The second part of my conversation with Antony Rotunno (John Lennon podcaster, English teacher) in which we discuss adjectives of personality, with John Lennon as a case study. Vocabulary list available.
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Introduction Transcript
Hello listeners,
Welcome to this brand new episode of Luke’s English Podcast. Here it is, another episode of my podcast, from me to you, in which I help you try to learn this wonderful language that we call English, and I am here to try to help you do it, in ways that I hope you will find interesting and motivating.
So, how are you doing out there in podcastland today? I hope things are pretty good all things considered.
You are now listening to the fourth in my Beatles mini-series and the second part of this double episode I’m doing about describing John Lennon using various adjectives of personality.
I’m assuming here that you have heard the first part of this. If you haven’t heard the first part of this double episode then you need to go and listen to that. It’s probably the previous episode to this one, ok?
I’m still talking to Antony Rotunno from the Glass Onion: On John Lennon podcast. Antony is also an English teacher with plenty of experience. So I think he’s the perfect guest for this podcast series, and let’s continue going through this list of adjectives we compiled, and let’s see if we can use them to discuss John Lennon’s life, his psychology, his personality.
In the last episode we covered adjectives from A to I. It’s a sort of a rough A-Z, and we did A to I last time so let’s do the rest of the alphabet, more or less.
We might skip a few letters here and there but I’m sure that you’ll forgive us.
Just before we continue, let me read out the list of adjectives. Like last time, we don’t go into full detail about all of these, but have a listen and consider these things: whether you know these words, whether you don’t know them, whether you use them and whether you don’t and also what’s the word stress for these adjectives? How many syllables are there and which syllables are the stressed ones? It can also be useful to consider what the noun or verb forms of these adjectives are, if they have them, and sometimes you’ll hear us using the different forms of these words in these word families as well.
Adjectives of Personality J-Z
O o o <—- these symbols show the number of syllables and word stress in a word. For example, “podcast” = O o (two syllables, the first syllable is stressed)
- Jealous O o, Jittery O o o (Also: to have the jitters, to be on edge, to be nervous, to be anxious)
- Knackered O o, Kind-hearted o O o
- Lovable O o o
- Misunderstood o o o O, Multi-faceted o o O o o
- Narcissistic o o O o, Nasty O o, Nervous O o, No-nonsense o O o
- Open O o, Original o O o o
- Paranoid O o o, Progressive o O o
- Questioning O o o, Quick-witted O- O o (Also: to have the gift of the gab)
- Reclusive o O o, Restless O o, Revered o O
- Sensitive O o o, Sensible O o o, Sentimental o o O o, Superstitious o o O o
- Talented O o o, Tragic O o, Traumatised O o o, Troubled O o
- Uncompromising o O o o o, Unconventional o o O o o
- Violent O o
- Warm-hearted o O o, Well-read o O, Wise, Witty O o
- (not) Xenophobic o o O o (this is the only adjective I could think of that begins with an X!) (xylophone and x-ray are other words beginning with x – but they’re not adjectives of personality)
- Yellow O o / Yellow-bellied O o – O o (cowardly), Youthful O o
- Zealous O o, Zen
Also: Childish O o / childlike O o
We also cover a few common false friends in this episode, so listen out for those.
False friends
- Embarrassed o O o
- Suburbs O o / slums
- Sensitive O o o / sensible O o o
That entire list is available for you to see on the page for this episode on my website. The link is in the description.
Now, I read that list of adjectives pretty quickly. If you didn’t catch the word stress, or in fact if you feel you need to explore these words more slowly, you can always just check the word list on the website page … and copy+paste them into an online dictionary, where you’ll see phonemic transcriptions of the words (so you’ll know how they are pronounced, including word stress) you’ll be able to hear someone say the words, and you’ll get definitions and examples and so on.
OK, so – I always encourage you to check words that you discover in episodes of this podcast in your own time, and I refer you back to episode 720 for more information about how to do that.
OK, so without any further ado, let’s jump back into my conversation with Antony about John Lennon, and here we go.
Ending Transcript
Thank you again to Antony for his contribution to this episode.
Let me suggest again that you check out Antony’s podcast if you’d like to hear more in depth discussions about John Lennon. It’s called Glass Onion: On John Lennon and you can get it wherever you get your podcasts. I must say, it is an excellent listen.
Right, so that’s not quite it for Beatle-themed episodes. The last in the series is with Antony too, and that’s where we turn to look at the music (or should I say listen to the music?) In any case, the next part of this series is all about the music and lyrics, especially the lyrics and Antony is going to guide us through a little exploration of words and phrases in Beatles songs, looking at nice idioms, uses of metaphor and other features that you should find interesting from a language learning point of view. And Antony got his guitar out for that too, so we also get treated to little snippets of songs as we go.
So, you can look forward to the final episode in the series, coming soon.
I say final episode, there’s nothing stopping me from doing more episodes with Beatle themes in the future, and I do plan to do that actually. I’d like to do some specific song breakdowns in which I could explore the story behind a particular song, then play the song for you and analyse the lyrics. That could be great.
Anyway, thank you for listening as usual! I hope this has been interesting and useful, and I will speak to you very soon in the next episode of this podcast. BUt for now it’s time to say, good bye bye bye bye bye.
