A bit of English every day
Welcome to my English learning support space! Here you’ll find some written explanations, as well as videos to help you become familiar with the sound of English from all around the world. Some of them are about learning the English language, but you can also find videos about traveling, cooking, music and many other topics. You’ll find shorts, reels, and longer videos so you can choose the format you like best. Just make sure you have your computer or phone settings on English in the language section! Learning to communicate in English with confidence can be a challenge, but there’s a secret to making it easier: put a little bit of English into your everyday life.
How do you pronounce “water”?
It depends on where you’re from! English actress Emily Blunt shows us how even in a family of native English speakers words can be pronounced very differently, with her daughter choosing between the pronunciation of her English mother and her American father.
Forrest Gump’s accent with Tom Hanks
Tom Hanks explains how he learned the accent for Forrest Gump from the actor who played the character as a child, Michael Connor Humphreys. It’s interesting that one of the characteristics of the boy’s accent is something that Italians tend to do - the hard G at the end of words ending in “ing”.
“Would” isn’t always conditional
In this famous scene from “Pretty Woman” Julia Roberts’ character Vivian uses the modal verbs “would” and “will” not as conditional and future, but in their meaning connected with “will” as “volontà”. When she says “Nobody will help me” she isn’t talking about the future, she means “nobody wants to help me”. And when she returns to the shop the next day she uses the past form of “will” in this meaning, when she accuses the snobbish shop assistant: “You wouldn’t wait on me”. In this scene we can find the conditional “would” too, used by the shop assistant when she says to Vivian “I don’t think this would fit you”.
The creative process of Wish you were here
David Gilmour reveals the story behind the writing of one of Pink Floyd’s most iconic songs, in which his initial riff sparked off the creative process of Roger Waters and resulted in a song that seemed to exist in its own right just waiting to be discovered.