Category Archives: Story

833. Text Adventure Story: Lemon Simulator (by Daniel Champion)

Join me as I read through a bizarre online game. Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be a lemon? No? Well, neither had I, until I played this game. Can I escape the kitchen, become human again and avoid being chopped up and turned into a juice! Watch out for some descriptive language and some funny moments along the way! Story by Daniel Champion on www.textadventures.co.uk

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🍋 Play “Lemon Simulator” by Daniel Champion and read the text https://textadventures.co.uk/games/view/6q7gsnm4oeyqsmou1artbw/lemon-simulator-2014

832. Sherlock Holmes: The Red-headed League (Learn English with a Short Story)

Let me read you a classic Sherlock Holmes detective story, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I’ll read the original text and stop regularly in order to explain what is happening.

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📄 DOWNLOAD THE PDF TRANSCRIPT 👇

828. PARIS STORIES with Amber Minogue

Amber returns to the podcast to tell us some grisly stories about the history of Paris. Amber is a bit of an expert about Paris. She has read pretty much every book about the city and is also a registered tour guide here. A few years ago she set up a podcast called Paname Podcast (Paname is a nickname for Paris). Each episode contains a true story from history, with tales of battle, execution, romance, tragedy and adventure. You can get it where you get your podcasts. In this episode Amber comes onto LEP to share a few stories from her podcast series. Includes a 30-minute ramble at the end of the episodes.

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☝️Listen to the audio version of the episode to to hear an extra 30 minutes of rambling after the conversation with Amber.

Listen to Luke’s English Podcast on your phone – audio episodes are usually longer than video ones

Scan this QR code on your phone 👇 and choose a podcast app of your choice. I recommend PocketCasts.

👉 Listen to Amber’s podcast https://plinkhq.com/i/1241927554?to=page

825. Time-Travel Story, English Immersions in Malta & Playing the Bagpipes (with Alastair Budge)

Is that a confusing title? Hopefully not. As you might expect, it’s a little summary of what’s included in the episode. To give you some more details, Alastair Budge is the host of a podcast called “English Learning for Curious Minds” and he has created a new audio drama for English learners called “Pioneers of the Continuum”. It’s a time-travel adventure for English learners, and Alastair asked me to be the narrator for episode 1. In this episode of LEP, we talk about Alastair’s story, living in Malta, learning English by immersion, cliches and complaints from English speakers visiting Paris and Alastair’s story about playing the bagpipes on the streets of Paris. The audio version includes 30+mins of rambling from me at the end. Enjoy!

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Alastair’s website (podcasts + more) https://www.leonardoenglish.com/

Listen to Pioneers of the Continuum wherever you get your podcasts, from 23 May 2023 👇

Wonderwall on the bagpipes (yes, of course someone did it!)

818. Monster Bogey (A Children’s Book) with Anna Brooke

My friend Anna has written a book for children (7+) which has a full publishing contract and is available in all good bookshops now. The book tells the story of a boy who accidentally creates a monster when his secret collection of nose bogeys gets struck by lightning! This conversation includes lots of talk of snot and bogeys, as well as stories from Anna’s time as a travel writer.

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Get your copy of Monster Bogey here! https://www.chickenhousebooks.com/books/monster-bogey/

Read an extract from the book here https://www.chickenhousebooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Monster-Bogey-chapter-1-for-website-COMPRESSED.pdf

817. Parson’s Pleasure by Roald Dahl (Learn English with a Short Story)

Learn English with another short story. This time it’s Parson’s Pleasure by Roald Dahl, which is an intriguing tale of a dodgy antiques dealer, with a nasty twist at the end. Learn vocabulary while you enjoy a fascinating story.

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808. James Harris returns to talk about his book 📖🗣

James Harris is a writer, comedian, English teacher and language learner (French, German, Chinese) from England. In this funny chat, we talk about learning Chinese, being married to a Chinese woman and his semi-autobiographical book, “Midlands” which tells several funny and touching stories about two ex-pats living in Germany; Stuart, who is a stand-up comedian trying to understand the Germans, and Doug who gets involved in a love affair. James reads several passages from the book during the episode.

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https://youtu.be/xP9dCzNJ93w

👉 Get James’ book ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ https://www.amazon.co.uk/Midlands-James-Harris/dp/B0B38CX11P

👉 Sign up to James’ email newsletter “Stiff Upper Quip” for regular short articles in English & more https://stiffupperquip.substack.com/

👇 Listen to James’ first episode on LEP


Extracts from “Midlands” by James Harris 📖

From Chapter 2

Stuart describes his early days in Germany, learning German.

Then a chance meeting in a pub had earned him an invitation to Berlin. Laura, Danish and short, was staying there for the summer, rummaging around in the archives for information about a particular Jewish family who had gone on to achieve cultural success in post-war Denmark; 

Laura, a snub-nosed Danish girl with glasses who loved Israel and wheat beer. Stuart didn’t care much about her interests but did enjoy spending the days reading on her balcony and socializing with university friends at night; 

by the end of the summer his hair had lengthened and his German increased fifty-fold, meaning he now knew about a hundred words. ‘Hallo!’ he would say, then ‘Weltschmerz’ and following a further pause ‘Auf Wiedersehen,’ saying a final farewell to people he would see again the next day. 

He also hadn’t yet learnt to ask whether something was sugar or salt, leading to an evening eating some very sweet chips. But even speechless he wasn’t, at last, uneasy in Berlin – it seemed to him a gentle city, where the trains slid in and out and the open spaces pacified tourists drunker and rowdier elsewhere. 

It was like the Germans had become one of the peaceful races in Star Trek, the ones introduced by an insert screen of their orderly, verdant planet, Bajorans, say, or some other species permanently threatened by obliteration; and what a change after the tiny cubicles and traffic-jam living of the English, who could only ever be the Borg.

Surrounded by pacifists, Stuart revelled in the license of Englishness, his ability to voice the odd mildly aggressive opinion or wildly over-celebrate during that summer’s football tournament, until England lost. He swam in lakes, and bought a bicycle, and gradually stopped thinking of England and the ashes it had fed him. 

In Oxford, where he had been President of the University sketch revue, people had printed gossip about him in the student newspapers, asked him to leave parties, dealt with him as the man who had committed that deepest and most unforgivable of Oxford crimes: failure. 

He had failed, as a comedian and a young man, and now publicly; his country had rejected him. He had been humiliated in front of an audience of his contemporaries and sent into an internal exile. 

Afterwards, many of these young dilettantes, at the time apparently picturing future lives as bereft of unforeseen distress as possible, lives composed of simply an endless procession of success, successes occurring within a network of contacts which they had built up at University and which would continue to provide them with unstinting support throughout their adult lives, never violating the simple and essential principle that all was permissible as long as it did well – did not want his name on their social CV.


From Chapter 14

Stuart is on-stage doing stand up in Germany.

‘Don’t you sometimes get the feeling,’ said Stuart, years before on the stage in Heidelberg, ‘that if Barack Obama had been German it wouldn’t have been “Yes We Can” but ”Nein das geht nicht”? No you can’t. 

‘Everyone would have been chanting it – No you can’t! No you can’t! Of course in this version Obama would not have been black.’ 

Stuart was closing in on the kill. ‘And this very lack of optimism,’ he said, treading across the stage, limbering, into the really good stuff now, ‘is actually built into the German language itself. 

Like for example, when you’re really happy in English, you say “I’m on Cloud Nine.” But in Germany you say, “I’m on Cloud Seven.”

Does this mean that even in their happiest moments the Germans are two clouds less happy than English-speaking people?’ 

And after developing that bit, which meant moving into a depiction of an exemplary German, Hannes, in his German heaven, with an allotment, board games, juice and an Autobahn heading directly to Mallorca, he noting, somewhat wistfully, the celebratory Anglophones on Cloud Nine who were dancing to ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’, which was an excuse to sing it, following which they – the Anglophones – called down to Cloud Eight “Hey Hannes man! Come and join us here on Cloud Nine” and Hannes replying “No thank you. Everything on Cloud Seven is perfectly satisfactory” then moving on to speculation as to the occupants of the other clouds, the French on Cloud Eight living it up, their motor scooters floating off the cloud and down to Cloud Zero where the Greeks were and below them the Cypriots who’d had to sell the cloud, and were just falling – after all these and other jokes, Stuart had them where he wanted them. 

‘Isn’t it funny that, since the Second World War, the Germans have been like’, change voice, German accent, ‘”We Germans. We have done so many things wrong and there is no way we can ever put them right.” 

And now Greece is like,’ pause, turn of the head, “Well, actually…”’ 

They laughed, and laughed, and laughed. They got it.

👇 Follow James on Twitter

804. The Missing Masaccio (Learn English with a Text Adventure Story) by Peter Carlson

The third (and final) adventure in this series of mini-mysteries on LEP. Can I improve my detective skills to work out the disappearance of a priceless painting and a series of gruesome murders? Story by Peter Carlson and available on textadventures.co.uk

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👉 Play text game “Victorian Detective Interlude” on textadventures.co.uk

👉 Part 1 – The Unopened Safe

👉 Part 2 – The Wraith

Sorry for mispronouncing “Masaccio” in this episode! 🇮🇹

803. The Wraith (Learn English with a Text Adventure Story) by Peter Carlson

The second in a trilogy of text adventure stories by Peter Carlson. In this one we are chasing a ghostly serial killer with a few tricks up his sleeve. Do I have the detective skills to solve the mystery and avoid certain death?

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Click here to play “Victorian Detective Interlude” on textadventures.co.uk

👉 Part 1 – The Unopened Safe

👉 Part 3 – The Missing Masaccio

802. The Unopened Safe (Learn English with a Text Adventure Story) by Peter Carlson

Let’s do another text adventure mystery story by Peter Carlson. Listen to me read the story and make choices to solve the mystery. You can read the story with me (link below) or do the game yourself later. This is the first in a series of 3 stories from Peter’s “Victorian Detective Interlude” game on textadventures.co.uk

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Click here to play Victorian Detective Interlude by Peter Carlson on textadventures.co.uk

👉 Part 2 – The Wraith

👉 Part 3 – The Missing Masaccio


A message from Luke – 2022, A Year in Podcasting

Hello website visitors! I hope you’re doing ok. Did you have a good Christmas (if you celebrate it)?

These three “Victorian Detective Interlude” episodes will be the last episodes of 2022. What a year it’s been! For me, the year started in our new apartment, and everything was a disorganised mess! I had no pod-room where I could record episodes in peace, and our apartment was so noisy that I even had to record a podcast outside in the street. I talked about it in episode 759. Then I managed to set up my new studio/office in a tiny room in a nearby building. I was quite proud of myself because I put up all the shelves (more difficult than you might think!), painted the room, fitted a desk, procured a free office chair and then carried all my books, equipment and other stuff to the room (up 6 flights of stairs, no less). I talked about all that “DIY” in episode 757. After a looooong time the room finally got electricity and an internet connection, I got a new computer (the old one was kaput) and was able to get back to normal podcasting.

Oh yes, then I changed podcast host in June and everything got incredibly complicated again, especially for premium subscribers! But thankfully we all survived all the stress and I was able to record some episodes that I am very happy with, and LEP Premium continued on Acast+ with more and more new episodes.

If you have recently subscribed to LEP Premium – www.teacherluke.co.uk/premium
The best way to use LEP Premium is to add the episodes to a normal podcast app on your phone (not the LEP App, it’s not updating any more 😢, and not Spotify because it isn’t “normal”). Read this page for some important information to help you get started https://teacherluke.co.uk/premium/how-to-add-lep-premium-to-a-podcast-app-on-your-phone-with-acast/

Luke’s English Podcast continues to be the thing I love doing, and I’m lucky to get some income from this work now. I’m happy to say that the podcast continues to go from strength to strength. This year the audio podcast hit 800 episodes, 100,000,000+ downloads in total (incredible), 100+ premium episodes, and my YouTube channel passed 400,000 subscribers (wow!). But maybe the most satisfying thing is that I have received so many messages from listeners with positive things to say about their experiences of learning English with my content.

Thank you for choosing LEP in 2022. Thank you if you left your comments on my episodes. Thank you if you sent me messages of encouragement. Thank you if you sent donations to support this project. Thank you if you signed up to LEP Premium.

I hope you have enjoyed learning English with me in 2022. Here’s to more episodes in 2023! I have lots of plans for more content on a variety of topics – some serious, some funny, but all designed to help you to get more English into your life.

Happy New Year everyone!! 🥂

Luke

Episode 803 “The Wraith” will be published tomorrow, probably!