Emma's ESL English

Have you ever wondered how language shapes the way we see the world ? In this episode of Emma’s ESL English , we explore an eye-opening story about the Zulu language —which has 39 words for “green” —and what that reveals about the deep connection between language and culture . 🌍 Discover how learning Chinese changed my perception of reality 🧠 Understand how different languages reflect different...

Welcome back! I hope you all had a great holiday period, Happy New Year! 🥳 This week I wanted to give you a little life update, so I guess it's mostly listening practise for you. Sorry, I'm a little out of practise so I did go a bit too fast in places I think. Hopefully the subtitles can help you. Feel free to ask any questions in the comments. The Google search tip I mentioned is that yo...

In Episode 218 we covered how to review your year, this is an important step, don't miss it. I know it can feel frustrating or even cringy to review the year, but we need to understand what worked and what didn't so we can improve next year. So here we are, 2025, or almost. Happy New Year! 🥳🥂 Take some time over the next couple of weeks to figure out what worked well last year and how you want t...

This week I have something a little different for you. Last year my family and I went to Castle Howard. This is an English country home in Yorkshire that puts on a special Christmas display every year. They take a story and decorate the house with that theme. Last year the story was JM Barrie's Peter Pan. I'll show you the dramatic road in to Castle Howard using Google Maps, and then some of the p...

Wow! Here we are again, at the end of the year! For those of you who have been with me for a while, you will know what's coming, review and plan. In this episode I'll give you some tips and thoughts on how to review your year in English. This is an important step. So many language learners feel like they're not making any progress. It's important to take a little time to recognise how much work yo...

This week we're analysing last week's reading. I'll talk you through some of the references and vocabulary. I'll also put the vocabulary list below. In the first video I referred to the illustrator as Paul Kirby, which is actually not just confusion because the names sound similar. Terry's original artist who did about half of the covers of the original books was called Josh Kirby. When he passed...

This week we have the inevitable Pratchett Christmas reading. I hope you enjoy. This is taken from The Last Hero, a book about Cohen The Barbarian (that'll be the hero!). In this excerpt I'm reading a conversation between him and his old friends as they make their way up a giant mountain in the centre of Discworld with the goal of returning fire to the Gods 'with interest'. I'll read today and the...

A few weeks ago one of my students brought me some phrases. She couldn't really work out what they meant, and the context wasn't helping. I was very quickly able to work out that the writer she was reading was using only half an idiom. Helpful! So today let's take a look at a couple of these examples so you can see what might happen when a native speaker isn't thinking about all the hard working i...

This week we're reading another Engoo Article: Level up your language skills by thinking in English. I'll give you some ideas about how you can use the https://engoo.com/app/daily-news website regularly to practise your English both by yourself and with a tutor. I'm also going to read the article and talk a little bit about what it means and how you can use it. If you'd like to read along you can...

This week we have a bit of a silly episode focused on the pronunciation of the 'f' sound. Episode 87 covers more pronunciation. You can find the YouTube video here: https://youtu.be/N2BZg718a-8 Note: I filmed this video before the American election so...sorry, hopeful moment included😨😭 I'll explain it in the video but the words we're covering this week are: Fond, Find, Fund, Fend, Fanned And Fil...

This week we're looking at animal idioms. Surprisingly there's not as many of these as you might imagine (there's far more of the body part ones from last week!) This weeks idioms are: A frog in your throat: Have you got a cold? It sounds like you've got a frog in your throat. As mad as a box of frogs: Watch out for that one, he's as mad as a box of frogs. At a snails pace: Come on! Let's go! You...

This week we're learning some English idioms that use body parts! There are SO many of these so do Google for more if you'd like. I mentioned Rob Words, here's his YouTube video trying to trace English back through time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeAx3QZ7eRs Episodes 179 and 180 of this podcast both talk about the different influences on English and why it's so complicated. There is an Engli...

This week we're going on a little road trip. We're going into the Lake District National Park in the North West of England. We're specifically going for a walk around a lake called Buttermere. I show you a picture of the road we're on in the video, this was taken from Google Maps. So if you'd like you can head to Google Maps and use the man to drive down this road exactly and see where we were. Yo...

Several months ago I got scammed. It took hours out of my time, both in the original phone call and in cleaning up the mess. And a lot of stress. This is the story of that experience. I hope that in telling you this story you will remember some things that will help you avoid a similar experience. Please do not underestimate how crafty these people are and how much they want your hard earned cash!...

I'm back doing episodes this week and we're starting this month with a series of stories. The first is just a little update on my decorating, since that's what's taken up SO much of my time this summer. A big thank you to my Uncle, who created my bedroom window seat and my Mum (who is very clever!) and made 3 cushion covers very very carefully out of not really enough material. It is delightful to...

Do you get frustrated with the need to learn three different words to describe the same thing in English? Do we really need all of these varieties? What actually is the point, the benefit, of having 10 ways to describe rain? Or 100 ways to describe how you feel? In this episode I'll read a short excerpt from George Orwell's 1984. This book is a dystopia novel, so darkness is kind of the po...

Welcome back to the channel! In this episode I answer a learner question: how do I speak English well at a conference? In this episode we'll dive into why speaking English in stressful environments or situations is so challenging. Why is your English so impossible to use right when you need it? Is there anything to be done about it? If you can't practise your English in these situations, t...

Just a quick update for everyone, I know it's been a while. I haven't disappeared, but I have been busy. There will be new episodes uploaded here, but they will be rather random. If you'd like me to cover anything you're always welcome to let me know via email: emmaseslenglish@gmail.com I'm also opening up all the previous episodes on YouTube so you can access those whenever yo...

In this week's celebration of Pride we have an episode about the history of LGBTQ history in the UK. Unfortunately we do seem to be going backwards in the UK and America at the moment, especially regarding Trans rights, but as we will find out, Trans people have been with us all through time. I mentioned yesterday several Influencers you can follow to increase your understanding on this and ot...

Today we're studying a confusing English word: 'overwhelm'. This is a very over-used word, so the most important thing to understand is that as long as you're using it to describe something that's 'too much', you're probably using it correctly. First of all, the website I suggested was called YouGlish. It's really handy for seeing how words are used naturally. h...

In today's episode we're looking at the website TED.com. ...well, I'm talking about it, you can go look at it! 😉 I'll teach you: 1. How to navigate the website to get to the most useful part for your English 2. How to use what we learned in Ep 152 (Learning Plans) together with the TED.Ed class to make the most of their videos 3. How to make the most of each of the sections you&#3...

A while ago I was talking to a Taiwanese student and he said 'I'll leave it for my future self to handle'. We talked for a while about this, I loved the idea but couldn't think about how to say this in English. In the end I've had to accept that we just don't have anything like this in English. Instead, today I'll share with you lots of different common phrases we do us...

'Quite' is such a common word in English. As you'll see from my closing statement, it's even possible to put it in almost every sentence! So what do all these 'quite's mean? Don't worry, I've got your back. Today we're learning all the different ways you can use 'quite' correctly in a sentence. I'll give you some examples and show you some mistakes....

Yesterday I read from Terry Pratchett's Wee Free Men, today let's take a look at the vocabulary. Luckily the vocabulary in this episode is much much easier than last week's Jane Eyre! But we do have some little blue men, who speak in a Glaswegian accent and are very hard to understand and we do have some tricky phrasal verbs. In this episode I also mentioned the podcast Terry's dau...

This week on the podcast we have another reading episode. This is one of my favourite books and the very first Discworld novel I ever read. It is The Wee Free Men and is the first appearance of young witch Tiffany Aching. I chose this excerpt especially because of a delightful collection of phrasal verbs towards the end. There are some unusual creatures in the story, but don't worry, I will ex...