Learn 20 high-frequency expressions, including words for natural disasters and common emotions
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| In this video, you'll learn 20 of the most common words and phrases in English. |
| Hi everybody, my name is Alisha. |
| Welcome to The 800 Core English Words and Phrases video series! |
| This series will teach you the eight hundred most common words and phrases in English. |
| Ok! Let's get started! First is… |
| 1. "landlord" |
| A landlord is the person who owns land or a person who owns a building. If you rent a house or if you rent an apartment, you probably have to pay your rent to a landlord every month. |
| "My brother's landlord will not accept a check." |
| 2. "dormitory" |
| A dormitory is a place where many people live together, usually students live in dormitories, especially their first or maybe second year of college. You may also see company dormitories for company staff. |
| This word is long so we often call them "dorms." |
| "I lived in the dormitory for all four years of college." |
| 3. "apartment building" |
| An apartment building is a building that's used just for apartments. So there's lots and lots of small houses inside an apartment building, this is different from a dormitory because a dormitory is usually a bunch of small rooms, just rooms together; apartment buildings are composed of like small houses. You can find kitchens, living rooms, bathrooms, everything inside one apartment. |
| "There are 24 apartments in this apartment building." |
| 4. "city" |
| A city is like a very big town. A city is a place with many people, it's very lively, there are lots of activities, lots of things to do; it can be noisy at times so think of a city as something bigger and much more exciting, perhaps, than a town. |
| "He moved from the country to the city." |
| 5. "farm" |
| A farm is a place where food is grown; this can be vegetables, fruits, it can also be livestock. So livestock means for example, cows, pigs, sheep, and so on. So a farm is a place where food comes from. |
| "The goats are playing on the farm." |
| 6. "tsunami" |
| A tsunami is like a very very large, very fast moving wave. A tsunami is a very very dangerous natural occurrence, it can cause huge disasters in cities and towns. |
| "The tsunami hit the city." |
| 7. "avalanche" |
| An avalanche is another type of natural disaster. |
| When a lot of snow becomes dislodged, meaning it gets moved from its original position high up in the mountains and a lot of snow moves together, it can create a very very large amount of snow that falls down a mountain very very fast. This can be extremely dangerous if you're hiking or skiing or snowboarding. |
| "The avalanche destroyed the ski resort, but luckily, nobody was hurt." |
| 8. "fire" |
| So there are many situations where we use the word "fire." |
| We can of course use it to talk about, like, the top of a candle, for example, but when we need to talk about a disaster or an emergency situation, we call it "a fire." |
| We use the article "a" or we use "the" as well to talk about a specific disaster. When we talk about it, to describe a disaster, it's typically a very large scale fire, as in, like, a building fire or perhaps a fire at a store. |
| "The fire is burning." |
| 9. "earthquake" |
| An earthquake is another type of natural disaster. It may be helpful to break this word into two parts to understand the meaning - "earth" refers to our planet, so the ground; "quake" means "to shake." So we can imagine this as together meaning ground and shake, so earthquake means shaking ground or the planet shaking in some way. |
| Earthquakes can be very big or very small, so sometimes they can be very dangerous. Generally, they are fairly surprising. |
| "The earthquake is shaking the ground." |
| 10. "sandstorm" |
| So a sandstorm is a type of storm where instead of rain or clouds or thunder and lightning in the air, there's sand that is moving around quickly, high speeds in the air. |
| So a sandstorm can move up, way way way high up in the air, and then it can fall to the ground or it can "touch down," is what we call it. When a sandstorm moves from high up in the air to ground level, we call that "touching down," this can be a very very dangerous situation. |
| "The sandstorm has touched down." |
| 11. "glove" |
| A glove is an article of clothing, it's a piece of clothing. We wear gloves on our hands. A glove is different from a mitten, which you might know about, because a glove has space for individual fingers. There's a pocket for each finger with a glove; a mitten uses one pocket only for all of these fingers. |
| "I need new gloves for autumn." |
| 12. "umbrella" |
| An umbrella is something we use to protect ourselves from the rain. We can carry small folding umbrellas or we can choose to use a larger umbrella. When we use an umbrella, we put it up above our heads to protect us from falling raindrops. |
| "I forgot my umbrella in the office." |
| 13. "hat" |
| So a hat is a type of clothing, we wear hats on our head. |
| Hat is the most general type of hat, there are many different types of hat inside the category, you might see beanies, you might see baseball hats or baseball caps, you might see cowboy hats, there are many different types; we can understand all of these as hats. |
| "How much is this hat?" |
| 14. "long-sleeved" |
| Long-sleeved is an adjective. We use "long-sleeved" to talk about the length of a sleeve on a shirt. Something that is long-sleeved goes until the wrist, this is what we consider long and make sure you clearly pronounce that /d/ sound at the end. So not "long-sleeve," but "long-sleeved." |
| "Long-sleeved shirts are good for cold weather." |
| 15. "short-sleeved" |
| So a short-sleeved shirt is the opposite of a long-sleeved shirt. If a long-sleeved shirt goes all the way to the wrist, a short-sleeved shirt generally ends about here. If you can imagine a T-shirt, that's a very good example of a short-sleeved shirt. |
| "Short-sleeved shirts are better when it is warm." |
| 16. "painful" |
| Painful is an adjective. We use "painful" to talk about things that hurt us, things that cause pain. |
| This can refer to physical pain, something that causes us to feel unpleasant sensations in the body; we can also use this word to talk about things that are emotionally difficult. |
| So something that is emotionally painful might be something that causes us to feel sad or angry, for example. |
| "A jellyfish sting is very painful." |
| 17. "shy" |
| Shy is an adjective that we use to talk about people. We might use it to talk about animals like pets from time to time, too. |
| Someone who is shy doesn't like to talk to other people or maybe they feel nervous in social situations. |
| "Don't be shy!" |
| 18. "nervous" |
| So nervous is an adjective and we use "nervous" to describe our feelings, usually before we do something kind of exciting like a performance or maybe before we do something a little bit dangerous. |
| So a key difference here, "nervous" versus "shy" - someone who is shy, we use shy to talk about a person's personality trait; nervous is used to talk about our feelings in a moment. So we could say "I feel nervous right now," but we would use "shy" to describe someone's personality, "she is shy" or "he is shy." “Nervous” is temporary, hopefully. |
| "Speaking in public makes me nervous." |
| 19. "excited" |
| Excited is an adjective that we use to talk about feelings of happiness or feelings of enthusiasm. |
| Again, this is an adjective we use to talk about a temporary situation; so we use excited to talk about something maybe we are looking forward to. |
| "The young scientist was excited." |
| 20. "embarrassed" |
| Embarrassed is an adjective we use to describe our feelings after something usually unpleasant happens to us. |
| We've made a mistake in front of many people, for example, and we want to describe that feeling of shame, we can use “embarrassed” to do that. |
| "My face turns red when I am embarrassed." |
| Well done! In this lesson, you expanded your vocabulary and learned 20 new useful words. |
| See you next time! Bye-bye! |
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