Transcript of AE 1300 - Learn English with a Short Story: Piss-Up at the Pub

G'day you mob, and welcome to Aussie English. I am your host, Pete, and my objective here is to teach you guys the English spoken Down Under. So whether you want to sound like a fair dinkum Aussie or you just want to understand what the flippin' hell we're on about when we're having a yarn, you've come to the right place. So sit back, grab a cuppa and enjoy Aussie English. Let's go.

G'day, mate. Have you ever wondered what kind of slang and expressions Aussies use at the pub, or when drinking a beer or two? In this episode, you're going to learn a whole bunch of slang, advanced expressions and collocations related to drinking culture and pub culture in Australia.

Don't forget to grab the free worksheet for today's episode. You can download it via the link in the description. It has a full transcript of the short story. We will study in depth today a glossary with all of the interesting vocab from the story, and a 20 question quiz at the end. A multiple choice quiz for you to test your comprehension. So go grab that. It's free. Just click it and you can download it. Don't forget you can listen to this episode as a podcast episode. So if you're not able to watch a video but you still want to study, go and check it out on the Aussie English Podcast. It'll be linked below in the description, but you can find it via any good podcast app as well.

Now lastly guys, I want to say thanks for all the kind comments and words of encouragement from the last episode that we did, where we were looking at a Day at the Beach. That was the first time I had done this structure with a story like this, and you guys seem to love it. So I'm so happy to be doing a second episode. And I asked you guys if you had any suggestions for future episodes. And here's one of those comments. I got this from Mr. PK 266. "Great story! How about camping and exploring the outback with a couple of animals and critters. And two, a diving expedition in the Great Barrier Reef."

Now, next week's episode is going to be number one that he suggested here, a camping and exploring episode about the outback, with loads of animals. So that's a little cheeky preview for next week's episode. But without any further ado, let's get into today's episode.

So today's episode is called Piss Up at the pub. And as a little preview, in Australian English slang, we have loads of terms, expressions, vocab related to 'piss' and you will see that in this episode.

Anyway, let's play the story through. After the story I'm going to go through line by line. We'll read it out, we'll practice the vocab, we'll talk about what things mean in each line, and then I'll play the story for you again, so that hopefully the second time you'll understand almost everything, if not everything, that you hear. Okay, so are you ready to rock? Let's go.

Mick pushed open the door of the Rusty Roo. Feeling a mixture of excitement and nerves. It was his first Friday arvo at an Australian pub, and as an American, he wasn't sure what to expect. The place was already chockers, filled with blokes and sheilas all having a proper piss up. Mick had heard about the legendary Australian pub culture, but nothing could have prepared him for what lay ahead.

As his eyes adjusted to the dim lighting, Mick spotted two blokes at the bar, Tommo and Davo, both dressed in high-vis work shirts, clearly having knocked off after a long day. Already a couple of drinks in, they waved him over with big grins plastered on their faces.

"G'day, mate! You're new 'round here, eh?" Tommo greeted, raising his glass. "Let's grab a brewski. It's time to get on the piss!" Mick furrowed his brow, trying to keep up. "On the what?"

Davo chuckled, leaning in close. "Means we'll be drinking tonight, mate. On the piss all night long!" Still unsure of what he'd gotten himself into, Mick nodded, eager to fit in.

Tommo had been quick to take charge, ordering the first round of beers for the group. As they waited, the barmaid, Shazza zipped past them with a full tray of beers, expertly weaving through the crowded pub like it was second nature. She looked completely swamped, barely keeping up with the mountain of orders that just kept coming in.

"Bloody hell. Shaz is flat out like a lizard drinking tonight," Davo remarked, casually leaning against the bar. "The place is going off like a frog in a sock!"

Moments later, their drinks arrived, three pints of cold beer, each glistening under the warm pub lights. Mick grabbed his pint and with a grin raised his glass. "Cheers!"

"Good on ya, mate!" Tommo cheered, clinking glasses with Mick. "Ah! A pint's just what the doctor ordered. None of that schooner or pot stuff tonight. You Yanks love your oversized drinks, anyway, right?"

"Yeah, you could say that." Mick replied. They all took long, satisfying sips, and Mick felt the tension in his shoulders melt away as the beer settled in. It was only when Tommo set his glass down and looked at Mick with a grin that he realised something was coming.

"All right, Mick, you know the rules, right?" Tommo announced with a hearty slap on Mick's back. "It's your shout next!"

Mick blinked, confused yet again. "My what? What do I need to shout?"

Davo burst into laughter. "Not 'shout' as in 'yell'. If it's your shout, it means it's your turn to buy the next round of drinks, mate. No tight arses allowed in this pub."

Mick chuckled nervously, trying to mentally calculate how many rounds he'd be expected to buy before the night was over.

Before he could ask what to order next, the door swung open with a loud bang, and in stomped Big Pete, a massive bloke with a reputation for causing trouble. He was the kind of yobbo everyone knew to avoid after a few drinks.

Big Pete's eyes immediately locked onto a man sitting across the pub- Gazza. With a smug grin, Big Pete made a beeline for him.

"Oi! Gazza!" Big Pete hollered, his voice booming across the room. "You old bludger! Still supporting that useless footie team of yours?"

Gazza glared up at him, clearly unimpressed. "You're full of it, Pete. Don't you start taking the piss out of my team!"

Mick, feeling lost again, turned to Tommo. "Wait, what does taking the piss mean? As in, taking his beer off him?"

Tomo smirked. "No, mate. If someone's taken the piss, they're making fun of you. We Aussies love a bit of piss-taking!"

Before Mick could respond, Davo leaned in with a grin. "And while you lot are watching Big Pete take the piss, I'm off to take a piss." He winked at Mick as he strolled off towards the bathroom.

Mick turned to Tommo with a quizzical look. "So, I gather Davo means he's going to the bathroom?"

Tomo chuckled. "Spot on mate. There's a huge difference between taking a piss and taking the piss."

Mick smiled, shaking his head in disbelief. "You Aussies really love the word piss, don't you?"

"Too right," Tomo replied with a laugh. "After all, it's a pisser of a word!"

Meanwhile, the pub started to buzz as the banter between Gazza and Big Pete heated up. Mick could feel the tension rising, but Tommo and Davo seemed completely unbothered.

"She'll be right," Davo reassured Mick as he returned from the bathroom. "Happens every week."

But the argument suddenly escalated before anyone could stop it, Big Pete lunged at Gaza, swinging a fist at him and knocking over a full tray of beers in the process. A full-on biffo erupted in the pub, with blokes swinging punches left and right.

"Crikey! Pete's as mad as a cut snake tonight!" Davo shouted over the chaos, clearly enjoying the spectacle.

Mick froze, unsure of what to do. He'd never seen anything like this back in the States. Punches were flying, beer was spilling everywhere, and the pub had turned into a battleground.

"Just another Friday night, mate," Tomo yelled over the noise. "Things always get a bit loose after a few rounds!"

As Mick ducked under the bar to avoid the chaos, a pint of beer splashed all over him, drenching his shirt. One bloke in the corner was already blind drunk, stumbling around, completely out of it.

That's when Shazza had had enough. "Oi! Knock it off, everyone!" she shouted. "Rack off, Pete, or you're banned for life! I'm not cleaning up this mess again, ya drongo!"

Shazza marched over her face red with fury, glaring at Big Pete as she added, "Now, piss off!" Realising he was seconds away from being banned from the pub for good,

Big Pete backed down, muttering one last insult as he stormed out. "Oh, you're weak as piss, Gazza!"

The fight fizzled out, and the pub slowly returned to its usual rowdy but slightly calmer state. Tommo slapped Mick on the back, laughing. "Fair dinkum, mate, you handled that well. Didn't run off like a wuss. Nice one!"

Mick, still dripping in beer, chuckled awkwardly. "So, is this a normal Friday night?" Davo smiled back. "Bloody oath, mate! Things always get a bit full-on around here. But it's all good fun, especially when you're on the piss with mates."

As they settled back down at their table, Shazza, seeing Mick soaked and looking out of sorts, took pity on him and brought over another beer. "Don't worry, love, this one's on the house," she said with a kind smile.

Mick grinned, finally starting to understand the rhythm of Australian pub life. He raised his glass with a newfound sense of belonging. "I'm starting to get the hang of this, I think."

The next morning, Mick woke up with a pounding headache and a foggy memory of the night before. He groaned, grabbing his phone and shooting a quick text to Tommo. "I'm feeling awful this morning, mate." He rubbed his sore head.

Tommy replied almost instantly. "Haha! Reckon you'll need the hair of the dog."

"Dog hair? What are you talking about now, Tommo?" Mick asked confused.

"Hair of the dog, mate. A drink in the morning to get rid of the hangover." Tommo replied. "Meet us at the pub later for a recovery drink."

Mick chuckled despite the throbbing in his head. He was still learning the ropes, but after surviving his first piss-up, he knew he was well on his way to becoming one of the locals.

Okay, so hopefully you enjoyed that guys. Hopefully there was loads of new vocab for you to learn. Loads of slang. Um, hopefully it was a fun story as well. Let's dive into the transcript and just go through line by line. So today's story is called Piss Up at the pub. Let's do it.

"Mick pushed open the door of The Rusty Roo, feeling a mixture of excitement and nerves." So, The Rusty Roo. The rusty kangaroo. This is the name of the pub.

"Feeling a mixture of excitement and nerves." Like, 'nerves', as in you're nervous, right? So there's sort of two, I guess. They're contrasting. You're excited, but you're also a bit nervous.

"It was the first Friday arvo at an Australian pub, and as an American he wasn't sure what to expect." So it was 'the first Friday arvo'. 'Arvo' is Australian slang for 'afternoon'.

So, "Friday afternoon at an Australian pub and as an American, he wasn't sure what to expect. The place was already chockers, filled with blokes and sheilas all having a proper piss-up."

So, 'chockers', we learnt this last week and this means 'really full'. You can use it in terms of people, like a place is 'chock full of people'. You can also say 'chock a block' or 'packed'. It's got loads of people, but we can also use it about items, right? Like as we talked about last week, if you've got an esky that's full of drinks, if it's 'chockers full', it's very, very full.

"Filled with blokes and sheilas." So these are two Aussie slang terms for men and women. 'Blokes', men, 'sheilas', women. The only thing to mention here is that you can kind of use 'sheilas' more often as a man, as long as you're not referring to a woman directly. I don't think women would enjoy being called 'sheilas' directly. For some reason, it has a bit of a negative connotation. It probably comes from the past, when, you know there was a bit more sexism in Australian society, and 'blokes' would often talk about women as 'sheilas' and yeah, they didn't like that.

But, you know, sometimes it can be used to sort of add a bit of Australian, Australian-ness, to the way that you speak or a story you're telling or something you're reading.

So, "Filled with blokes and sheilas, all having a proper piss-up." So, 'a proper piss-up' here would be like a proper party or event with lots of alcoholic drinking, right? So, a 'piss-up' is an event. A party where everyone's drinking alcohol. 'A piss-up'.

"Mick had heard about the legendary Australian pub culture, but nothing could have prepared him for what lay ahead." So, 'lay ahead' is like, 'to come'. What's to come? "Nothing could have prepared him for what's to come." Doesn't matter what you told him. Doesn't matter what you showed him. He wasn't going to be prepared for what 'lay ahead'.

"As his eyes adjusted to the dim lighting, Mick spotted two blokes at the bar. Tomo and Davo, both dressed in high-vis work shirts, clearly having knocked off after a long day." So there's quite a bit going on here. 'Two blokes at the bar', two men at the bar. The 'bar' will be the part of the pub where people will be serving drinks behind it, right. That's the 'bar' within a pub.

We can also use 'bar' to mean a place where you can go and buy drinks like an event, an event, a venue that maybe has events. But typically at a pub, the 'bar' is going to be the the table, the bench, the thing behind which all the drinks are and the people that are working there behind that bar.

"Tommo and Davo". So, quite often in Australian English we add /o/ to names to make them nicknames. So 'Tommo' is almost certainly short for 'Tom'. Well, Tom is shorter than Tommo. The name Thomas will be reduced to 'Tommo', and 'Davo' will be short for David or Dave, right, Dave-oh.

So we do this when we're talking about friends and we give them nicknames and it's just a bit of informality. So just be used to the fact that Australians may have nicknames that end in things like E, O and A as sounds, right.

"Both dressed in high-vis work shirts." So these are 'high visibility'. They're usually bright orange, bright yellow, you know, fluorescent colours. They might be reflecting white, you know, have that really reflective stuff on them as well. And they're used by people who work usually as like tradesmen. Uh, they could work with large machinery, all that sort of stuff. It's so that they can obviously be highly visible at work.

So, "Both dressed in high-vis work shirts, clearly having knocked off after a day at work" or "a long day." Sorry, "a long day". "Clearly having knocked off after a long day already. A couple of drinks in, they waved him over with a big grin with big grins plastered on their faces."

So, "already a couple of drinks in". The idea here would be it's a few drinks 'into the night', 'into the evening', 'into the arvo', 'into the piss-up', 'into the party'. So they've been there for a while and there are a few drinks in. They've had a few drinks.

"They waved him over". That's like, 'G'day, mate, come over here, come and sit with us'. You're waving at someone and telling them to come over. You 'wave someone over'.

"With big grins plastered on their faces." "Plastered on their face". 'Plaster' is the stuff that we have on the wall behind here, right? And if you 'plaster something onto something', or 'something is plastered on something', it's like it's squashed or like spread all over that thing. So if you have 'a grin plastered on your face', it's like you have a 'huge grin all over your face'.

"G'day, mate. You're new around here, eh?" So, that's a little way of saying 'Hello. G'day, mate.' That's a common greeting in Australian English. 'G'day, mate'. 'G'day, mate'.

'Mate', we use to be informal, friendly, and we use it to refer to other people, typically men. But you can use it on women too.

"You're new 'round 'ere, eh?" So there's some interesting stuff going on here. "You're new." So, 'you' 'are' 'new'. 'You are new around here'. So we shortened 'around' to just 'round'.

"You're new 'round 'ere" and then "eh" at the end of the sentence can be used by Australians. Typically, sort of, in Queensland, you will hear it everywhere. But I definitely remember when I travelled to Queensland, loads of people did it almost like a tick. That they were always saying /a/ at the end of all sentences. But he's used it here as a way of turning the phrase into a question, right? It's kind of like a tag question. "You're new 'round here, eh?" So it's sort of like, 'are you?'.

"Tommo greeted raising his glass", so he raised his glass up. "Let's grab a brewski. It's time to get on the piss." A 'brewski'. This is an interesting slang term. 'Brew', right? If you 'brew' beer, you make beer. It is the 'brew'. You 'brew' beer at a 'brewery'. It's a very hard word to say. And 'brewski' is just a slang term for, I guess, a beer, a drink, you know, 'You want some brewski?'.

"It's time to get on the piss." If you 'get on the piss' or if you are 'on the piss', you're drinking alcohol. So if you had someone, maybe in your family who's always drunk, you could say, 'Oh, he's always on the piss', 'he's always on the piss'. And remember, 'piss' typically means like urine. If you were to sort of translate it literally. So like, 'wee', 'pee', 'piss', um, but we use it informally for alcoholic drinks in Australia. So you'll hear this all the time. 'Oh, I'm going to get on the piss tonight with some mates.' 'I'm going to go to the shops and buy some piss.' 'Are you guys coming to the piss-up?'.

"Mick furrowed his brow, trying to keep up. On the what?" That's me doing my best American accent. So if someone 'furrows their brow', it's usually this idea, right? That they're sort of looking confused. They're frowning. They're kind of like mhm. So, "He furrowed his brow, trying to keep up", trying to understand what the person was talking about, what he said, right. "On the what?" Or 'on the what' if I use my American accent, 'on the piss', right?

"Davo chuckled, leaning in close."

So he's leaned in. "It means" or "Means we'll be drinking tonight, mate. On the piss all night long." So, 'the whole night we're going to be drinking'.

"Still unsure of what he'd gotten himself into, Mick nodded, eager to fit in." So 'to fit in' is to feel part of the group, right. You want to feel like you're one of everyone in that group. You want to 'fit in'. I guess it's like being a 'fit'. You know, if you put a puzzle piece into a puzzle and it fits, it fits in that spot. And that's the idea of you, I guess, socially here, you want to fit in with everyone else.

Tommo had been. "Tommo had been quick to take charge, ordering the first round of beers for the group." If you 'take charge', you 'take control', right? You're 'in charge'. You're 'in charge of something'. So, "Tommo took charge". He 'took control' of what was going on.

"Ordering the first round of beers for the group." A 'round of beers' is like if you were there with three mates at the pub, getting on the piss, and you want to get 'a round of beers', you 'get a beer for everyone'. So it's sort of like, I guess around the table. If you had like three people sitting at a table, you're 'getting beers for everyone around the table', so you're getting 'a round of beers'. We use that a lot in Australia.

"As they waited, the barmaid Shazza zipped past them with a with a tray full of beers, expertly weaving through the crowded pub like it was second nature." I don't know why I didn't highlight some of this vocab in here. It's really interesting. 'Barmaid'. This is a word for someone, usually a woman who works at a bar, right? They're a 'barmaid'. I guess the male version would be 'barman'. Uh, 'barmaid'. 'Shazza'. 'Shazza' is a common Australian. A common Australian nickname for 'Sharon'. Anyone with 'Shar' at the front of their name? I guess so, 'Shazza'. It'll typically be 'Sharon' though.

Trying to think, are there any other names that start with Shar? Sharon? Cheryl? Dunno. Yeah. Shazza, Shazza is probably just short for Sharon.

"Zipped past them", so she went past really quickly. Like 'zip', "zipped past them with a tray full of beers, expertly weaving her way through the crowded pub like it was second nature." So, if you 'weave your way through something', it's like there are many obstacles and you're going around them, 'weaving yourself around' those obstacles.

And if something is like 'second nature' to you, it's like it's 'natural'. You know, you you've done it your entire life. It's so natural for you to do. You don't even have to think about it. It's 'second nature'. Don't know why we say 'second nature' as opposed to just 'first nature'. I don't know if there's 'third nature'. 'Second nature'.

"She looked completely swamped, barely keeping up with the mountain of orders that just kept coming in." So if you're 'swamped'. "She looked completely swamped." This is the idea that you are very, very busy with a lot of work. So if you went to work, you worked in an office and all of a sudden all this paperwork got piled up on your desk by, you know, all of your colleagues. You're 'getting swamped'.

I guess the idea being that all this stuff is piling up on top of you so we can use it literally. You know, you can get 'swamped with paper' like that, but it can also be figurative where if Shazza has heaps of these orders coming in and she's having to run around and deliver stuff and pour drinks, she can also be figuratively 'swamped' with the amount of work that she has to do.

"Barely keeping up with the mountain of orders that just kept coming in." So 'mountain' here, we're using again figuratively, to talk about how much she's got coming in, how much work she has, how many orders are coming. Is a 'mountain' of these orders right? They're coming in. They just 'kept coming in'.

"Bloody hell. Shaz is flat out like a lizard drinking tonight, Davo remarked, casually leaning against the bar." So, 'casually leaning'.

"The place is going off like a frog in a sock!" So I wanted to include a bunch of these really cool Australian expressions. 'Bloody hell'. This is an exclamation. Shows shock, surprise, that you're surprised. It shows that you're impressed. 'Bloody hell. Wow.' 'Bloody hell. Wooh!' 'Bloody hell.'.

"Shaz". Now 'Shaz' is a shortened version of 'Shazza', right? So her name would probably be Sharon. It gets turned into Shazza, but it can be further shortened to just Shaz.

"Flat out like a lizard drinking." If you're 'flat out'. 'Flat out like a lizard drinking', you're incredibly busy. 'Oh, man. I have been flat out all day'. 'Flat out like a lizard drinking.' You can say either of those. You can shorten it to just 'flat out', or you can say 'flat out like a lizard drinking'.

"Davo remarked casually, leaning against the bar. This place is going off like a frog in a sock." This is a great Australian expression, and it means for something to be very wild, often a party. Um, it could be a person too. 'They could go off like a frog in a sock'. And the idea would be they're a bit crazy. They're wild. You know, if someone got really drunk and was going crazy at an event, you could say, 'Oh, Pete's going off like a frog in a sock'. And I think the idea would be, if you put a frog inside of a sock, it's not going to be happy. It's probably going to lose its shit, right? It's going to it's going to go crazy. It's going to 'go off like a frog in a sock'. It's going to go wild.

"Moments later, their drinks arrived. Three pints of cold beer, each glistening under the warm pub lights." So 'moments later', 'very quickly after', 'very soon after', moments later. "Only a few moments later, their drinks arrived." 'Three pints'. A 'pint' is probably about this size, right? This is my drink that I'm holding up to the camera. I think it's about 500ml. I'm not sure how many fluid ounces that is for you guys in the US, but it's about half a litre, although it's ounces. So it's. What is that? Imperial? It won't be exact, but it's one of the common sizes of drinks. It's the largest size of drink you can order from a bar that is like for a single person.

We tend to have things, at least here in Victoria. Jugs will be like a litre in something that you can then pour out into multiple glasses. You'll have pints, you'll have mids- or no mids isn't us. I know all these words. What have we got? Pots, pints. And then there's also mids and schooners in different places in Australia. Anyway, let's keep going.

"Mick grabbed his pint and with a grin raised his glass. Cheers!" Again, me doing my American accent. "Good on you, mate. Tommo cheered, clinking glasses with Mick." 'Good on you, mate'. Another great Australian expression, meaning 'well done'. 'Good job'. 'Good on you, mate'. 'Oh, good on you. Well done'.

"Ah, a pint is just what the doctor ordered. None of that schooner or pot stuff tonight." I'll finish it because it all makes more sense. "You Yanks love your oversized drinks anyway, right?" So, 'a pint is just what the doctor ordered'. If something is 'just what the doctor ordered', it is 'perfect'. It is exactly what you wanted. 'Oh my God, that was just what the doctor ordered'. That was exactly what I wanted.

And then he says, "None of that schooner or pot stuff tonight." The idea being 'none of those smaller drinks'. I don't want those smaller drinks. I want a big drink, you know? I want a big drink. "None of that schooner or pot stuff tonight". None of that.

"You Yanks". 'Yanks' is short for 'Yankee'. And I think we got this from the either the Second World War or the First World War when Australia was fighting with Americans. It's probably the Second World War, and many of them were known as Yankees. And I think that goes back to the- is this a civil war in the US? You had like the, is it the Union and the Yankees? There was like North versus South, and I think Yankees was were the Southerners. Americans, correct me if I'm wrong. Anyway, Australians will often refer to Americans as Yanks. It's not meant to be like an insult or offensive. It's just a sort of informal, friendly way of saying, you know, American, these Yanks.

Uh, 'oversized drinks' would be really big drinks. So Americans are renowned for having drinks that are always huge. You know, you go to McDonald's and you end up leaving with, like, a gallon of coke. And our large would be like, you know, the size of a pint. So Americans, especially with takeaway and like drinks, coffees, all that sort of stuff, they tend to have like maxed out their sizes. You know, bigger is better.

"You could say that again, Mick replied." You can say that when someone really agrees with you. 'You can say that again'. So if someone says, 'Oh man, that was the best movie I ever saw. What did you think?' And you agree with them? You could say, 'Man, you could say that again.' 'You could say that again'. You know, like, 'I agree with you, it was the best movie that I've ever seen too. You could say that again'.

Um, or maybe, you know, my son farts, you know, and he'd come home. He does that a lot at the moment. Um, he farts and my wife's like, 'Geez, it stinks in here'. And I might say, 'Yeah, you can say that again'. You know, my eyes might be weeping. It's just horrible. Like, 'you could say that again'.

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Let's keep going. "They all took long, satisfying sips." So like, um, a 'long, satisfying sip of their drink'. "And Mick felt the tension in his shoulders just melt away as the beer settled in." So 'melt away' is for it to just disappear. To dissipate. So that tension in his shoulders, you know, he's relaxing as the beer settled in. So I guess as he started feeling the effects of the beer.

"It was only when Tommo set his glass down and looked at Mick with a grin that he realised something was coming. All right, Mick, you know the rules, right? Tommo announced with a hearty slap on Mick's back. It's your shout next!"

So, 'All right. You know the rules, right?' This is like you would know what's meant to be done. You know 'the norms' here. You know 'the cultural norms', what we do here, the rules. And then "It's your shout next". 'Your shout'. It sort of gets explained in the story. If it's your shout, usually with regards to drinks, it's your turn to pay. It's your turn to buy someone a drink.

So in Australian culture you'll go to the pub. If you're there with mates, one person will go up to the bar and buy a round of drinks for everyone, and then the next person will go up and it's their shout, it's their turn. And it's just a way of obviously being friendly, being generous, but also just saving time so that every time you guys want to get a drink, you don't all have to go to the the bar to keep buying drinks for yourselves. One person can do it at a time, and you usually do it until everyone's paid.

You know, um, one of the worst things culturally you could do in Australia is go out with your mates. Everyone else shouts everyone in the group, and then you bail. You leave, before it's your shout because you don't want to fork out money, you know. So that's that's something that some people do. But that is a massive faux pas. Don't do that.

"Mick blinked, confused yet again. My what? What do I need to shout?" 'My what?' So, what do you mean? It's my what? Your shout. It's your shout. It's my what? What do I need to shout? Like, to shout?

"Davo burst into laughter. Not shout as in yell. It's your shout. If it's your shout, it means it's your turn to buy the next round of drinks, mate. No tight arses allowed in this pub." 'Tight arse' is a kind of rude, informal way of saying someone who doesn't want to spend much money. If you're a 'tight ass', you don't like buying expensive things. Whether for other people, whether for yourself. You just don't like parting with money. You don't like spending money.

The idea being that, yeah, I guess you- for whatever reason, we've decided your butthole is very tight. 'Nothing can come out', right. 'Tight ass'. That's a common one in Australia, I love that. 'Oh, man, he's such a tight ass'. 'That guy's a tight ass'.

"Mick chuckled nervously, trying to mentally calculate how many rounds he'd be expected to buy before the night was over." So, 'mentally calculate', to think in his head. How many rounds of beer am I going to have to buy? Oh my God.

"Before he could ask what to order next, the door swung open with a loud bang and in stomped Big Pete, a massive bloke with a reputation for causing trouble." So, if you 'stomp in', the idea here is that you're 'stomping' your feet down on the ground, right? You're, you're 'stamping' your feet on the ground, making a lot of noise.

You 'stomp into a place' and it's usually because you're angry, right? You don't stomp in happily. It's usually you're angry.

'A massive bloke'. A massive 'man', "with a reputation for causing trouble". This would be 'to make problems'. To cause problems somewhere. To cause trouble.

"He was the kind of yobbo everyone knew to avoid after a few drinks." A 'yobbo' is kind of like an uncouth, unpleasant person, you know. Loud. They swear, they're just not friendly, you know? 'Yobbo' right. 'Bit of a yobbo'.

"Everyone knew to avoid after a few drinks." So the idea being being here, that if Pete comes in and he has a few drinks, you better avoid him. Because after a few drinks, after he's had a few drinks, he turns into an unpleasant person.

"Big Pete's eyes immediately locked on to a man sitting across the pub. Gazza." So another one, Gazza will be a nickname for Gary, right? 'Gary'. 'Gazza'. So, his eyes 'locked on'. He saw the man and 'fixed' his his eyes. He was 'staring at'. He was 'glaring at' this person, his eyes 'locked on' to poor old Gazza.

"With a smug grin, big Pete made a beeline for him." So, a 'smug grin'. This would be like your sort of have this, uh, evil kind of look on your face, right? Like, mmm. Or you could be pleased with yourself. Yeah. It's it's. Yeah. You, you sort of be wary of people with a smug grin, right. Or, 'Oh, here it comes'.

And if you 'make a beeline for something or someone', you go 'straight to that thing' without deviating, right? So a bee flies in a straight line towards a flower. You know it's not. It can fly there. It's not impeded by other obstacles. So if you 'make a beeline for something', you it's like you move in the line of a bee straight to that thing.

"Oi! Gazza! Pete hollered, his voice booming across the room." 'Holler' is like, 'yell'. He 'hollered'. And that's something Americans will use quite a lot, 'to holler'. 'Just give me a holler', you know, 'holler'.

"Oi! Gazza! Pete hollered, his voice booming across the room." 'Booming'. He would be like, 'very loud', right? Boom. Like an explosion.

"You old bludger. Still supporting that useless footy team of yours." A 'bludger' is like a lazy person, so he's kind of using it here as an insult, 'You old bludger'. "Still supporting that useless footy team of yours." 'Footy team', a 'football team'. This could be rugby or AFL in Australia.

"Gazza glared up at him, clearly unimpressed." So this would be like 'to look back angrily', 'to glare at someone'.

"You're full of it, Pete. Don't you start taking the piss out of my team." So, if someone's 'full of it', it's like they're 'full of lies'. They say garbage. What they say is not the truth. 'Oh, you're full of it, mate'. So anything you say is just trash, garbage, rubbish. You know.

"You're full of it, Pete. Don't you start taking the piss out of my team." So, if you 'take the piss'. The idea here is you make jokes, you tease, you belittle. Um. So, Big Pete's making fun of Gazza's footy team. He's 'taking the piss out of' the team.

You can do both. So it can be a normal sort of. Well, I guess it's a phrasal verb. 'Take the piss'. But it can be a phrasal verb with a preposition 'out'. You 'take the piss out of someone' or 'out of something' if you want that object after it. But you can also just 'take the piss'.

"Mick, feeling lost, turned to Tommo. Wait, what is taking the piss mean? As in, taking his beer off him?" So here, the idea is that Mick has heard 'take the piss' and having just learnt earlier that 'piss' means 'alcohol', 'beer'. He's thinking, What do you mean take the piss? Why is this guy just said take the piss out of him? Is he going to take his beer away from him? You know what does he mean? Taking the piss?

"Tomo smirked." This is kind of like, similar to smug grin. It's kind of like, you know he's laughing.

"No mate. If someone's taking the piss, they're making fun of you. We Aussies love a bit of piss taking." So the cool thing I've tried to do here is use 'taking the piss' as a verb, a phrase, a verb phrase, right? 'Taking the piss', 'to take the piss'. But then also use it as a noun, 'piss-taking'. So, 'Pete likes partaking in a lot of piss-taking'; this is the noun. 'He likes to take the piss'. And that is the sort of verb phrase that we're using there. So 'piss-taking' is to sort of 'tease people' or 'to tease someone'.

"Before Mick could respond, Davo leaned in with a grin. And while you, and while you lot are watching Big Pete take the piss, I'm off to take a piss. He winked at Mick as he strolled off towards the bathroom." So, 'to take a piss', that would be to go to the toilet to urinate, to wee, to do a pee, to do a piss, to take a piss, to have a piss. You can use all of these number ones. Number ones? Yeah. Number ones. When you go to the toilet.

"Mick turned to Tomo with a quizzical look." So, he's confused. He's you know, What? "So, I gathered Davo means he's going to the bathroom? Tommo chuckled. Spot on mate. There's a huge difference between taking a piss and taking the piss." 'Spot on'. We use this to mean 'exactly right'. You are, you know, 'perfect', 'spot on'. That is it. That is correct. That is exactly right.

"Spot on, mate. There's a huge difference between taking a piss and taking the piss." It's amazing how just changing the article can completely change the meaning, right? 'Taking a piss', going to the toilet to urinate, or taking the piss. Um, joking around, making fun of someone.

"Mick smiled, shaking his head in disbelief." Like, 'Oh man, are you serious?' This is, you know, confusing.

"You Aussies really love the word piss, don't you?" So I'm trying to do my best American accent, but give me a break. Americans are going to be watching this, you know, vomiting.

"Too right! Tommo replied with a laugh. After all, it's a pisser of a word." So, 'too right'. Again, this is similar to 'spot on'. 'Exactly correct'. You know, you're correct. You're right. Too. Right, mate? "Too right, Tommo replied with a laugh. After all, it's a pisser of a word." If something is a 'pisser'. Again, Australian slang for 'incredibly funny'. 'Man, it is an absolute pisser of a word'. It's a word that is very funny. It's a 'pisser'.

"Meanwhile, the pub started to buzz as the banter between Gaza and Big Pete heated up." So 'buzz', if the pub starts 'buzzing', I guess there's a lot of activity, right? Maybe it sounds like a beehive, with all that buzzing going on, because there are so many people here in this case, you know, arguing, fighting. There's a lot of noise going on.

'Banter'. If you have 'banter' between people, it's kind of like, uh, what would you say? Insults going back and forth.

It can be friendly-ish. It can be really nasty banter, is that kind of back and forth conversation type thing between two people. So here, Gazza and Pete are obviously having a heated argument, a heated fight. Things are 'heating up'. They're getting worse, right? They're intensifying.

"Mick could feel the tension rising, but Tommo and Davo seem completely unbothered." So, 'unbothered'. They didn't care. Nothing bothered them. "She'll be right, Davo reassured Mick, as he returned from the bathroom. Happens every week." So, 'she'll be right'. A great Australian expression for ah, 'it'll be okay'. 'Nothing to worry about'. No worries. She'll be right. There's no she. It's just the phrase we use, right? It's the same as 'it'll be alright'. It'll be fine.

"Davo reassured Mick as he returned from the bathroom. Happens every week." Now this is really cool. We've done. I think it's elision again, where we've dropped the pronoun. 'It happens every week', and we do this when using spoken English all the time, when the context is obvious. So he's talking about obviously this fight between Gazza and Big Pete, or a fight at the pub in general. And he's trying to say 'this happens every week', 'that happens every week'. 'It happens every week'. You don't have to include that pronoun or demonstrative pronoun at the start, 'that' or 'this', and you can just say "happens every week", right? 'Happens every week'.

"But the argument suddenly escalated." So it suddenly got worse, right? It suddenly intensified. "Before anyone could stop it, Big Pete lunged at Gazza, swinging a fist at him and knocking over a tray, a full tray of beers in the process." So, 'lunge' is to, like, jump forward at someone. Um, Big Pete's jumped at Gaza swinging a fist, throwing a punch at him and knocking over a full beer. A full beer of trays. A full tray of beers in the process.

So in the process is like while he's trying to do this thing, in the act of doing this thing, whilst this thing happened, he spilt these, um, these beers. Beers of trays, these trays, this 'tray of beer' over. "A full-on biffo erupted in the middle of the pub, with blokes swinging punches left and right." So, 'full-on', 'full-on' is like very intense. So a 'full-on biffo', 'biffo' is Australian slang for a fight. A 'full-on biffo' is an intense fight, like, Whoa! It's full-on, this fight. This biffo is full on.

"Erupted in the middle of the pub", sort of like exploded, suddenly occurred. It erupted. "With blokes", 'men', "swinging punches left and right." 'Left and right'. If 'something happens left and right' or you 'see something left and right', the idea is that it's everywhere. It's on the left, it's on the right, it's all over the place. But the argument. Oh no, we did that bit already. Let's keep going.

"Crikey! Pete's as mad as a cut snake tonight! Davo shouted over the chaos, clearly enjoying the spectacle." 'Crikey', this is something you would have heard Steve Irwin say all the time back in the day. He made it famous, I think, in the US. 'Crikey' is a way of showing shock or surprise, or being impressed. Similar to like 'bloody hell'. 'Wow'. There's a whole bunch of these that we use in Australian English, you know. 'Blimey'.

"Crikey! Pete's as mad as a cut snake tonight." If you're 'as mad as a cut snake', it could be that you're angry, but it could also be that you're crazy. 'He's mad as a cut snake'. The idea being that if you cut a snake in half, it's gonna go berserk, right? It's gonna lose its shit. For good reason. And, um. Yeah, if you're as mad as a cut snake. Another great Aussie expression for 'crazy angry', um, 'off your tree'. You know, there's loads of these ways of- 'having a few roos loose in the top paddock'. We've got heaps of them!

"Dave shouted over the chaos." So the idea being there's chaos everywhere. All this stuff's happening, and he shouts over the top of it so that other people could hear. "Clearly enjoying the spectacle." So the 'spectacle' is this thing that's happening that's worth watching, right? He's a 'spectator'. He's watching the spectacle. He's 'spectating'. Um, yeah. Spectacle.

"Mick froze, unsure of what to do. He'd never seen anything like this back in the States." 'In the States', 'the States'. This is the United States of America, and we shorten this quite often. This isn't just Australian, this is just English in general to the States, you know. 'Where are you from?' 'Oh, the States'. It's just a short version of The United States of America or The United States.

"Punches were flying, beer was spilling everywhere, and the pub had turned into a battleground." So when something's 'flying', the idea is that it's all around in the air, right? So people are flying. Well, punches are 'flying', people are 'throwing punches'. The idea is there's punches happening everywhere. You know, all these people are fighting.

"Beer was spilling everywhere and the pub had turned into a battleground." A 'battleground' is a place where a battle takes place, right? That's the ground on which a battle occurs. "Just another Friday night, mate, Tomo yelled over the noise. Things always get a bit loose after a few rounds!" So, 'things always get a bit loose'. That would be like a little wild, a little crazy, loose, you know, as opposed to, I guess, uptight. Tight, more formal. Formal, informal, sort of like tight and loose. We use that comparison in English. You know, you can be uptight or you can be laid back and loose, if that makes sense.

"After a few rounds", a few rounds of beer, a few rounds of drinks. "As Mick ducked under the bar to avoid the chaos, a pint of beer splashed all over him, drenching his shirt." If you get 'drenched', you get 'very wet'. You get saturated. You get covered in water, right? 'Drenching his shirt' so he had a beer spill on him, splashed all over him, and it drenched his shirt.

"One bloke in the corner was already blind drunk, stumbling around completely out of it." If you're 'blind drunk', you are 'incredibly drunk'. I guess the idea being that you can barely see, you know, you're that wasted, you're that inebriated. You are that, um, intoxicated that you can't see properly. You're 'blind drunk'. "Stumbling around", you know, unable to walk properly, falling over.

"Completely out of it." If you're 'out of it', it's that you're not there like consciously, you know? So like, yeah, if you get drunk and you pass out or you're, you know, you can barely function. You can barely walk, you can barely talk, you are out of it. It's kind of like you're not 100% conscious. You're not 100% there.

"That's when Shazza had had enough." Right, 'to have had enough', to not want any more. Like, that's that's enough. That's going to suffice. No more. She's had enough. "Oi!" Well, Shazza doesn't have a low voice.

"Oi! Knock it off, everyone!" Knock it off! Stop it! Cut it out! Knock it off! "She shouted. Rack off, Pete, or you're banned for life! I'm not cleaning up this mess again, you drongo." 'Rack off'. This is a bit of an outdated slang term that you know older generations may still use.

It was very popular in the 90s and the early 2000 in Australia. And it means go away, piss off. "Rack off, Pete, or you're banned for life." You can't come back here ever. You know, you get a lifetime ban. "I'm not cleaning this mess up again, you drongo." 'Drongo' is like an informal, not to offensive way of calling someone an idiot. Moron. You know, drongo. You idiot. You drongo.

"Shahzza marched over, her face red with fury, glaring at Big Pete as she added, Now, piss off!" Again, I've tried to use piss here in a way that Australians will use this. If you tell someone to 'piss off', you're telling them to 'go away'. It doesn't have anything to do with beer, doesn't have anything to do with urine or going to the toilet. It means 'get out of here', piss off, piss off.

"Realising he was seconds away from being banned from the pub for good, Big Pete backed down." So he's sort of like 'surrendered'. He 'gave up'. He was like, All right, all right. I'm backing down. "Muttering one last insult as he stormed out." If you 'mutter something', it's like you 'say it under your breath'. You say it softly. Like you know he's muttering. "One last insult". So one last offensive thing, "as he stormed out". It's kind of like, is he, he raged. He got angry and stomped again out of the pub. He stormed out.

"You're weak as piss, Gazza!" 'Weak as piss'. So again, using 'piss', if something is 'weak as piss', it is 'very, very weak'. It's not very strong. So we're saying together, you know You're weak as piss, Gazza. You're weak, you're you're a wuss. You're, you know, shitty person. You're weak, you're weak is piss, Gazza. Weak is piss. So you can use it in English, Australian English in particular to just mean very weak. You can use it about people.

You could use it about drinks. So you could get a beer and just be like, This beer is weak as piss, you know, it's almost like, I guess we're liking likening it to urine, having no alcohol in urine. And you could just, you know, although I don't know why you would drink it. You say that, you know, urine is weak as piss because it's piss. There's no alcohol in it. So if a drink doesn't have much alcohol or it's not very strong, you can just say, oh, it's weak as piss weak is piss.

"The fight fizzled out and the pub slowly returned to its usual rowdy but slightly calmer state." If something 'fizzles out', it's sort of like, you know, like it dissipates, disappears. So the fight stopped, 'fizzled out', "and the pub slowly returned to its rowdy but slightly calmer state." So, 'rowdy'. There's a lot of noise going on. There's a lot of talking, all that sort of stuff, you know, it's loud, but it's calmer than it was.

Right. It's a calmer state.

"Tommoslapped Mick on the back, laughing. Fair dinkum mate, you handled that well. Didn't run off like a wuss. Nice one." So, 'fair dinkum, mate'. He's like, you know. Truthfully? Honestly. Fair dinkum, mate. 'Honestly, mate, you handled that well'. You did a good job. You did well in that situation. "You didn't run off like a wuss", 'didn't run off like a wuss'.

We've done that elision thing there again where we've removed the pronoun because it's obvious. You don't have to say 'you' because you're talking to the person. They know you're talking to them. "Didn't run off like a wuss."

A 'wuss' is a coward in Australian English, a 'wuss'. "Nice one", you know. Nice one. Good job. "Mick, still dripping in beer, chuckled awkwardly. Heh. So, is this a normal Friday night?" Is this a normal Friday night? Again, my atrocious American accent. "Davo smiled back. Bloody oath mate. Things always get a bit full on 'round 'ere, around here, but it's all good fun, especially when you're on the piss with mates."

So 'bloody oath'. We use this in Australian English to when you agree with someone. Oh man, it's hot today. Yeah. Bloody oath it is. You know. Bloody oath mate. You're right, it is. You're. You know what you said is true. Bloody oath mate. Bloody oath. "Things always get a bit full on." Things always get a bit intense. "Around here", in this place.

"But it's all good fun", you know, Yeah, don't take it seriously, mate. Um, "Especially when you're on the piss with mates." When you're 'drinking with mates', you guys are 'on the piss together'. You're drinking alcohol together.

"As they settled back down at their tables, Shazza, seeing Mick soaked and looking out of sorts, took pity on him and brought over another beer." So, 'Mick looked soaked'. He was wet from the beer. "Looking out of sorts." So I guess that's sort of like looking a bit sad out of place. Awkward, 'looking out of sorts'.

"Took pity on him", so, felt sorry for him. If you 'take pity' on someone, you 'feel sorry' for them. So she's there looking at him, drenched, and he's just like, Oh, poor dude. I'll give him a free beer.

"And brought over another beer. Don't worry love, this one's on the house, she said with a kind smile." 'Don't worry', you know. 'Not a problem'.

"Love." Now, I wanted to include this because this is how women will often refer to men. Probably women too, in an informal way. It's kind of their equivalent of 'mate', especially in more regional areas. In Australia, if you go into the outback and you go into a shop and there's a woman working there who's selling the stuff that you're buying, whatever it is, she's probably going to call you 'darl' or 'Love'. That would be the stereotype in Australia. She may even call you 'mate', but it's a common one.

Men don't typically use it unless they're talking to women. Women will use it on everyone, if that makes sense.

"Don't worry, love, this one's on the house, she said with a kind smile." If 'something is on the house', the 'house' is kind of like the pub itself. The business, the establishment, the pub. Um, and so if it's 'on the house', it is them who are paying for it. It's free, you know. The establishment is paying for that beer. "Don't worry love, this one's on the house." This one is free.

"Mick grinned, finally starting to understand the rhythm of Australian pub life. He raised his glass with a newfound sense of belonging." So, 'newfound' is like something that you have just found. You have just discovered- he's got this newly discovered sense of belonging. He feels like he 'belongs' in this pub. You know, I'm one of this one of these guys. I'm one of these guys.

"I'm starting to get the hang of this." I think if you 'get the hang of something', you 'start to understand it'. You know, you start to get used to it. You 'get the hang' of things. He's 'getting the hang' of Australian pub culture.

"The next morning, Mick woke up with a pounding headache and and a foggy memory of the night before." So, you know, he's got a really bad headache. His head is pounding. It's going like bang, bang, bang, bang, bang.

And if you've 'got a foggy memory', the idea is that you can't really remember everything clearly, right? Imagine you're inside. Your mind is full of fog, right? Like smoke, clouds. And you can't see your memories very clearly. You've got a clear memory. Would be the opposite, I guess. Or, you know, sharp memory and a 'foggy memory' is to 'not be able to remember things clearly'.

"He groaned, grabbing his phone and shooting a quick text to Tommo." You can 'shoot someone something'. And this is to 'send'. It's a synonym for 'send'. You can 'send someone a text'. 'Text'. You can 'shoot someone a text'. You could 'shoot them an email'. You could 'shoot them a look'. You could 'shoot them a message', right?

"I'm feeling awful this morning, mate." 'I'm feeling awful'. I'm 'feeling horrible' this morning. "He rubbed his sore head. Ohh. Tommo replied almost instantly. Reckon you'll need hair of the dog?" Sorry. "Reckon you'll need the hair of the dog." Reckon you'll need the hair of the dog?"

Again, we haven't said "I reckon you'll need the hair of the dog". He's just dropped that and just said "Reckon you'll need hair of the dog?"

"Dog hair? What are you talking about now, Tommo? Mick asked, confused. The hair of the dog, mate." Gotta get my voices straight. "A drink in the morning to get rid of the hangover."

So 'hair of the dog' is when you are drunk one night. You go home, you wake up hungover. You feel like shit, right? You got a headache, you're hungover, you feel, you know, just under the weather. The- I don't know if it's true or not because I've never really done it, to be honest. But the myth is that you just start drinking alcohol again and you don't feel bad. It sort of clears up the hangover. And we call it 'hair of the dog', 'the hair of the dog'.

I don't know if this is unique to Australia, probably isn't, but that's what it is. 'Hair of the dog' is when you have a drink after a night out drinking, and you're hungover, right.

"Hair of the dog, mate. A drink in the morning to get rid of the hangover." To get rid of something, to, uh. I'm trying to think of a good synonym, to stop that thing from being. Being here to throw it away, to get rid of it. Yeah.

"Tommo replied. Meet us at the pub later for a recovery drink." So the idea here being that he's going to drink some more beer or some other alcoholic drink, I guess you could have an OJ, an orange juice, to recover. It's a recovery drink. "Mick chuckled despite the throbbing in his head", throbbing, like, pounding that doof doof doof.

"He was still learning the ropes, but after surviving his first piss-up, he knew he was well on his way to becoming one of the locals." If you 'learn the ropes', it's like you 'learn the rules'. The way that things work at a job, in a location, to learn the ropes, you know. And 'to feel one of the locals', to feel like one of the locals, to become one of the locals is to start being treated as or feeling like or understanding the people from that place, the locals.

All right. So now let's have a listen to that story one more time through. Keep an eye out, look at the vocab and see how much you understand. Hopefully a lot more this time. Let's do it.

Mick pushed open the door of The Rusty Roo, feeling a mixture of excitement and nerves. It was his first Friday arvo at an Australian pub, and as an American, he wasn't sure what to expect. The place was already chockers filled with blokes and sheilas all having a proper piss-up.

Mick had heard about the legendary Australian pub culture, but nothing could have prepared him for what lay ahead. As his eyes adjusted to the dim lighting, Mick spotted two blokes at the bar, Tommo and Davo, both dressed in high-vis work shirts, clearly having knocked off after a long day already a couple of drinks in.

They waved him over with big grins plastered on their faces. "G'day, mate. You're new around here, eh?" Tommo greeted, raising his glass. "Let's grab a brewski. It's time to get on the piss." Mick furrowed his brow, trying to keep up. "On the what?"

Davo chuckled, leaning in close. "Means we'll be drinking tonight, mate. On the piss all night long." Still unsure of what he'd gotten himself into, Mick nodded, eager to fit in. Tommo had been quick to take charge, ordering the first round of beers for the group.

As they waited, the barmaid, Shazza, zipped past them with a full tray of beers, expertly weaving through the crowded pub like it was second nature. She looked completely swamped, barely keeping up with the mountain of orders that just kept coming in.

"Bloody hell, Shaz is flat out like a lizard drinking tonight," Davo remarked, casually leaning against the bar. "The place is going off like a frog in a sock!" Moments later, their drinks arrived, three pints of cold beer, each glistening under the warm pub lights.

Mick grabbed his pint and with a grin raised his glass. "Cheers!" "Good on you, mate!" Tommo cheered, clinking glasses with Mick. "Ah, a pint's just what the doctor ordered. None of that schooner or pot stuff tonight. You Yanks love your oversized drinks anyway, right?" "Yeah, you could say that," Mick replied. They all took long, satisfying sips, and Mick felt the tension in his shoulders melt away as the beer settled in. It was only when Tommo set his glass down and looked at Mick with a grin that he realised something was coming. "All right, Mick, you know the rules, right?" Tommo announced with a hearty slap on Mick's back.

"It's your shout next!" Mick blinked, confused yet again. "My what? Why do I need a shout?" Davo burst into laughter. "Not shout as in yell. If it's your shout, it means it's your turn to buy the next round of drinks, mate. No tight arses allowed in this pub." Mick chuckled nervously, trying to mentally calculate how many rounds he'd be expected to buy before the night was over.

Before he could ask what to order next, the door swung open with a loud bang and in stomped Big Pete, a massive bloke with a reputation for causing trouble. He was the kind of yobbo everyone knew to avoid after a few drinks.

Big Pete's eyes immediately locked on to a man sitting across the pub- Gazza. With a smug grin, Big Pete made a beeline for him. "Oi! Gazza!" Big Pete hollered, his voice booming across the room. "You old bludger, still supporting that useless footy team of yours?"

Gazza glared up at him, clearly unimpressed. "You're full of it, Pete. Don't you start taking the piss out of my team." Mick, feeling lost again, turned to Tommo. "Wait, what does taking the piss mean? As in taking his beer off him?" Tomo smirked. "No, mate. If someone's taken the piss, they're making fun of you. We Aussies love a bit of piss taking." Before Mick could respond, Davo leaned in with a grin. "And while you lot are watching Big Pete take the piss, I'm off to take a piss." He winked at Mick as he strolled off towards the bathroom.

Mick turned to Tomo with a quizzical look. "So I gather Davo means he's going to the bathroom." Tomo chuckled. "Spot on, mate. There's a huge difference between taking a piss and taking the piss." Mick smiled, shaking his head in disbelief. "You Aussies really love the word 'piss', don't you?" Too right!" Tomo replied with a laugh. "After all, it's a pisser of a word."

Meanwhile, the pub started to buzz as the banter between Gaza and Big Pete heated up. Mick could feel the tension rising, but Tommo and Davo seemed completely unbothered. "She'll be right", Davo reassured Mick as he returned from the bathroom. "Happens every week."

But the argument suddenly escalated. Before anyone could stop it, Big Pete lunged at Gazza, swinging a fist at him and knocking over a full tray of beers in the process. A full-on biffo erupted in the pub, with blokes swinging punches left and right.

"Crikey! Pete's as mad as a cut snake tonight!" Davo shouted over the chaos, clearly enjoying the spectacle. Mick froze, unsure of what to do. He'd never seen anything like this back in the States. Punches were flying, beer was spilling everywhere and the pub had turned into a battleground. "Just another Friday night, mate," Tomo yelled over the noise. "Things always get a bit loose after a few rounds!"

As Mick ducked under the bar to avoid the chaos, a pint of beer splashed all over him, drenching his shirt. One bloke in the corner was already blind drunk, stumbling around completely out of it.

That's when Shazza had had enough. "Oi! Knock it off, everyone!" she shouted. "Rack off, Pete or you're banned for life! I'm not cleaning up this mess again, you drongo!" Shazza marched over her face red with fury, glaring at Big Pete as she added, "Now piss off!"

Realising he was seconds away from being banned from the pub for good, Big Pete backed down, muttering one last insult as he stormed out. "Oh, you're weak as piss, Gazza." The fight fizzled out and the pub slowly returned to its usual rowdy but slightly calmer state.

Tommo slapped Mick on the back laughing. "Fair dinkum, mate, you handled that well. Didn't run off like a wuss. Nice one!" Mick, still dripping in beer, chuckled awkwardly. "So, is this a normal Friday night?" Davo smiled back. "Bloody oath, mate! Things always get a bit full-on around here. But it's all good fun, especially when you're on the piss with mates."

As they settled back down at their table, Shazza, seeing Mick's soaked and looking out of sorts, took pity on him and brought over another beer. "Don't worry love, this one's on the house," she said with a kind smile. Mick grinned, finally starting to understand the rhythm of Australian pub life. He raised his glass with a newfound sense of belonging. "I'm starting to get the hang of this, I think."

The next morning, Mick woke up with a pounding headache and a foggy memory of the night before. He groaned, grabbing his phone and shooting a quick text to Tomo. "I'm feeling awful this morning, mate." He rubbed his sore head. Tommo replied almost instantly. "Reckon you'll need the hair of the dog?"

"Dog hair? What are you talking about now, Tommo?" Mick asked confused. "Hair of the dog, mate. A drink in the morning to get rid of the hangover," Tommo replied. "Meet us at the pub later for a recovery drink." Mick chuckled despite the throbbing in his head, he was still learning the ropes, but after surviving his first piss up, he knew he was well on his way to becoming one of the locals.

All right mate. Don't forget to grab today's worksheet down below. The link is in the description. Remember, you'll get the full transcript of the story. You'll get the vocab glossary, and you'll have the 20 question multiple choice quiz right at the bottom to test your listening comprehension skills. And um, yeah, I hope you enjoy it.

Besides that, don't forget to comment below and let me know what story you would like me to do next. Remember, we're going to do one next week on camping in the bush with loads of different animals and other things going on. So I hope you're back to see that one like and subscribe. All that good stuff. And besides that, I hope you have a ripper of a week and I'll see you next time. Tooroo!

Transcript of AE 1287 - How I Got Fluent in a Language without Leaving Australia

G'day you mob, how's it going? Welcome to this episode of Aussie English. So today I've got something a little different. I have tried to get back into creating videos on YouTube! And today is one such video. So I thought I would sit down and sort of talk a little bit about my journey learning Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, to fluency, and all the resources that I used. Um, how I worked on fluency, improve my reading, all of that sort of stuff.

So it's a rather long video on YouTube that you can check out. I will include the link in the description so that you can watch this video if you want. There are loads of sight gags, so to try and mix things up and make it more interesting to watch, I've kind of inserted little clips from films. They'll make more sense if you watch the video. Listening, you may sort of get an idea of what's going on. But yeah, they're sight gags, right? They're sort of jokes that you kind of have to see. So you've been warned with regards to those!

But you should be able to enjoy this episode nonetheless, and I would love for it to be a, an open discussion. If you guys have tips and tricks for how you've learned foreign languages, hopefully Australian English to fluency, be sure to leave them in the comments on the video, or send me a message and we can have a chat about it as well.

But yeah, let's get into today's video. Or podcast episode rather. Ah ah ah.

Guys, how's it going? Welcome to this episode of Aussie English. I am your host Pete. Today I thought I would discuss how I learnt Portuguese [speaks Portuguese] and why I still suck. [speaks Portuguese] in Portuguese. Why I still suck at Portuguese.

Okay, so the journey. Probably about a decade or so ago, I was learning French like crazy. I'd studied French, Chinese, I'd done Japanese and Indonesian as well at, um, primary school and high school. French was my strongest, and it had been like a decade since I had really learned French. Well, anyway, long story short, I started training MMA in Brazilian jiu jitsu, was meeting loads of foreigners in Melbourne and was quite envious of the fact that they spoke so many languages and quite often very well.

And always felt a bit insecure. It was just like God, I live in such a multicultural city but I only speak English. I don't speak French anymore, I can't communicate well and I really wish I could. So I spent all this time learning French, probably about 2 or 3 years, going at it full on. Got to a really good level and obviously doing jiu jitsu, Brazilian jiu jitsu. I was meeting lots of Brazilians, so I started learning Portuguese as well.

And that's where this story comes, because Portuguese is now way better than my French. Because partly because I don't really use French anymore. So it's kind of taken a nosedive. But yeah. So today's story is about Portuguese. What I did, what I would do if I went back, you know, what advice I would have for myself. And hopefully you guys can take from this. Take what's useful, discard what isn't, and make the rest uniquely your own. Is that the Bruce Lee quote? Anyway.

Okay, so when I first started learning Portuguese, I started with Duolingo at the time. [Ooh, brother. Ooh! What's that?] This was probably 2015? Maybe? Maybe about that? So at the time Duolingo was pretty good in terms of its use. It was a good kind of introductory avenue to the language, to the basics of the language, to learn the 2000 most common words.

The main problem with it now is that it's so commercialised that, you know, it has algorithm built into it, and the whole purpose of Duolingo is to make money now. At the time, it was free and you could do a lot of stuff. I think they made their money at the time from translating. You know, people would upload documents and students on there could translate them between two different languages. And I think that was the business model at the time. Now they're selling, you know, a subscription to Duolingo Plus or whatever it is. And so their motivations have shifted from just being the best language learning platform for beginners, to now needing people to stay on there for as much as possible, to either buy a subscription or watch as many ads as possible.

And so when I went back to try and use Duolingo a while back, checking out Chinese or something, it It was so slow, like it took so long to learn anything, and it seemed like you were just going over the same five words from a single lesson. And so I feel like it has totally changed and is now all about keeping you on there for as long as possible, watching ads or buying a subscription, and not necessarily about introducing you to the basics of a language as quickly and as effectively as possible.

So at the time, I used Duolingo. I think I smashed through the tree in a matter of weeks. I think it may have been like a month or so. I did the entire Brazilian Portuguese tree. And I just kept reviewing things, right. I was just trying to get a basic idea of how the grammar worked, the vocab.

And Duolingo, at the time, I felt was really good for pronunciation. Because you've got lots of little short phrases and words, and you could hear them being said often by native speakers, and you would have time to repeat out loud. So I was very speaking focussed from the beginning, and I felt like that helped develop my Portuguese.

But yes, now would I suggest it? No. I would suggest finding other materials. Duolingo is probably a massive waste of your time. If your goal is to rapidly expose yourself to the basics of a language, both vocabulary and and grammar. I guess as well as, um, pronunciation. So there's that.

Number two. So what did I do after that? After I had smashed out Duolingo and gotten the basic idea for it. I've sort of jumbled these up, but I'll go through them. I started looking at basic Portuguese grammar books. I can't remember the exact brand. I'll chuck it up on screen.

One of those things that I noticed quickly, using this grammar book, was that there were quite stark differences between the languages and the grammar that was used. The weird thing that I encountered is that, at least from my experience, it seems like Portuguese Portuguese, they follow the rules a lot more stringently, and use a lot of the more formal pronouns and conjugations.

Whereas Brazilian Portuguese seems to just constantly be deleting these rules. Or not, not actually applying these grammatical rules. [Fuck the rules! Don't worry about it.] So getting my head around that was really confusing. Because there seemed to be like no materials for learning Portuguese grammar online compared to when I was learning, say, French. Or when I looked at Spanish and Italian, those three seem to have so many resources.

Whereas Portuguese, it was just a vacuum of useful material. To try and master the grammar, you would have to get online and search specific grammar points and try and emphasise the fact that it was Brazilian Portuguese, and not Portuguese Portuguese.

And like, one of these examples, I remember with my wife, we got together before I was very fluent in Portuguese, and she's from Brazil. And I remember using the word 'rapariga', which means 'girl' in Portuguese Portuguese, in front of her. I can't remember if I was using it to refer to her or not.

And she just looked at me, horrified. And I was just like, What? I was just trying to say, like, you know, Whatever, 'girl'. And she said, in Brazilian Portuguese, 'rapariga' means 'whore'. [Whoops!] You know, 'slut'. You can't use it the same way. And I just remember being like, Why? Why?

So there were all these stark differences between the two languages, which made it kind of a nightmare at the time to try and and and learn from traditional grammar resources. So what would I do now? I would probably rely heavily on ChatGPT, whilst also looking at resources online that focus solely on Brazilian Portuguese. There must be so many better ones out there now.

Now, paired with this, the grammar books, pretty quickly I found some podcasts that were really helpful. And the first one I used was Brazilian PodClass and this was useful for me coming out of Duolingo and learning the basics of the language. Because it was bilingual.

So it would have Portuguese first, and then they would translate literally every single line into English. This podcast aims at teaching Brazilian Portuguese. [Portuguese voice over].

As I said, this was really helpful and the good thing was these episodes were structured around themes. So they would have like a dialogue at the start that they would then translate. They would go through the vocab in the dialogue, which might be related to, say, the airport. And they might talk a bit about pronunciation and grammar as well.

And so I think I went through maybe 3 or 400 of these episodes in a handful of months, and it was just so good for, again, taking that next step and getting used to Brazilian Portuguese pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary and, you know, learning the difference between how plurals are formed depending on the word endings and all those sorts of things, you know. They have different pronunciations for like alveolar, aviary changes from singular to plural.

So this was a brilliant podcast. The thing I found difficult was that pretty quickly, after a handful of months, although I still felt like I had a lot of grammar and everything to learn, I felt like it was holding me back because there was just so much English in this podcast.

[You've been holding me back this whole time!] It had gotten to the point where that podcast would have been so much more useful if it had that initial stage of, say, being in a bilingual setting and then quickly transitioned into just being Brazilian Portuguese, because then you would just be doubling your efforts. You would have 100% immersion in the language every time you listen to an episode, instead of 50% in English, 50% in Portuguese, which kept sort of jarring you whilst listening.

So that led me to try and find another podcast at the time. And again, I haven't looked recently. There's probably so many more, so apologies for that. If you've got some suggestions, let me know below.

But I found one called Café du Brazil. I think it was Cafe du Brazil, right? Brazilian cafe or cafe from Brazil. Now this was brilliant! Because it was like a radio show that they turned into a podcast episode. And they had two hosts on there that would chat. It was 100% in Portuguese [Portuguese language] Cafe Brasil, also Luciano Perez [Portuguese language].

They would give you a transcript. And they even had access to Brazilian music. So they would have this really cool structure of having someone ask them a question, like a call up show on a radio, you know, people from Russia or people from America or people from Vietnam. You know, people from all over the world learning Portuguese were asking them questions.

But also there would be Brazilians ringing them up and asking them stuff about Brazil, like, Why do we do this? Why is this a thing? Why do we say this? And then they would go into usually I think, a song. And they would play a section of it and talk about the vocab from that song, which was just really cool. This was brilliant. It was hard going at first in terms of adjusting from Brazilian podcasts and a bilingual podcast to one that is effectively two native speakers talking. [This is not fun for me.].

I didn't even know if they spoke English. They may have just been Brazilian speakers and so they weren't dumbing things down. They weren't speaking slowly, they were just chatting away. And it was hard going at first, but the transcripts were the lifesaver for me. And I got so much out of studying, one episode at a time, printing out the transcript, taking notes, and just repeating again and again and again, really trying to squeeze as much juice out of that lemon. [Squeeze the lemon.] That was every single episode.

And I feel- we can probably talk about this a bit later, but I feel a lot of people skip that stage or move on from that stage too quickly. That stage of intentional study, using a resource and just being as repetitive as possible, to the point that you squeeze as much lemon out of that, as much lemon, as much juice out of that lemon, as much lemon out of that juice as you can. [I have to squeeze the lemon. Oh, you heard me.] So that you, you're just doing insane reps. You're getting exposed to loads and loads of content, and you're probably acquiring all of these things you're not even conscious of acquiring, whilst also studying things that you are. You're finding difficult aspects of grammar, new vocab, expressions, all that sort of stuff.

So that was what I did with podcasts. What would I do differently today, or would I do the same thing? I think I would probably do a similar sort of thing. I think I would probably have spent less time with podcasts, with Brazilian podcasts as a podcast, and tried to move on to 100% Portuguese as soon as as possible, and really dive into those materials to try and just get used to hearing the language 100% of the time, and just immersing yourself and using that, that process of repetition. Lots of immersion, lots of content, lots of exposure leading to acquisition of grammar, vocab, expressions, just trusting that process. [Trust the process.].

Because I didn't so much focus on just mass immersion at the time and trying to just sort of passively expose myself to content, trusting that I would eventually pick things up and be able to use them. I was much more focussed on 'I need to learn every single new piece of vocab' aspect of grammar before I can move on, and I don't know how helpful it was being hyper focussed on it to that degree.

I think there's probably a happy medium. You need to obviously do the work, do the repetitions and really focus on getting as much as possible out of a specific item thing that you're studying, right? Tv show, podcast episode, page of a book, whatever it is. But you can also fixate a little too much and think you're never going to be ready to move on, if that makes sense. [You gotta relax a little bit and just take it easy.].

So this leads me to talk about Anki or Anki. Now I was using this, this is an SRS spaced repetition system right. Effectively a program you use on your computer or your phone. You create flashcards for yourself using the vocab that you would be trying to learn. And you would review those cards on a daily basis, typically. [That's a lie and you know it.].

And it would really help with learning vocab quickly. Now, diving back in after years of not using Anki and sort of learning about what a lot of the polyglots are saying online, and also what a lot of the academics are talking about with it. And it may not be the most effective way to learn a language these days. Or at least, you know, for most people it may not be the most effective use of your time.

It really depends, I think, on what you enjoy and if your memory works that way, and also the process that you're going through. [Well, I'm convinced!] We can probably talk about this a little bit. A big issue with Anki, and I think why it gets a bad rap, is that people either use it for or think that it's used for just learning single words at a time or expressions by themselves. So effectively pieces of language out of context, and it's just trying to mass memorise those things individually. [Not a great plan.] And I think I agree with people when they say that's useless, or at least not very effective.

When it came to me learning with Anki. I was using the sort of 'mass sentence mining' kind of approach where I would be using websites like Reverso, Tatoeba, as well as dictionaries online, I think, what have we got, dictionary online de portugues or what's the other one? Pribram. But I would be looking for sentences using the words, the pieces of grammar, the expressions, the slang terms that I was trying to learn. And I would be mining those. I would be taking those off the internet and then using those sentences in Anki and on the front of each card, I would have the piece of grammar, vocab, whatever it is removed from that sentence. And on the back side, I would have the entire sentence with that piece of vocab or grammar or whatever it was so that I could test myself.

Beyond this, I would also try and have conversations with myself. As I was reviewing the cards, I would be saying the phrases out loud. I would be using them as a way of talking about topics. You know, if I was learning the word for, say, dog, I would have a phrase that would be like, Yesterday I went to the park and I saw five dogs, and then I would use that when I was studying that card to try and cause myself get myself to say a phrase spontaneously using parts that were in that sentence.

It could be transcribing that sentence and using the same grammatical structures, but changing the nouns or the adverbs or whatever in it. It could be that I might try and pretend like I'm having a conversation with myself, you know, say 'I went to the park yesterday and saw five dogs'. 'What colour were the dogs?' So 'I saw a brown one'. 'I saw a green one'. 'I saw a blue one', you know, that sort of thing. And then I would move on.

So I was really aware at the time, at least, of the pitfalls of Anki being that you can just get good at memorising the material in there for the sake of getting good at using Anki. But I kept thinking consciously, how do I actually use Anki to memorise content that I can use in the real world? Because I don't want to just get good at being able to review cards. I want to get good at being able to use the stuff that I'm learning, remember it and use it actively.

Would I do that now? I don't think I would spend anywhere near as much time with Anki as I did in the past, because there were times where I was reviewing, say, 200 cards a day. It would take two hours, and it was a lot. And a huge problem with it is that it's hard to maintain your discipline and motivation if you fall off the wagon. If you miss a day all of a sudden instead of having 200 cards, you've got 400 cards, and pretty quickly it gets to the point of being like, [Fuck this dude, I'm out!] I've missed a week and I have a thousand cards to review. It's going to take all day. I'm just tapping out. So there's that kind of pitfall with it.

The other thing is that you would probably get the same sorts of results if you just kept reading. If you kept watching TV shows with subtitles, without subtitles, repeating scenes, dialogues and just getting loads and loads of immersion. So I'm still sort of on the fence. I think there's probably a place for Anki if you enjoy it. [Fucking sadist. Fucking sadist!].

The other thing to mention with Anki that I found really helpful, and I think helped me a lot, was the process of making the cards was probably 80% of remembering the vocab. Because you're thinking about it for like five minutes whilst you're searching for sentences, you're looking for photos that are related to the sentence or the word or the vocab. You're then putting them in and you're thinking, how do I make a good flashcard that's going to test my memory?

And you're also obviously seeing all these other words and phrases and pieces of grammar that are associated with that word as you look up sentences. So funnily enough, I think reviewing the cards was probably 20% of the use of Anki for me and the 80% that I found really useful was just getting together a list of stuff that I wanted to put into Anki from, say, reading podcast transcript, watching a TV show, whatever it was, and then all the thinking and planning I had to do to create those cards, that was probably pretty helpful.

But again, if you think about it, it's kind of a weird use of your time. It's not necessarily as enjoyable as, say, you know, reading a chapter of a book multiple times and just using a dictionary to look up all of the new vocab and then moving on. You'll have to tell me what you guys think.

[I'm gonna go read a book with pictures.] But that was my experience with Anki. I do recommend it to some of my students, but it just depends on what kind of learners they are, what they enjoy, and how kind of fixated they are on learning new vocab quickly and memorising it because it is, it is definitely powerful at allowing you to remember stuff. I used to have the craziest words on the tip of my tongue whilst I was always reviewing stuff.

All right, so next, books. Was I reading a lot of books? Now you can find books that are I think are helpful and not helpful when you're sort of an intermediate learner. What I did at the time was I quite often searched for books that I was already interested in learning, or learning, reading, consuming in my native language. So quite often they were books that had been written in English. But I would look for the Portuguese version.

So things like, you know, the Harry Potter series, Game of Thrones, uh, Lord of the rings, things that were going to be heavy in dialogue. There was sort of a trade off I would have between inherent motivation and interest and passion. So, you know, there would be plenty of things. At the time I was studying biology and I wanted to learn about things like, you know, human evolution or Neanderthals or whatever it was.

I would have to think and consider, how motivated am I to learn about this stuff right now? And can I do it in Portuguese? Versus consuming books like Harry Potter where they're really, really dialogue heavy? The side of that that's kind of you have to juggle up is I've already read it before, so I know it, which is good and bad, right? It's not new. So it may not be very interesting in that sense. You're not learning about new parts of the story. But on the other hand, the fact that you've read it before, you'll know the story in the back of your mind. You'll have a basic idea of what's going on, who's saying what in different scenes, depending on how much of a Harry Potter head you are.

And so there's a kind of use in that, because it's not 100% novel, pun intended. It's not completely unique. It's not completely new. You can follow along because you've already read it in English, and it's also easy to find in English for you to be able to compare, right?

So I always had that kind of issue juggling up those things. Am I going to consume some content? Am I going to read something that is dialogue heavy, that will help me with acquiring vocab and grammar in common spoken Portuguese that I can go out and use? Or am I going to be using materials that I can't really say? I'm going to take loads of commonly spoken English from? You know, if I'm learning about the evolutionary history of native Australian rats and how to talk about that in Portuguese, I can probably talk about it with people, but there's going to be very few people that care, right? Or are interested.

They're just going to be like, [What the fuck are you talking about? I don't know!] So I felt like that was really useful, especially too, with common books like Harry Potter. You can find audio books for them. And in fact I found on YouTube, loads of people in Brazil would actually read out the chapters and just upload them to YouTube. [Portuguese language].

It was a weird phenomenon where for some reason no one took them down and you would be able to find, say, five different people who had literally read every single Harry Potter book, chapter by chapter and uploaded those to YouTube so you could get different accents and different voices reading out the same chapters. So I would quite often go through the different voices of different channels and just study the same chapter again and again and again, so that I could boost my listening comprehension skills with different accents, but also do those repetitions and learn the vocab and everything out of them. So yeah, I think books are immeasurably helpful.

I would probably suggest trying to find the audio with the book at the same time, because if you compare up those two things of listening and reading at the same time, it's two birds, one stone, you know, you're training your ear at the same time as you are getting better at reading and able to see the words that are being spoken.

And from what I remember with research, looking at language acquisition and getting better ability at speaking and listening, it's much better to do both of those simultaneously than to do them separately or just do one of them right. Just reading alone or just listening alone.

Because if you read, you're not working on your ear, and if you're just listening, you're not going to hear 100% of the words that are actually being said. Spoken contractions take place, all that sort of stuff, and you're probably just going to not notice it and keep moving on with the story.

So I would definitely say whatever you end up reading, it's going to be a plus, but try and find something that has the audio to it as well. You have a transcript and you have the audio and you can do both simultaneously.

So next: series movies and the news. What did I do with watching TV shows? Netflix was my friend. I found a lot of Brazilian TV shows on there, I think was it like Bom Dia, Veronica and there's, there's like three something. Is it just three's or something like that? I watched a whole bunch of these series a few years back, and they Netflix was brilliant because it had subtitles.

You could also watch it dubbed so you could flick through just having it in Portuguese, having it in English, and having it with or without Portuguese or English subtitles, playing around with any of those combinations and again, doing that repetition of watching one episode many times to be able to squeeze as much juice out of that lemon as possible was really helpful.

Another thing that I did to try and really help me with learning different accents and dialects of Brazilian Portuguese in particular, was I would use YouTube and try and find the different news shows that would stream, and quite often there was one that was called, you guys are gonna laugh at me, who are Brazilians. Globo Rural. [Portuguese language] Globo Rural. Effectively, like rural news. It was farmers, right? [Portuguese language] And the reason it was funny is because I remember all these Brazilians would always be like Why are you watching Globo Rural? [Is this- what is wrong with you?] They're talking about like the price of fish and cassava and all this other stuff.

And I'm like, you don't understand. They go through all the different regions in Brazil, right? There's like 25 different accents in Brazil. They've got a dozen or two states, and there's so much diversity there.

And Globo Rural was great because they would just be going from state to state and talking about things like, you know, vets treating horses, the harvesting of a soy crop and the prices of soy going up and down. So I was just, I was learning so much. There would be a lot of person on person interactions, a lot of informal language, loads of different accents. But then also they would be talking about things I was interested in, like animals and plants and farming and how to take care of bees and all that sort of stuff. So I found that really, really useful. [You know, they used to call him weirdo in school.].

So if you haven't done this before, get on YouTube and try and see if you can find a new show that is in your target language from that country. And if you can find one that is like a variety show type thing where they're interviewing a lot of different people and you can get a lot of different voices, different accents and topics in a very short period of time. And you can just keep watching that same episode. It is just really, really useful, really, really useful. [That's the good stuff.].

So yeah, would I go back and do that? What would I do now? I think I would do much the same. I would probably try and spend more time for longer with specific things I was watching. So like if I was watching a series on Netflix, there is definitely that part of you that is like, God, I want to see what's going to happen next. And you may rush through the season a little too quickly, guilty, and not end up doing your reps. And so you have to be aware of that push and pull, that relationship between intent, active study with materials, and relaxed, passive consumption of materials.

The first is going to help you boost your language skills very quickly. The latter is not going to help you with that as quickly. It definitely is better than nothing. As I said to my students, you know, what are you watching on Netflix? I watch a lot of stuff in Persian. You know, I'm from Iran, I watch loads of Persian shows, and I'm like, [I'm afraid that's not going to help.] So if you can just switch that and start watching stuff in English, that's that's a bonus.

But beyond that, if you can get to a point where even if it's just for a short period of time, every single day, you have a specific episode or portion scene from a film that you study intently with, with subtitles, without subtitles, you do repetitions, you take notes, you try and think, what don't I use? That's being said here. Is there new vocab? Is there new grammar? Are there expressions being used? What's happening with the pronunciation? Is their connected speech happening? You could use it as prompts for being able to speak out loud, and try and copy the people who are talking and mimic their accent.

You know, if you can do that for a short period of time, every single day before you move on to just consuming content passively, I think that is probably the key. If you can do this short, bulky, kind of intense period of study, and when you are getting burnt out with that, that's when you move on to the whole I'm just going to passively consume for the rest of the time. The issue I think loads of my students have is that they move from this area of intently studying something with, you know, a reason behind it to just the passive stuff really quickly. And the problem is you get to a stage where you're like, I can understand and follow along. So my English is pretty good. All I need to do is more of that and I'll get better, and I think you will, but it'll take longer compared to if you pair these two things up. Trying to work smart, not hard.

So I think that is what I would go back and focus on. I would be trying to make sure that I have my sort of study period that I get in there and really intensely kind of study for a short period of time, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, whatever it is, before moving on to just say, a few hours of consuming something to insert here that I didn't put on this list.

We have ChatGPT now, and I've been talking about this with my students so much recently when doing English classes, and I'm still astonished at the lack of people using ChatGPT, whether they're doing it for language learning or anything else. It is so useful. It's not perfect, and you have to pay attention to the responses you get, and quite often you have to tailor the responses, change your prompts, ask it to improve something, change something, adjust something.

But the use is just out of this world. [It's horrifying.] It is so fast at being able to help you with language learning, being able to give you answers. So I'll give you some some stuff and I might save this for a future video. What I would do now with ChatGPT is when I'm watching a series, if I'm having trouble with vocab, I would take the vocab or I would take the subtitles with the vocab. I would copy paste it, I'd have it in a document and then I would open up ChatGPT, free version or not, paste it in there and say, define each of these words or phrases or slang terms, and then give me five sentences using each one and explain the context.

And you can make this as complicated or as easy as you want. It's up to you. Your imagination is effectively your limit, but you can get on to ChatGPT paste in this stuff and then say, give me a list of sentences using these words and phrases and explain how they're being used or whatever. And you can just read that. That can be your homework.

You can ask ChatGPT to make you a quiz. You can ask it to give you written worksheets, written questions, fill in the blank questions using the vocab that you've just studied. You can ask it to write in a certain style. Can you write in the way that Mick Dundee speaks in Crocodile Dundee and write me a short story about how he gets lost in the bush and a crocodile nearly bites his leg off? Make it 500 words long at the level of B1, B2.

And within 20s it'll just spit that out. If it's too complicated, you say, can you make that at the level of A1? Write that story again, but at the level of A1 at the level of A2, if you need it to be more complicated, say, can you write it at the level of C1 or C2? It's just endless. So it's a great resource. Today, if I went back, I would be using the shit out of ChatGPT paired with all these other resources that I was studying.

And again, you can talk to it, you can ask it questions, you can treat it as a conversation partner. It has like 60 different languages on there. You can talk to it in your native language and have it respond in English or your target language. You can get it to to correct you spontaneously. So like if you're having a conversation with it in English and you make a mistake, you can say, can you correct any mistakes I make? So it's just brilliant. Check it out. I would be using that like crazy.

Moving on now, conversations with my wife. So pretty quickly I started trying to use the Portuguese with my wife, who was my girlfriend at the time, right? That was a motivating factor as well for me to keep learning Portuguese and wanting to get good. She had a really good level of English. She was obviously a Portuguese speaker from Brazil and I wanted to be able to talk to her in Portuguese. It was almost like a respect thing of you've put all this effort into learning English. I want to be able to speak your native language. As our relationship progressed, it became important because she had family and friends and all these people back home in Brazil that I had never met who didn't speak English. So I wanted to be able to communicate with them instead of having to use her as a translator.

[Can he drive this if he's drinking as well? You must be under 0.05. Oh, I'll just translate. Yes, you can drive drunk.] So I used to have conversations with her all the time. I would ask her about things. I would ask her about slang, about swear words, about her, her life in Brazil. I would ask her to talk to me in Portuguese.

Now, the thing that I would talk about here that can become an issue is you shouldn't treat your partner as your teacher. You shouldn't treat a teacher as a teacher. And what do I mean by this?

No one is going to teach you anything. At the end of the day, no one can teach you a language.

No one can force you to be able to speak that language without you yourself doing the work. Anyone you're interacting with can talk to you.

They can answer your questions, but you still have to put in loads of work. You have to do the legwork. You have to do the majority of the hard work. Taking that pressure off my wife and never treating her like, you know, I would show up to chat to her and it was her job to teach me to speak Portuguese. I never had that kind of relationship with my wife or with anyone else who was a Brazilian Portuguese speaker. Even people I got lessons from. It was always I was there to ask questions and to try and communicate with them and have conversations.

But I took charge of my own learning. That's the main takeaway point here. Don't expect other people to teach you anything really.

When it comes down to it, people can expose you to content, they can chat to you, they can give you ideas, they can discuss things, but you have to take charge of teaching yourself.

So that was a big thing that I was always conscious of with my wife. And I also didn't want to put that pressure on her, because I know people who've had that kind of dynamic or relationship in the past. It quite often gets to a point where the spouse, the other, the girlfriend, the boyfriend, whatever is just like, screw this, I don't want to talk any more in Portuguese. This is not fun. I don't enjoy this. [I want to go home now. This isn't fun anymore.] You're just making me feel like I need to be teaching you constantly. So making sure that dynamic is not there and that it's always fun. It's enjoyable.

So I remember my wife and I, we used to have to drive to and from Canberra. We were living in Canberra at the time and my family lived down here in Melbourne, and it's a seven hour drive and we would just chat away in the car for like seven hours in Portuguese and it was broken Portuguese on my part, but it was a lot of fun and it helped rapidly improve my fluency.

It's doing that work of just speaking and my wife being like quite often being like, What the hell? [I don't know what he's saying. Do you understand? I don't know what he's saying.] What are you talking about? Do you mean this? Do you mean that? You know, and then just us having a laugh. So making that enjoyable and doing that. When it comes to conversations with people, it just is absolutely brilliant.

So would I change anything there? I probably would have tried to talk to her even more, to be honest, because the other thing is that you have that bad habit when one of you speaks both languages very well, but the other one speaks only one of those languages really, really well, it's very easy to kind of keep switching back to that language that you both share. That makes ease of communication a lot better. And we did that more than we probably should have, or at least more than I should have. [Whoa, how'd that get in there? Yikes. Whoops. Whoa!] It's something to be aware of, and you have to constantly be fighting that urge to follow the path of least resistance. And that goes for a lot of things, right? That goes for study material as well. You can get to a point where things are too easy and you need to keep pushing yourself.

You need to keep searching for that barrier of of discomfort right? Between language you don't understand and language that's too easy. You have to search for that sort of frontier and constantly be pushing it forward.

Next one: moving in with Brazilians. I ended up moving in with a whole bunch of Brazilians in Canberra with my wife. In fact, it was five Brazilians and me in a house. The thing that really helped with that was that quite a few of the Brazilians in the house didn't speak really good English, [Look, I don't have time for that.] So pretty quickly my Portuguese actually crept past their English. And that was because a lot of them worked with other Brazilians. So they were speaking Brazilian Portuguese at home. They would go to work and speak Portuguese, and then they would get home and they would consume Portuguese TV shows, movies, all that sort of stuff. [This is not helpful.].

Whereas I was obviously in Portuguese for a greater proportion of the time comparatively. And that really helped, especially when we got to that point of my Portuguese being better than their English. I would often take advantage of the situation of that path of least resistance, because they may want to try and speak a bit of English with me, but as soon as they would get to a point where they're like, Oh, you know, I can't speak as quickly and as effortlessly as I want, they would switch to Portuguese and put me in that position of not being able to understand or speak as easily.

[Sucks to be you, nerd!] And so I kind of pretty quickly just decided, Fuck it, you know, I'm going to just accept this, I'm going to take it. And it really helped really quickly. It was a sink or swim kind of immersion that I created for myself in Canberra. [Help me! I can't swim! I'm drowning!] And I guess my advice for you guys and my students would be if you're in that kind of a position of living in a sharehouse or needing to rent a room in a house when you come to Australia, or if you're living in Australia, for the love of God, try and do what I did.

Where you move in with other people who don't speak your native language, or at least don't speak it as well as you do, if that makes sense. The number of students that I had in the past that would tell me things like, I'm Colombian, I came over from Colombia. I've been here for three years, but I still don't speak English. And I would probe a little bit and it would turn out they're living with Colombians. They got a job with their Colombian friends. They only watch Spanish TV. And I would just be like, [Oh, fuck me, man!] No shit, Sherlock.

Like, you've done everything that you can do to pretty much avoid learning English. So if you're moving here and you want to live with people, try and move into either a house with loads of other foreigners from other places where the shared language is English, or try and find Australians ideally if if your goal is to learn and speak Australian English as well as possible, that's the key, right? Moving with other Australians, they're unlikely to speak your language. And if there's multiple, they're going to be speaking Australian English all the time, which is, you know, great for you.

So yeah. Would I do that again? Would I move in with Brazilians? Hell yeah. And I would probably try and live with them for longer. I think we only ended up living there for 3 or 4 months. But that and speaking with my wife as much as I could every single day for several months, it really boosted me from that kind of beginner level of being able to put together the odd phrase and have a basic idea of what someone was saying to intermediate and intermediate advanced, where I could now express myself a lot better and talk about a lot of different topics. And yeah, it was uncomfortable initially, but it paid off in the long run.

So why does my Portuguese still suck? I've got two kids now that I've had with my beautiful wife.

My son is five, my daughter is three. When we first had my son, we were speaking Portuguese at home probably 90% of the time, and it was absolutely brilliant. It was great for my Portuguese. We were talking all the time.

The issue came when my son started going to Day-care and there's a certain threshold, I think, that we passed with how many days he started going to Day-care. I think he started going three days a week. As soon as he was able to speak English at about 3 or 4, he started realising around him. Everyone else spoke English, so any single person he would interact with would speak usually just English, but may speak Portuguese and English as well. But that common factor of every single person that he interacted with definitely spoke English. He worked out pretty quickly. He didn't have to speak Portuguese. [Why are we doing this again?] He could just speak English to everyone and no matter what, they would always understand what he was saying.

And so now, more recently, they've been at Day-care ever since because we, my wife and I both have to work. We got to a point where they were at day-care four days a week, and the thing that was beautiful with my son was that he ended up making the best little mob, a little group of friends at Day-care, but they were all obviously English speakers. And so every day he goes to Day-care or like four days a week and he interacts with 20 other children, all of whom only speak English, or they may speak other foreign languages at home.

But the common denominator of just speaking English at Day-care was there. All of the teachers were English speakers, so he was just surrounded by all the time. He was also spending a lot of time with his grandparents, with his uncle and auntie. Again, they only speak English.

And so our issue was that the kids would always be speaking in English back to us. Even if we were speaking in Portuguese with them, they would understand it, but they would just reply in English and it became an exhausting battle to try and get them to speak in Portuguese. [I only speak English, I'm sorry.] And my wife, who works in reception and admin, is using English all day, every day. But when she gets home, she's in English mode and she doesn't often switch now to to Portuguese.

So we've unfortunately ended up in this situation where we probably use Portuguese at home maybe 50% of the time, if we're lucky, but most of the time it's English and you get into that phase two of because the kids are always asking and speaking in English, even if you try and speak Portuguese to them, they sort of snap you out of it constantly because it requires more cognitive effort to keep replying in another language to someone who's speaking to you in English, than it does to just use the words that they're asking or saying to you and reply back, if that makes sense.

So unfortunately, I would say, you know, do you have bilingual kids? I would say they understand. They can definitely understand Portuguese, [But I don't speak it.] But they can't string a complicated sentence together because it's just not something they've practised. I think we could have gotten around that if my wife hadn't gone back to work, and if we didn't send them to Day-care, I think there would be a lot better. And ironically, that tends to be the pattern I've seen with other families around us that are Brazilian.

Typically, the only children I've interacted with now who speak Brazilian Portuguese and English really well have two parents who are Brazilians who only speak Portuguese at home, and they don't send the kids to Day-care very often. So that balance, I guess, of Portuguese and English, is much closer to 50/50 than in our case, where it's probably more like 9010 or 9020.

So that's been a real kind of eye opener. It's been difficult because I kind of wanted the whole time for my kids to be able to be good at both languages, primarily so that they could chat to family, but it hasn't ended up that way. I think they'll understand them, and hopefully it's there and we can sort of reignite it in the future if they're interested.

But yeah, for now, it's definitely a frustrating thing of them speaking and understanding a lot more English than Portuguese and to my Portuguese has stagnated. That's where we probably need to focus the end of this video I have just been overwhelmed with work, with family life and everything, that it's become really difficult to find time or to make time to study and do what I need to do to keep pushing my Portuguese, to keep improving it.

So one thing I have noticed is that my pronunciation hasn't changed. My fluency has probably diminished a little bit since I was really focussed on speaking at all the time, but I can still talk a lot about everyday things, and that's the kind of gift and a curse thing I can talk a lot about doing the clothes, doing the dishes, cooking dinner, changing nappies, family events, all that sort of stuff because it's what we're always talking about.

But if someone comes over who's from Brazil and they say, you know, [what's your opinion of modern art?] I would be like, I just don't have the vocab to be able to express my ideas clearly and quickly and concisely in Portuguese, because it's not something I do very often. So yeah, that's why my Portuguese still sucks a great deal. And the most frustrating part that I have to share with you guys, because I have like an area of fluency that is still very good.

The annoying thing is that it falls a lot of Brazilians, and they'll think that I have the ability to speak a lot better than I can. [No, trust me, I'm stupid.] And so that is a gift and a curse. It's infuriating. You know, when they come over and they're like, [Portuguese language] you know, blah, blah, blah, how are you? Is your family all good? And you're like, yeah, me and my blah blah blah. My mom's this, that. And then they'll they'll switch the topic and you'll be like, [I'm sorry, I just can't do it.].

You just took me from advanced to beginner and we're gonna have to switch to English, so. Yeah. Ah. All right, wrapping up, the future. I think you kind of have to decide what you want and what you're comfortable with. I am pretty proud of where my Portuguese got to and where it is today. [Still sucks.] And all things being equal, I'm still glad that I have Portuguese. That's good enough to communicate with people. So I could go to Brazil tomorrow. I could find my way around. I could chat with people. I could get to know people. I could probably make friends pretty well. [Oh! Como estas?] I probably couldn't get a job. I don't think I would be confident enough with my Portuguese to get a decent job, say 100% in Portuguese, but I'd get by.

And so, you know, there's that side of it. And I have to keep thinking. I have to trade off. How much do I want to spend? How much time, energy, and effort do I want to spend getting my Portuguese to say, a C1 or C2 level, or being able to talk about loads and loads and loads of topics when at the moment my main focus is my family, my kids, my work. That's what matters the most at the moment.

Yeah, I think Portuguese is always going to be there. I can reignite it in the future and at the moment I just use it for day to day stuff and, you know, the odd bit of TV shows, movies and that sort of stuff to passively learn. And I don't want to feel guilty about it, but I do at times wish it was a lot better than it was, right.

But the thing is, it's not it's not free. Like having a good body from going to the gym. It's something you have to maintain and keep working on if you want to keep it. Anyway, it's turned into a massive episode. I hope you enjoy it. I would love to know your experiences and if you have any questions or anything else, chuck them down below in the comment section. I'm Pete, this is Aussie English. Thanks for joining me. Tooroo!