English Extras
Go beyond your textbook and learn authentic alternatives to common phrases! Let's make your English sound real!
- Update frequency
- every 7 days
- Average duration
- 14 minutes
- Episodes
- 66
- Years Active
- 2024 - 2025
About Halloween in America
Halloween has arrived! So what does that mean exactly? It means a lot of things: pumpkins and ghosts and spiders but also candy and scary movies and haunted houses. In this episode,…
Ways to Talk About Geography
This episode tackles two topics: the weird ways we use (or don't use) "the" with geographic features AND a common mistake I hear when people say where they are from. Do you make thi…
Ways to Use Conversation Fillers
Conversation fillers–in linguistics, it’s also known as discourse markers–are words or phrases that have many purposes: conversation fillers can help start a conversation, maintain …
5 Common Mistakes (and how to fix them)
In this episode, I'm going to share 5 common mistakes I hear from my students as an English language teacher. They include:
- incorrect use of mass nouns
- much versus many
- incorrect i…
Ways to Talk About Sadness
We talked about anger. We talked about happiness. Now it's time to talk about sadness. Spoiler alert: it's a bummer.
You can find the transcript here
Idioms for Happiness
In episode 19, I shared how to express anger and irritation. In this episode, I share six idioms to express happiness!
Transcript available here
Idioms for Anger and Irritation
How can we express our anger or irritation? There are a TON of ways. In this episode, I share 6 ways.
Transcript available here
Ways to Make Small Talk
Small talk can be scary, but the other person is probably more nervous than you are! In this episode, I talk about how to start small talk, maintain small talk, and end small talk, …
Ways to Measure Things
"Many" is a common way to say the number of things--many apples, many ideas. But native speakers use other phrases to say the number of things: a bit of, a lot of, a ton of, and mor…
Florida and Peddler's Mall and Summer Slam--Oh my!
In this episode, I share my summer vacation to Kentucky! I discuss traveling, various places in my hometown, and attending an amazing event called Summer Slam.
Want the transcript? Y…
Ways to Use Conditionals
Conditionals are the phrases and verb tenses we use when talking about hypothetical situations. In this episode, my husband and I ask each other hypothetical questions. For example,…
Ways to Talk About Death
Death is a sensitive topic. Not many people feel comfortable talking about it. So there are a lot of other expressions--less direct expressions--we use to refer to death. Of course,…
Patterns of Connected Speech (Part 2)
This episode covers even more ways native speakers of American English connect words together. Knowing these patterns improves your understanding and speaking 👍🏻📄 Follow along with …
Patterns of Connected Speech (Part 1)
Native speakers (of any language) will take the shortest, most efficient path to say something, and it often sounds different than when a word is said in isolation. This episode sha…
Ways to Say "I'm Sorry"
Saying sorry is so hard. In this episode, I talk about three ways to apologize more formally, three ways to apologize more casually, and some things you can say after you apologize.…
Ways to Talk About Numbers
I don't know about you, but I think learning numbers in another language is hard. In this episode, I talk about (1) how my students say 2,500 vs. how native speakers usually say it …
Ways to Be Polite
I don't know about you, but I try to be as polite as possible, especially when I'm talking to someone older than me, or an authority figure, or someone providing me a service.
In th…
Ways to Introduce Yourself
Introducing yourself is super important, and you'll need to do it a lot! In this episode, I discuss various ways to introduce yourself to a future English teacher.
The transcript for…
Ways to Talk About Time (Part 2)
Let's discuss common mistakes I hear my students make and how to remember the correct way. In this episode, I also talk about two more time-related words that native speakers don't …
5 Things About Me
Do I have a weird thing about pickles? Possibly. Depends on who you ask. In this episode, I share 5 things about me that maybe you didn't already know--about my languages, about my …