06/5/2010 - 3:20 pm
Tags: Canada, culture
Posted in Chatterbox | 3 comments
Please meet our friend Melanie! She is a native English speaker who learned French from a very young age. She traveled to Lyon, France where she met her partner Christophe, who is a native French speaker. In this episode, Maura and Melanie discuss the fun and the challenges of being in a relationship where the [...]
If you bite off more than you can chew things might be difficult for you. This expression might sound like it is talking about eating but – don’t be fooled – it is not. Another expression with a similar meaning is to get in over your head. You can use both of these expressions when [...]
08/16/2009 - 12:21 pm
Tags: ESL Podcast, interview
Posted in Chatterbox | 4 comments
Moheb is joining the Culips team and helping us create an online writing course (We will let you know as soon as we start taking students!), so we wanted to introduce him to you. We talk a bit about his interesting experiences in Egypt, the U.S. and Canada. Can anyone hear a difference between the [...]
08/8/2009 - 9:52 pm
Tags: ESL Podcast
Posted in Catch Word | 4 comments
Of course we all need to push some buttons to turn on a computer or our MP3 players. But to push someone’s buttons has a very different meaning from that literal meaning. In fact, it’s usually not a good idea to push someone’s buttons! In this episode, we look at three expressions, to push buttons, [...]
08/1/2009 - 1:22 pm
Tags: ESL Podcast, expression
Posted in Catch Word | 1 comment
If you want to tell someone to keep something a secret or promise to keep a secret for someone else you can use this expression: mum’s the word. At first it seems like a strange expression…mum is the word? Weird. But you will see it is not so complicated when we explain the possible origin [...]
07/26/2009 - 12:35 am
Tags: culture
Posted in Curious Questions | 2 comments
Eliza from China emailed to ask us about Wedding Anniversaries. Here we talk about different ways to wish someone a happy anniversary, what couples do on their anniversaries and the special names of some anniversaries. If you’re married or not, listen below. Harp: And for other more special anniversaries people celebrate with parties, with their [...]
06/21/2009 - 12:10 am
Tags: ESL Podcast
Posted in Chatterbox | 2 comments
Sometimes we don’t want to be rude and so we need to tell a little white lie. Other times it may be important to be completely honest, and this is called brutal honesty. When is it OK to tell a white lie and when is it necessary to be brutally honest? Harp and Maura discuss [...]
06/13/2009 - 2:48 pm
Tags: ESL Podcast, expression
Posted in Catch Word | 3 comments
Sometimes studying another language is really hard. We wish we could just get it over with and speak the language well. That is today’s expression to get something over with. We usually use this expression when we have an obligation to do something that we don’t want to do. We use the examples of homework [...]
Hello everyone! A good friend of mine who is originally from Montreal now lives in Vancouver. Her name is Marie-Eve and she has a radio show on CITR, which is a community radio station with all kinds of cultural shows and podcasts. You can look at the schdule for their shows here. On May 21, [...]
05/30/2009 - 9:23 pm
Tags: ESL Podcast, expression
Posted in Catch Word | No comments
Sometimes it is not easy to get what we want. What we want could be a job or tickets to a really popular show. In these cases, sometimes we can pull strings to get what we want. When people pull some strings, they use power to get what they want. Is it fair to pull [...]
03/29/2009 - 3:12 pm
Right, I remember in seven years ago on Gulf news paper wrote some aliens arrived in Dubai by spacecraft from different planet and some people gullible believed it and after day Gulf news wrote it’s April fool’s day