18 Natural English Phrases You’ll Actually Use in Conversation
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
If your plan has ever backfired or you felt a little off kilter, don't worry. In today's lesson, I'm going to teach you exactly what these phrases mean. I'm going to teach you 19 natural phrases that you can start to use in your everyday English that will make you sound like a native English speaker. And honestly, it will make you more comfortable in your conversations because you'll feel like you can really express yourself.
What does a “thumbs up” mean in everyday American English?
And when others use these phrases, you'll understand exactly what they mean. If you want to become my student, make sure to visit englishwithkayla.com where you can join my monthly membership. You can learn more about the phrases in today's lesson, and I'll have plenty of lessons waiting there for you as well. Let's get started. I'm going to teach you these 19 phrases that will help you in your everyday English. If you give someone a thumbs up on something, it means it gets your approval.
We'll give a thumbs up. Yeah.
A lot of times in the United States, we talk about movies as getting two thumbs up, meaning it was very good. It was pretty good. Now, if we say, oh yeah, you get the thumbs up on that, that means I approve of it. It's good. You know, it's not neutral, but it's just saying like, I like it. It's good. But it's not saying, you know, this is the best. Thumbs up means good. Or literally, we might just say, hey, I give that a thumbs up. You might not literally put your thumbs up to say good. But in the United States, this is what we mean when we say that something gets a thumbs up. Your friend, maybe they're not actually an artist. Maybe they make a picture, they draw a picture for you. And they say, what do you think of this?
And you might say, I give it a thumbs up. That means I approve of it. It's pretty good. You're not saying it was amazing. And you're not saying it was bad. You're just giving your approval. One phrase that I used the other day in my natural English, I was like, I need to teach my students this phrase is scratch that. Scratch that. So sometimes if you're thinking out loud, maybe you're just kind of casually saying your ideas, you're thinking and you're saying what you're thinking at the same time. you might say something that is not exactly what you want. So you might say, ah, scratch that. That means take that off the list or erase that. Pretend like I didn't just say that. We're going to change what we're doing here.
So the other day I was telling my husband what I needed from the grocery store. And I say, can you just buy a gallon of milk? And then I say, Scratch that, actually two, two gallons of milk. We're gonna need more. So it's kind of like you're going back on what you just said because you realized that you need more of something or you need something changed. You need it different. Scratch that, I'm gonna need this instead. So it just means forget that or erase that. It's a really nice common idiom that we use in the United States. Do you know what it means to pick favorites?
You pick your favorites.
When we talk about picking favorites, we usually are talking about parents, grandparents, teachers, you know, they're kind of giving favoritism towards either a group of students or children, or just one in particular. So sometimes we say good parents should not pick favorites. So if there's, you know, they have many siblings in the family, they shouldn't say, oh, this kid's my favorite, or they shouldn't treat one kid better than the other. Same with teachers or you could just kind of jokingly say this in a workplace as well. Like, hey, don't pick favorites to your boss. So you can use this in a joking way like I just did. Like, haha, are you picking favorites? Meaning you're treating one person better than the rest because you like them more.
Or you can use this in a serious way as well. Like that coach tends to pick favorites and he only plays the players that he likes rather than saying, you know, they treat everyone fairly. So when we use this phrase, pick favorites, it means they treat people better than others, depending on who they like.
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