1: Icebreakers and table manners

Easy English Podcast

www.easyenglish.fm

Easy English consists of Mitch and Isi; a bi-national couple  experiencing British life on the south coast of England. You might know  us from our YouTube channel Easy English, where we interview the local  folk of Brighton in order to teach you authentic English. This week, we  discuss Queen Elizabeth's funeral, podcast recommendations and answer  your questions in our 'unhelpful advice' section. But as per usual, we  like to throw in our analysis of British slang, small talk and  passive-aggressiveness.

Interactive Transcript

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Show Notes

Transcript

Intro

0:25 Mitch:
Hello, welcome to the new Easy English podcast.
0:25 Isi:
Hello! That was weird. Hello!
0:34 Mitch:
And who are you?
0:35 Isi:
So I'm Isi. I'm a German living... nein. Oh God!
0:41 Mitch:
Jesus, can't get past the first step.
0:40 Isi:
You will record this forever. But I hate introductions. I actually hate introductions.
0:42 Mitch:
Yeah, I just want to start this without the feeling that we're starting something. I want it to feel like we're in Episode 10 already.
0:51 Isi:
Uh, who are you? Who are you? uh! (Yeah.) I always hated introductions. I hate it when you go like, to a conference or in a classroom or so; can you please stand up and say two to three sentences about yourself and just your name, your age, where you're from and a few of your hobbies. What do you like to do in your free time?
1:10 Mitch:
That's a great idea. What we should do instead, then, because I also don't like doing this, we should do what I had to do when I was at school for icebreakers, where you have to turn to the person to your right and you have to find out something, then you have to introduce each other. And you have to remember something about them.
1:24 Isi:
That will be really fun with the two of us.
1:24 Mitch:
You introduced me and I'll introduce you. (Okay.) Who am I?
1:31 Isi:
So Mitch is... oh God, this is so hard. Mitch... (Come on!) Mitch, is originally from Manchester, now living in the south of England, in Brighton. And, he's a film nerd, he loves films, especially horror films. Can I say that, or?
1:53 Mitch:
Yeah, that's a really important part of my life.
1:56 Isi:
Oh God. Yeah. I think everyone feels now, sorry for me. You love music as well. You make music yourself. You love the outdoors, where we spend a lot of time together with our dog, Nola. And you love the sea. And you love our free nature-ish, happy life.
2:18 Mitch:
Nice. Did oyu miss anything? I think you got it all, really.
2:23 Isi:
Well, let's say, Mitch, I think that people will get to know us in this podcast. So I don't want to say everything about you. Because, you will find out guys.
2:30 Mitch:
Should I describe you? (Yep.) So Isi is a German national, born in Münster. And... that's correct, isn't it? (Yeah.) Yes! Over the first hurdle. And, what else would I say your interests are? You are a big fan of music and quite specificly, English music, I think. (Yes.) I think your... probably your top three favourite bands are probably all British, I reckon. And... yeah? (Yeah.) hurdle two... hurdled. And, I'd say your favourite things are, outside of British music; I think that's your like, number one thing, I reckon.
3:09 Isi:
What!? Like, it's one of my favourite things. But, in life, it's not my favourite thing. It's very important, though.
3:12 Mitch:
Hmm... it's not your favourite thing?
3:17 Isi:
Music? (Yeah.) No, I would say. What do I do all day long? And what is... Where do I feel the most... I shouldn't tell you that.
3:23 Mitch:
I mean... okay, here's... here's the things I see you doing the most; listening to Foals' music; your favourite band. Two; cuddling our dog Nola. And three; looking at sunsets or being... our dog's just generally... just having a sneezing fit on... on... consciously doing it.
3:42 Isi:
I think she does it on purpose to get attention.
3:46 Mitch:
What's going on!?
3:49 Isi:
Okay.
3:50 Mitch:
And, uh yeah, being by the sea or generally just, looking out... out of the window at like a... daydreaming on a vista, on a nice sunset or on like, the horizon line.
4:06 Isi:
Alright. Dream... a dreamer. A dreamer. So, what we wanna tell you guys first, is that we are not only doing a podcast so that you can listen to very natural English and to us talking about a lot of things. But we also wanna give you some perks. Um and yeah, if you become a member of Easy English, we will have a podcast membership now, which will include, Mitch...
4:34 Mitch:
So if you're struggling to understand or keep up with our conversation, then you should be heading over to easyenglish.video/membership, and you can become a member and get an interactive transcript, which will, live, translate this conversation into an array of different languages. Um yeah, go get it.
4:56 Isi:
Yeah, I think it's really great. Um, it's not even if you can't understand this. But also, maybe you don't know some certain words that we use, Mitch for sure, as a native, uses a lot more slang words. And so if you just wanna, live, see it in your own language or in any other language that you speak or learn, that is really... yeah, a nice feature, isn't it? You can just read it in the other languages well and learn new English... British English words. So what we'll do in our podcast is we will have different categories, and we will slowly introduce them to you over the next podcasts. So we will not always do the same ones, some will appear again and again, some might be only... some visitors. So, I guess one of the main ones is the 'topic of the week'.
5:46 Mitch:
Segment intro? (Yep.) Let's try it now, here it comes.

Topic of the Week

5:55 Isi:
So there's only one topic that... not only, but there's one huge topic. Um, that was very present during the past weeks, and that was the death of The Queen of Britain.
6:12 Mitch:
And we watched on the TV, didn't we, while we worked?
6:14 Isi:
Yeah, we had it on the whole day...
6:16 Mitch:
Oh, her funeral by the way, we didn't say what happened, right? We didn't watch her death, we watched her funeral.
6:20 Isi:
Yeah, we watched her funeral. And obviously, there was like, this whole state mourning phase, which was 10 or 12 days. And for me, that was very interesting, obviously. As a German, I don't know monarchy, I didn't live in a monarchy in my life. But the Queen... Yeah, it was... it was really interesting for me, culturally, to observe these past weeks, how people were really grieving, mourning for the Queen. Their... you can really say their beloved queen. I went around our district here and made photos from... not even funny! I did this as a... a cultural documentation. No, because I found it super interesting; what the people had in their stores. Um, maybe we can put a... for our members a photo up or so. Um, or some of my photos. Because in every store there was like, a letter, they all said about obviously being closed on the day of the funeral. So...
7:26 Mitch:
There was... there was a lot of this, 'out of respect' (Out of respect.) It was like, the... it was the key word to put 'out of respect'.
7:33 Isi:
Yeah, so, yeah, nearly all stores were closed on that day, and also, every store or restaurant had a picture of the Queen in their window.
7:45 Mitch:
They'd all printed it off, using their office printers, hadn't they?
7:45 Isi:
So yeah, you could see who had a good printer.
7:48 Mitch:
Like; Barry! You've printed in colour! Black and white, she's dead! Have some respect!
7:47 Isi:
It was very, very interesting, to... to observe and I... I did come to an understanding of what this woman, Elizabeth, meant to the people and still means to the people, because I think she, um she was constant. That gave them safety in a way. Because Britain has been in quite... next topic... oh God, I will only talk here, in quite uncertain times, during the past years, with Brexit and all those things. And I think the queen was still... the Queen was the Queen; she was always there, representing the country, being lovely and yeah, it's... it's weird for a lot of people, also 70 years on the throne, to not have that anymore and change is never easy.
8:49 Mitch:
It wasn't just weird for you, I found it quite weird. I mean, we weren't here for the Jubilee, right? We were away. For her Platinum Jubilee. (Yeah.) And there were street parties, right? There was one in... just in... in the small town where we live. There is... uh, there was an arranged street party, which, for me is culturally weird, that like... that... I've never really noticed like, a country doing something together, but her funeral, felt just really massive. It's very bizarre, to be honest. Even for me, even for myself, because, you start to realise how many people actually really care about her and how much she actually means to people. And like, even I found myself getting involved in her story a little bit. And I guess, really, I kind of, I actually was quite sad, just because of the fact that, as much as I don't agree with the monarchy, but she took it on, so early on.
9:49 Isi:
She was 25.
9:51 Mitch:
And yeah, like, someone said it really well on one of the episodes we recorded, that she really never got a chance to...
9:56 Isi:
Oh 26 then... sorry. She was 96 now. All right, go on.
10:01 Mitch:
That she never really got a chance to like, experience being a person, like a mother or grandmother. Yeah, she did just sort of, take on this mantle, which sort of seems a bit like a weight, and yeah... she did it until the day she died. There's obviously a horrible side to the royal family with the British Empire. (Oh yeah.) But one thing that you... if you look at Queen Elizabeth's timeline, from when she took the throne to now. Yeah, it's in her title now that she's no longer the, you know the... Queen Elizabeth of Great Britain. She's Queen Elizabeth... well she was Queen Elizabeth of the Commonwealth and she kind of... it was her thing, really. Her thing was taking apart the British Empire and giving back independence to these countries. So yeah, I wonder whether we'll actually look back and... look back at her like, her reign and be; actually, you know what? She's like the Queen of peace or the Queen of... you know, she was giving... she was actually, slowly dismantling the monarchy in a way. And I wonder whether King Charles will carry that on.
11:04 Isi:
Yeah well, I... I don't know too much about it, if she really was a Peen of... Peen. (Peen of Que...) the Peen of quease.
11:12 Mitch:
King of Queens.
11:13 Isi:
No, but I... I can't... I can't really say much about it. Um...
11:17 Mitch:
Yeah, we both are not qualified enough to properly speak about the British Empire.
11:20 Isi:
But I just wanted to say that I do understand... I do... let's say it like that; I now, do understand what role she played and will still play in this country's history.
11:35 Mitch:
Her parachuting out of a plane with Daniel Craig was incredibly funny. Okay, so it only makes sense, because of this week's YouTube episode. And if you're not even aware that we do YouTube, then go over to youtube.com/easyenglishvideos where you'll find a whole array of videos that we're also doing alongside a podcast, where we interview people from the streets of Brighton to help you learn authentic British English.
12:02 Isi:
And we also do sometimes, home episodes if you want to call them like this, which is like, videos about grammar topics, about vocabulary topics, something that we focus on and Mitch always has amazing ideas to connect it to all his film nerd-ism. So... you're always inspired to bring in something that comes from a... one of your films.
12:25 Mitch:
If you want to learn about English conjunctions made to the theme of 'The Shining'...
12:31 Isi:
Yeah?!
12:32 Mitch:
I learnt to do a really fun trick, to make it look like you're being possessed. So maybe you want to be the possessed person.
12:38 Isi:
I can do that yet, yeah.
12:40 Mitch:
That'll be lovely, won't it? (Yeah.)
12:43 Isi:
Okay um... the past episode, which is...
12:42 Mitch:
Okay, Well, it makes sense to talk.
12:43 Isi:
Well it only came out now as well, same time.
12:49 Mitch:
Yeah, and it makes sense to talk about this topic we're discussing now, which is podcasts.

Past Week's Video

12:59 Mitch:
Um, so I basically, if you've watched the video already, then you'll know, but if not then, I went out on the streets of Brighton and found out what podcasts people regularly listen to.
13:13 Isi:
Yeah, so should we... should we just... well obviously, we now started a podcast, so that's why we did this topic. But Mitch, what is your favourite podcast? You listen to a lot of podcasts, I do listen to a lot of podcasts. Actually, podcasts play a huge role in our daily life, don't they?
13:28 Mitch:
Yeah well, I mean, I was... I've been into podcast for ages. I think it was before the word 'podcast' even existed, is when um, Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, who made 'The Office' and 'Extras' and all these other amazing TV programmes. Um, they started... it was basically a radio show, but there was... I could be wrong, I think there was music, but it was... usually with radio shows, you listen to more music than talking, but this was 15 minutes talking and one song. And then, more... 15 more minutes. Yeah, it's... they... in England I guess, invented the podcast, and I listened to that. The Ricky Gervais thing really got me into the idea of listening to comedy on the radio. And then, it then went from Ricky Gervais to Russell Brand, when he had his pod... he had like, a radio show on 'BBC', 'BBC Radio 2'. But that was also just talking. And then from him, I went to 'Adam and Joe'. And 'Adam and Joe' is just... they are like, the king... kings of podcasting in my... in my eyes. Give your podcast recommendation now, please.
14:36 Isi:
I actually do listen to a lot of German podcasts. Probably oh, I don't know, eight or 10 podcasts regularly. But they are nearly all German. And like, the biggest one I listen to, which all Germans will know now is 'Fest & Flauschig'. And er... yeah, yeah, that's the music, Mitch has to listen to that a lot when I'm like, in the bathroom or so.
15:07 Mitch:
Yeah, I hear in the show... from a distance in the shower.
15:10 Isi:
When I'm... when I'm cooking, yeah. Um, so I do listen to a few English ones, which are actually all British ones. And, one that was kind of, a surprising find. Um, was the podcast called 'Table Manners'. Um, which is a really nice setup, I think. It is... the host is, or the two hosts are Jessie Ware, who is a pop musician, I think, and her mum. And I have to say, I have no idea of her music, I really don't know one song, nothing.
15:44 Mitch:
Yeah, not in an offensive way.
15:45 Isi:
Not in an offensive way. I should have checked it out maybe, but she's really fun. Um... and her mum is really fun and they, together invite people, really... yeah, quite huge names, really. And, they prepare a dish and they sit together with them at a table, mostly it's a dish that the guest kind of likes, or from there, kind of like, cultural background. And then they talk all things from food to their life and anything. And it's really fun because they are really, really witty and really like... yeah, really fun. It's really, really good. I think we searched for some podcast with people that we wanted to listen to as guests, and then we found them.
16:28 Mitch:
Yeah yeah, when we travel between Germany and UK, we always use them as our means to conquer boredom in the car.
16:36 Isi:
It's a really, really good recommendation, if you like interview podcasts, if you like food and nice conversations.
16:46 Mitch:
They are a podcast to aspire to because they have no formalities, right? (Yeah.) It feels like... it feels like you're there, at the dinner table and you're just chatting the shit.
16:56 Isi:
Yeah, you get a huge glass of wine and just talking to them, that's how it feels and that's why it's so good. It's really, really good. So let's play the next. How do you call it? (The next segment.) Let's play it.

Unhelpful Advice

17:14 Isi:
So, you have heard it, it's called unhelpful advice and that was Mitch's idea and I think it's an amazing idea. And it basically means, people should write to us. So you, you people should write us, um... something you are struggling in life with, it doesn't have to be deep, it can be deep, though. Or any little question, it can also be like, Do I have spaghetti or pancakes for dinner?
17:48 Mitch:
I want people to write in asking us to name their pets, because I... I feel like I have a really good ability to name pets.
17:55 Isi:
Okay, um... if you wanna move house and have two options, it can be anything. But please, please, please, write us an email to...
18:04 Mitch:
podcast@easyenglish.video. One of our patrons picked up on the fact we were looking for unhelpful advice questions, and his name is Creighton. And Creighton is (Hello Creighton.) infamous across the Easy Languages universe, because I think he's also an Easy German member, right?
18:22 Isi:
Yes, he is.
18:23 Mitch:
And he has great tips on beverages, right?
18:27 Isi:
He does, he... I think he calls himself the Cocktail King of Easy German. (self-proclaimed) Now... now I put it out there Creighton, sorry.
18:28 Mitch:
I'll name pets and Creighton will teach you how to make the best cocktails.
18:40 Isi:
Oh yeah, he has a lot of knowledge in that. Actually, I wanted to create a pod... ah, a podcast. A cocktail for today, but I'm on antibiotics, so that's not a good idea.
18:52 Mitch:
I mean, if you want a wild night, then go for it. Do you want to know what Creighton's question is?
18:56 Isi:
Yeah, tell me.
18:58 Mitch:
So his question is... and let's just take it at face value. His question is; how do I appear less American in my next trip to the UK?
19:08 Isi:
Pretending a British accent will be good.
19:10 Mitch:
Don't do that. Please don't do that.
19:12 Isi:
Maybe people won't notice.
19:17 Mitch:
I mean, to appear less American. I mean, I can see Creighton's face on Patreon and the only way I can say he could appear less American is to like, show his teeth less, because I think he has probably really perfect, American teeth. And, that would be the key thing that'd make me realise he's maybe not a Brit, because most Brits have teeth like peasants.
19:36 Isi:
Don't say that. not everyone, that's also a stereotype.
19:36 Mitch:
I do. (No you don't.) I do. (You have beautiful teeth.) I would say, a good tip for appearing less American, or appearing more British. And, maybe it's quite liberating, is that, I feel like in America, you have this 'American dream', and this thing where you can self-promote yourself. And in England, if you self-promote yourself, it always, for some reason, comes across as snobbish or like you're blowing your own trumpet or you're being a bit big-headed. There are some... three phrases I've just nailed right there, which you can look on the transcript. And in England, it's really honourable thing to be... the more self-deprecating you can be, the better. And maybe in America, if you self-deprecate, people will feel sorry for you, or maybe you'll look like you're like, trying to gain some kind of, um... you're like, fishing for compliments, basically. But in England, you can be self-deprecating and it can be really funny. The more self-deprecating you are, the better. For example, your appearance; you can take the mickey out of your appearance, you can take the Mickey out of, anything to do with yourself. Like, if you're loud, say; Oh, I'm so loud, bloody hell, someone shut me up, I'm like a trumpet and people will find it really funny. So that would be my one and only tip, I think.
20:57 Isi:
Creighton, let us know if that if that is helpful or unhelpful, probably unhelpful.
21:03 Mitch:
Yeah, put yourself down. (That's what it's all about.) Put yourself down, but don't do it so much that then you have less respect for yourself.
21:10 Isi:
Yeah so, I think we are at the end of our first podcast, which was actually, in the end, will probably be shorter, but we talked for a long time.
21:19 Mitch:
If you're listening to the podcast and you're thinking; why is the energy dropping off so quickly? It's because we recorded this for an hour and had to... (More than an hour.) More than an hour, and it's had to be edited down to 20 minutes. So, lesson learnt for Episode two there.
21:35 Isi:
So what I would really like to say at the end is, it would be so amazing to get feedback by you guys. Um, if you could just write us an email with some feedback, how you liked it, if you didn't like it or whatever, what we can improve or any topic that you would like us to talk about. Any unhelpful advice that you need or really just anything, any question about our podcast, writes an email to...
21:59 Mitch:
podcast@easyenglish.video
22:04 Isi:
Amazing. So, um yeah and also, it would be really be nice if, in your podcast app that you're using, you follow us and you rate our podcast, because that is really, really, really, really nice for us. Um... would be great to get some love.
22:20 Mitch:
Yeah, it'll be nice to know what you all think of it, because we... I do feel like now we have a community. If you go to our YouTube channel, you'll see you have a nice community of regular viewers who want to engage in conversation. So hopefully we can start that up with our podcast.
22:34 Isi:
Yeah and obviously our members. (Yeah.) Who are there always, in support, thank you.
22:40 Mitch:
Yeah and if you want to become a member, which not only helps support our work here at Easy English and helps us to carry on making podcast episodes and video episodes. But in return, we also give you back, some learning extras. And for the podcast, alone, you'll get this interactive transcript to translate into many different languages.
23:01 Isi:
Please, please become a member, that will be great. And, I guess see you... hear you next time.
23:08 Mitch:
Yeah, I think we'll be talking to you from Germany in our next episode.
23:12 Isi:
Germany, yes.
23:13 Mitch:
So we might have some stories to tell on our trip over on the ferry. (Ferry trip.) and listening to Table Manners in the car to abstain from bordom.
23:25 Isi:
Thank you, guys.
23:25 Mitch:
Yeah, I hope you enjoyed it, see you next time. Bye!