Stephen from SEND7 podcast becomes the host to interview me about how I started LEP, the ins and outs of doing this, plus some advantages and challenges for podcasting to learners of English. Video version available.
Learn English with another short story. In fact, this episode contains two stories. Listen until the end for the 2nd one. Repeat after me to practise your pronunciation. Learn some vocabulary & grammar in the second half of the episode, with an explanation of modal verbs of deduction in the past and present. Video version available.
I want to just point out that there is a book full of these very short stories, which you could buy.
It’s called Nothing Short of 100: Selected tales from 100 Word Story
It is a collection of stories from the https://100wordstory.org/ website.
There’s a Kindle version or a print version.
It is published by OUTPOST 19 and it was put together by the team behind the website, including Grant Faulkner, Lynn Mundell and Joshua Michael Stewart.
It is available for you to purchase and I recommend it if you are looking for bite size stories to use for learning or teaching English.
I also recommend visiting https://100wordstory.org/ and www.fridayflashfiction.com where you can find absolutely loads of stories like this with new ones arriving each week.
Sign up to LEP Premium www.teacherluke.co.uk/premium
I do language analysis, vocab & grammar explanations and pronunciation practice.
There are stories and language reviews for conversations which have appeared in episodes of LEP.
If you sign up you can add all the premium episodes to your podcast app of choice, and also get links for video versions and PDF worksheets.
Last week a very special guest visited one of our comedy shows in Paris. I was given a ticket to the show, so I decided to record a podcast while riding through the streets on the way to the show, wondering if I might be able to interview this guest on LEP. Listen to find out what happened, and to hear some rambling and atmospheric sounds of Paris streets at night.
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My dad returns to talk more about UK politics, this time describing the disastrous economic policy of Liz Truss and her Chancellor (finance minister) Kwasi Kwarteng. Advanced level English listening practice – this is complicated stuff, but keep listening to develop your English skills and learn about what’s going on in UK politics and current affairs. Video version available.
Amber and Paul join me in my pod room again for a rambling discussion about everything! Includes a language point about adjective + preposition collocations. Notice the phrases and try to find examples of them in context. Video version available.
Sign up to LEP Premium to get the 3-part series of episodes (audio, video, PDFs) about the language point in this episode.
Here are a few words and phrases that you will hear us saying at the start of the episode.
My mum returns to the podcast to answer some questions from listeners about books, cooking, her relationship with Luke and her granddaughter, the war in Ukraine, the song Imagine by John Lennon, family games, the time she fell off a horse & more…
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Hello listeners!
Welcome back to the podcast.
Today I am joined by my mum and we’re going to spend the episode chatting about this and that, and responding to some questions from LEPsters on Twitter.
I hope you enjoy the episode everyone, Stick with us, and as usual you’ll find that the more you listen, the better it is for your English.
Hi Mum, how are you today?
Where are we?
It’s been ages since you’ve been on the podcast, with your own episode (April 2021 – 717. Gill’s Book Club).
We were doing Gill’s Book Club (we did 3 or 4 of those) and every now and then we talk about doing another one, but we have found it a bit tricky to choose books that
Plus you somehow got out of the habit of reading every day.
Anyway, it’s nice to be able to have you on the podcast again.
My aim for this is mainly to let people just listen to your voice, listen to your words and it sort of doesn’t matter too much what we talk about, as long as we just let the conversation flow and let the English happen naturally. We decided not to limit ourselves to any one specific topic here, preferring instead to cast our net quite wide in terms of things to talk about.
Yesterday evening, I Tweeted this:
It got about 26 replies.
I have a selection of questions from listeners on Twitter which we can explore. That’s probably a good starting point.
Kristýna Waicová @Elvea_Puff – Replying to @EnglishPodcast
Not a very original one but a classic: what book(s) did she enjoyed recently? I’m looking forward to listening to you two, it’s always such a treat. Please give your mum my best and as always, thanks for the podcast!
Aritz @aritz_js – Replying to @EnglishPodcast
Yes! Any books recommendations? I read The Five and A Month in the Country. Thanks.
Kam @ErkamUK – Replying to @EnglishPodcast
Could you please recommend us some books? and what do you think about Harry Potter?
Beniamino Bianco @Mire12374275 – Replying to @EnglishPodcast
Yes! What book dedicated to Winston Churchill can you recommend? Thanks from Ilario.
👇A list of books about Churchill → Skip to number 10 https://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/apr/11/top10s.churchill
En-quête de culture @EmmaB2944 – Replying to @EnglishPodcast
So happy so hear for your mother ! I would like to know what is she currently reading of course. And if she thought you would become a journalist like your father ? When I listen to the Rick reports, I realise that journalism is not so far from your podcast… Many thanks !
James Harris @JamesHarrisNow – Replying to @EnglishPodcast
No questions, but please compliment your mum on raising a fine boy.
Kam @ErkamUK
How does it feel to give birth to a famous podcaster?
Romário Alexandre @Lawter_ – Replying to @EnglishPodcast
How does it feel to know that people from many parts of the world know a little bit about your relationship with your son?
Kam @ErkamUK – Replying to @EnglishPodcast
Why did you name your son Luke?why not Dave?
Jinti Neog @JintiNeog
Why Thompson why not Rickson?
eslam @eslamaoao – Replying to @EnglishPodcast
Did you see signs of luke when he was a child that points to his currently career field?
teresa peltz @teresa_peltz – Replying to @EnglishPodcast
Yes.I’ve one maybe too personal. So you couldn’t take in account. How she feels as a Brit nanny ? Any special food for her niece as a British grandmother?
Gupse Uzun @uzun_gupse – Replying to @EnglishPodcast
So that she can see her grandchild more often, does she ever prefer that you with your family live in england?
Edier Rosa @RosaEdier Replying to @EnglishPodcast
I use both English and Portuguese when talking to my niece. I speak Portuguese, she answers in English and vice-versa. I wonder if she fears not being able to have a fluent comprehensible conversation with her granddaughter in future. That was my main motivation to study English.
Jay Jia @JayJia1982 Replying to @EnglishPodcast
How is her cooking? What is her signature dish? Any secret family recipes?
Is it true that English people in general are not good cook? Gordon Ramsay is a great chef but he usually cook Asian food, his restaurant in London is Asian restaurant.
Luke: Ramsay has 53 restaurants (according to the list on his website, and they serve a variety of things – French fine dining, rustic English food, burgers, pizza, asian food and more…)
Денис Леонтьєв @xxxpdenis Replying to @EnglishPodcast
What does She think about war in Ukraine? By the way,if You like the question,like it in order to see if you have chosen it.
albee @archdeaconsnz – Replying to @EnglishPodcast
Could her tell us about some good memories about her childhood or teenage years?
Znad – @znad9821 Replying to @EnglishPodcast
Why is your son obsessed with Betels?
Alex Replying to @EnglishPodcast
Yes, why after half a century the world still doesn’t understand the meaning of the song Imagine. Tnx
Paragraph about Imagine from https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/john-lennon-imagine-real-meaning-communism/
In an interview with David Sheff for Playboy Magazine, shortly before his death in December 1980, Lennon shared that Dick Gregory had given him and Ono a Christian Prayer-book which had inspired him to write the track. “The concept of positive prayer…If you can imagine a world at peace, with no denominations of religion – not without religion but without this my God-is-bigger-than-your-God thing – then it can be true.”
The Beatle continued, “The World Church called me once and asked, “Can we use the lyrics to ‘Imagine’ and just change it to ‘Imagine one religion’?” That showed [me] they didn’t understand it at all. It would defeat the whole purpose of the song, the whole idea.”
Kristýna Waicová – @Elvea_Puff Replying to @EnglishPodcast
Does she play any word games? Or some other games? :)
Rei da Salsicha de Chicago @jam0rreu Replying to @EnglishPodcast
Ask her to talk about the horse story (You and James told us she fell off a horse when you were a kid).
The One Who Knocks @JaderLelis27 Replying to @EnglishPodcast
How does she feel about Margaret Thatcher
Sorry, we didn’t get time to answer this question! 👇
Alper @tdurdendi – Replying to @EnglishPodcast
I wonder who is her favourite British and/or non-British film director.
Since I haven’t listened to all episodes, I apologize if she had already spoken of it.
Well then listeners, that was my mum in her own episode again, but hold on, we’re not done yet, there’s more.
As you just heard at the end, my wife and daughter just came back from the market so we thought we should stop recording and get ready to have lunch with everyone.
But then my daughter did come into the garden and she picked up the microphone, so here is a little interview with her. So you get 3 generations of the family in one episode. A cross generational podcast for you.
So, I asked my daughter to describe what she had done at the market and before I managed to press record on my recorder, she started talking about how they had gone into the local museum in the town square, where they have various items including a large stuffed bear (a real one, stuffed – it’s quite odd and quite interesting), as well as other things, and I asked if she found the bear frightening or if she’d been traumatised by the bear, and then I asked her about the word traumatised, and she ended up describing how she’d been traumatised by a loud automatic hand dryer in a public toilet once (you know those hand dryers which you get on the wall in public toilets?), and that is where this 10 minute clip begins.
So here we go with a bonus bit of chat with youngest member of the Thompson family.
There you go listeners.
A bit of wisdom there from the voice of the future.
Well, I hope you agree listeners, that that was a real treat, especially if you listened all the way until the end.
I really enjoyed that – being able to ask my mum those questions and get her responses, while sitting in the very nice surroundings of her garden, and I hope you enjoyed it too.
I must say I love making these recordings – in order to publish them for your listening pleasure and for your English listening practice (hopefully both) but also just as a record of family life – the voices of my family and my friends, stories, thoughts, memories, opinions and so on. How nice.
I’m very grateful to my mum for this episode and generally for all my guests who contribute so much.
Send us your comments. It’s nice to read them and to get some human responses to our words.
Sorry if you weren’t able to send in a question. I put up the request on Twitter without much notice. I do that sometimes, in order to get opinions or podcast questions from my audience.
If you want to follow me on Twitter, please go ahead. @EnglishPodcast
I’m also on Instagram but I hardly ever use it. In fact, at the moment I only use it to help me book and promote stand up comedy shows (because some of the comedy nights use Instagram to communicate with comedians), but I am there @lukesenglish
Thank you again for listening and for supporting the podcast.
Do me a favour:
I will speak to you again soon. I have loads of episode ideas and so many things I want to record, but I mustn’t overwhelm you.
Time to focus on some premium content now.
[Part 2 of 2] James and Luke discuss some more “facts” about the UK, but can you guess if they are true or false? Learn some interesting trivia about life in Britain, and improve your vocabulary in the process.
Hello listeners, and welcome back to the podcast.
This is part 2 of a two-part episode called 50 Random British Facts (True or False Quiz) with James.
This is part 2 – so if you haven’t heard part 1, go back and listen to that. It’s the previous episode.
In this one we’re going to go through the rest of the random facts about Britain which my brother and I put together earlier this year.
Just a reminder, of the way this works:
Hopefully you can learn some odd and interesting bits of information about the UK, spot some useful English vocabualry, generally practise your listening skills and have a bit of fun in the process.
If you’d like to work on your pronunciation, here’s a challenge. Try reading the facts out loud, like James and I did. When you read them out, try to say them clearly and fluently, emphasising the right words, connecting parts of the sentence and adding pauses and intonation in the right places. It’s actually quite difficult but a good exercise. You can read the facts on the page for this episode on my website, or you will see them on the screen if you are watching the YouTube version. You could compare the way you say the sentences to the way James and I say them, and perhaps try to copy us, or shadow us. That could be a good way to push your English a bit further with this episode.
As I said at the beginning of the 1st part of this double episode, James and I recorded this in August 2022 and that was before the Queen died in September, and so this is a bit anachronistic as we talk about The Queen in the present tense as she was still alive and the head of state of the country at the time we recorded this. So just keep that in mind while you are listening to this I guess.
Oh and by the way, listen out for a cameo appearance by my daughter somewhere in the middle of the episode.
Now, are you ready to keep calm and carry on?
OK then, here we go with more random British facts – are they true or are they false?
Section 3
Section 4
That’s it listeners.
Thank you for listening.
Don’t forget, you can read all those facts on the page for this episode on my website. That could be a good way to just check some of the words and phrases that you heard in this episode.
I’m sure there’s some new vocabulary in there.
Here’s a selection (just read through them)
That’s just a selection. I’m not going into it all now, but you could pursue that vocabulary and research it and try to remember it and use it, or at least try to notice it again as you listen, read and generally come into contact with English.
Some of them are more frequently used than others. I don’t know how often you will talk about tripe or bails of hay in your life, but that’s the thing about pushing your vocabulary beyond the intermediate plateau. You have to go beyond the limits of the vocabulary that you come across on a daily basis and go into the more uncharted areas of English in order to open things out and expand.
Also, I explained some vocabulary at the end of part 1. I don’t know if you heard that, but I went into various words relating to laws, rules, regulations, government legislation and so on, as quite a lot of those things came up in the 50 facts. So go back and listen to the last 30 mins of part 1, if you haven’t already done so.
You see, it pays to listen to episodes all the way until the end.
Talking to my mum and dad about events in the UK following the death of The Queen on 9 September, including the media coverage, the proclamation of King Charles III, comments about Charles as King and a discussion of the role of the monarch in the UK’s constitution. Also includes some comments about the new Prime Minister Liz Truss and the future of the UK government over the next 18 months.
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Hello listeners,
Welcome back to the podcast. Here is another episode, published only a few days after the last one. As you can see from the title it is another episode talking about the big news of the moment in the UK, the death of The Queen, but also this episode is about the new King, Charles III.
Thank you for the messages which you wrote in the comment section in response to the last episode in which I gave my instant reaction to the news. It is very interesting to read your thoughts, and to see how people have reacted to the news in other parts of the world. There’s been a fairly diverse response but overall most people have expressed their sorrow or their sympathy, with lots of people writing things like “Sorry for your loss” and that’s “loss” not “lost”. Quite a lot of people made that little error. Lost is an adjective and the noun is loss. So, “sorry for your loss”.
As I suggested in the last episode, this one is a conversation with my dad in the form of a Rick Thompson report, but my mum is joining us this time as well. So you’ve got the two of them. Two Thompsons for the price of none. Three in fact including me.
So, if you were wondering what’s been going on in the UK and how it is from the point of view of British people, here we are.
My parents are not flag waving royalists exactly. Long term listeners will probably be aware of their general views on the monarchy. My mum is probably a bit more sceptical about it than my dad, but I think they both think and care deeply about it all and have a critical yet balanced view of the system and the royals as people, overall.
Here is an overview of the things we talk about in this episode.
Coverage
The broadcasts in the media covering an event or series of events. Coverage means how a story is covered by the media.
Footage
This is video of something, for example footage of William, Kate, Harry and Meghan meeting the crowds of people outside Windsor Castle. If someone takes a video of that on their phone or something, they then have some footage in their phone. If it’s filmed with a camera, then the footage is probably on an SD card and can be put into a news report, uploaded, broadcasted on TV as part of the coverage.
Footage – actually refers to “rolls” or “lengths” of video tape, measured traditionally in feet (12 inches or 30 centimetres). Nowadays it’s all digital of course and not measured by length, but it’s still called footage.
Coverage – the way in which events are covered with all the news programmes and news reports of the event – this is media coverage and it includes the broadcasting of footage with commentary etc.
As I ever I hope you find this useful as a way of finding out what’s going on in the UK at this moment in time, and also as a way of practising your listening in English and as a way to notice and pick up bits of English as it is spoken.
One thing – I had the wrong microphone selected in my recording software during this conversation, which is a bit annoying, so without realising it I was recording myself using the inbuilt microphone on my laptop, so the sound quality isn’t up to the same standard as usual. My voice is a bit muffled basically, but it should be ok.
Right, without further ado, let’s get started.
So that was the Rick and Gill Thompson report. I hope you found that interesting and useful.
Overall I think that the effect on the country of The Queen’s death has not been quite as profound as I predicted in previous episodes. I think I said I thought that the entire country would stop and that everything would be cancelled. Of course it means different things to different people and a lot of people will be very affected by it, but as far as I can tell to a large extent things are pretty much carrying on as normal this week except that the story is definitely dominating the news on TV. Over the weekend it was pretty much around the clock coverage of everything relating to the event and we’ve all been getting lots of notifications on our phones of news stories about it. But people are largely getting on with normal life and work and people aren’t mentioning it in their work emails and everything. Anyway, that’s just how I see it from my position.
As always, leave your comments in the comment section. I am always curious to know what you are thinking as you listen to this.
To end the episode here I thought I would play you the audio from King Charles’s video message to the nation, which was published by Buckingham Palace on Friday, the day after it was announced that The Queen had died. I was going to play just the second half of this, where he gives his promise to uphold his constitutional duty and then describes the new roles and duties of the other members of the family. I was going to play just that part, but in fact I’ve decided just to play you the whole thing. So this is 9 minutes of King Charles III addressing the nation, expressing grief at the passing of The Queen and the promising to fulfil his duties as the king.
This is a chance for you to listen to his statement, but also to notice how he does it. Pay attention to his accent, his choice of words and structures, the way he delivers it all and also the more emotional and personal tone which he uses, especially nearer the end of the message.
I’ll also put this video on the page for this episode on my website and you can activate subtitles on that by the way.
So this is King Charles III addressing the nation in a recorded message published on Friday 9 September.
That was King Charles III.
What’s next for the podcast?
I think I won’t publish more episodes about this now for a while, unless I manage to record interviews with people in London when I am there at the weekend. But we’ll see. I don’t want to do too much on this subject. Probably these two episodes are enough. But as I said, if I end up interviewing some local people on Saturday or Sunday, then I will probably publish that, but we’ll see. I don’t want to overdo it.
The official period of national mourning last until The Queen’s funeral which is on 19 September. I think I will wait until then before publishing any more content. That’s about a week away anyway so it’s the usual period between episodes.
So, I will speak to you again in about a week.
About my choice for what to publish next, I think that I don’t need to be too precious about it and I reckon I will probably publish those episodes I did with James, with a little disclaimer at the start stating that they were recorded before The Queen passed away, and any references to her were not meant to be disrespectful, and I hope people don’t take offence or consider the general tone of the episode to be disrespectful at all. Apparently The Queen had a good sense of humour anyway.
All right. Thank you for listening. Thank you to my parents for their contribution this time.
Do take care, and I will speak to you again in about a week.
But for now, good bye bye bye
Queen Elizabeth II died today. Here are my thoughts and feelings about the significance and symbolism of her life and death, recorded just an hour after I first saw the news.
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Join us on a trip to a virtual pub for a couple of pints, a packet of crisps and some advice about how to go to the pub in English, with plenty of funny tangents, with Charlie Baxter. Video version available.
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