the evening, usually with a few drinks – and then when it gets towards 12 midnight, we countdown literally the seconds until the clock chimes and it’s a new year. So that’s ‘to countdown’. Or the New Year countdown.
New Year’s Resolutions
What about the fact that often, as I was saying before, people do a review of what’s going on in their lives at new year and they may decide they’d like to change, what they’d like to do differently in the coming year. People make promises to themselves – ‘I’m going to lose weight’, ‘I’m going to go to the gym three times a week’, or ‘I’m going to be nice to my sister’.
And they may do this for January, but perhaps they don’t do it for the rest of the year. Such promises to ourselves are what we call ‘New Year’s Resolution[s]’ – a resolution is a resolve, a promise to yourself to do something. But of course, we’re often bad at sticking to them, so maybe it’s better to just choose one.
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The idiom ‘to turn over a new leaf’
Another way of saying this would be to use the expression ‘to turn over a new leaf’. This really means to change, to resolve to be different, to resolve that things will be different from now on. The word ‘leaf’, L-E-A-F usually means those green things which grow on trees.
Or if we eat a salad, then that’s usually made with leaves of some kind, often lettuce. So why would ‘to turn over a new leaf’ mean ‘to change’? Well, it’s because the word ‘leaf’ used to be used to mean the pages in a book. Sometimes if you buy a pad of paper or a book with blank pages to write in, like you might use for school work or you might use to write your journal or your diary in, then on the cover, it may say ‘180 leaves’ – so actually that means ‘180 pages’.
So in the expression ‘to turn over a new leaf’, it’s really meaning to start a new page in your book, start a new chapter in your life. So ‘Oh, he’s turned over a new leaf’ means that he’s decided to change, and it all looks very different now’.
The expression ‘Out with the old, in with the new’
Something that people also say around new year ‘Out with the old and in with the new’. What this means is that there are points in time where you review, where you have a rethink about a situation. And you get rid of the old things – and instead you adopt new things.
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So ‘out with the old, in with the new’, could mean that you’re getting rid of all your old furniture and buying new instead. Or it could mean that you’re ending old relationships, and starting out anew, starting new relationships, new friendships. It could also mean that you’re abandoning old ideas and embracing new ones.
Or it could just mean that you’re tidying out your sock drawer. You got new socks for Christmas and you decide to have a purge of all those old socks with holes in, or which don’t have a partner. In these times of lockdown, a drawer full of lovely new socks is the sort of thing that we have to take pleasure in! So that’s ‘Out with the old, in with the new’!
Best Wishes for 2021 to all Adept English listeners
So there you have it – a couple of expressions associated with New Year – ‘to countdown’ and ‘to turn over a new leaf’ and ‘out with the old, in with the new’. To all of you out there, learning English and listening to our podcasts – a big thankyou for your support this year.
Goodbye
To those of you who leave us comments or send us emails, to those who like us or subscribe to us and who recommend Adept English to other people – a great big thankyou! Let me just wish you all the best for the New Year, 2021. I hope all your dreams and wishes come true – and here’s to a safe and healthy and Happy New Year to all of you!
Enough for now. Have a lovely day. Speak to you again soon. Goodbye.
