ESL Podcast 2 - Family and Family Members

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Hello and welcome to English as a Second Language Podcast. ESL Podcast is brought to you by eslpod.com at www.eslpod.com, a service of the Center for Educational Development in Los Angeles California. My name is jeff McQuillan and let's get started.

 

Today we're going to talk about family and family members and in doing so we're going to go over some idioms and expressions related to expressing likes and dislikes. We focus on two questions today. What family member are you most like and what family member are you least like.

 

1. ESLPod2.mp3

 

Well my family member that I think I have the most similarity to or that I resemble the most would be my sister Teresa. There are a couple of reasons why I think that we are most similar. Number one, she likes to read and I like to read. We're both readers. We like we always have lots of books in our house and are always reading something. My sister also likes to write. She is a writer by profession and I as a researcher do a lot of writing myself. So we both share an interest in writing. More importantly we are the two members of my family that moved away from where my parents and the rest of our family still lives back in the state of Minnesota. We both live here in California. My sister in Northern California and I in Southern California.

 

I think often in dealing with family members and family tensions and family politics. Sometimes it's a good idea to move to another part of the country or sometimes even another part of the world as I have done and break away from those family ties to strike out on our own in order to do something different and that is what both my sister and I did and I think that's one of the things we have in common.

 

Now in terms of my siblings that I have the least similarity with or have the least amount of common interest. That would probably be my brother Mike. Now Mike is a big sports fan. He's an avid watcher of television sports. He was an athlete himself. He taught physical education for a few years. So mike has a lot of interest in sports and he spends a lot of time on things connected with sports both with his own sons as well as his own activities outside of work. I am not a sports person. I don't really like sports that much. I don't watch sports very often and so this is one reason why we're not very much alike.

 

 

Let's start by talking about these terms like, alike and likes. In English the word like as a verb you probably already know means that you're interested or you enjoy something. For example, I like to read, I like to go bowling, I'd like watching television.

 

Like is also used as a proposition to mean that you have a similarity or a resemblance with another person or thing. So we might say that Los Angeles is like New York. They're both big cities. Or I'm not like my sister Teresa in that she likes to drive and I don't. We use the term like here as a way of describing a phrase or expression that has some similarity with something else.

 

Another term that sometimes gets confused but is similar in meaning is alike. That's a-l-i-k-e all one word. And alike is in this case is usually used as an adjective. For example my sister and I are alike. This is to express resemblance once again and similarity.

 

Finally there's the term likes. And likes relates back to that first definition we gave of the verb like. Likes as a noun means that these are the things that you enjoy. So some of my likes are reading, watching television and surfing the internet. All of these would be likes and again like serves there as a noun.

 

Couple of other expressions that you may not have recognized in listening to today's podcast. One was break away from. I mentioned in talking about how my sister Teresa and I are alike that we it's sometimes good to break away from your family. To break away in this case means to separate.

 

I also use the expression strike out on our own or strike out on my own. This is a different difficult term because strike out can mean two things. In this case to strike out on your own means to go off on your own to be independent, to separate yourselves from someone or some group of people. Used alone strike out is a baseball term which you may be familiar with which means to fail at something and we often use this as a synonym for failure. For example I struck out today at work. I didn't get a raise.

 

We've come to an end to another English as a Second Language Podcast. My name is Jeff McQuillan. I want to thank you all for listening today. Remember our podcasts are voted frequently up on our website at www.e-s-l-p-o-d.com that's eslpod.com. This broadcast is copyright 2005 by the Center for Educational Development. Please come back and join us next time at English as a Second Language Podcast. English at the speed of sound.