Name: English Fluency Expert Reacts To Shinjiro Koizumi's
Uploaded: 2020-03-26T03:30:57.000Z
Duration: 7 min 47 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Past simple

I am Drew Badger, the Founder of EnglishAnyone.com and I just wanted to make this quick video

because of something that happened in the news.

This is just a little bit of interesting and kind of funny English in the news, especially

This happened a few days ago where I believe it was the Minister of the Environment, the

new Minister of the Environment, Shinjirō Koizumi.

So this is the son of the old Prime Minister Koizumi who used to be a few years ago before

But, his son now is the Minister of the Environment and he was giving a recent speech.

Watch this and then I'll show you exactly what he did in that conversation.

On tackling such a big scale issue like climate change, it gotta be fun.

Listening to what he said, the interesting thing that happened in the news in Japan,

lots of talk shows were talking about this.

It was in newspapers out here and people were saying it's really odd that he's using the

word sexy to describe something like climate change and wanting to take care of the environment.

Now, before we talk about that, I just want to mention very briefly, the interesting thing

I noticed as an educator, a teacher, as a native English speaker, is that the rest of

the sentence, it wasn't grammatically correct anyway.

When people, especially the kind of the obvious thing the Japanese media would notice is the

word sexy, but most people didn't notice the rest of the conversation or the rest of the

This is when he was talking about, "It got to be cool.

He might have kind of miss said it, but what's interesting is that using a word like sexy,

this is a very conversational and natural way of expressing that.

And I'll talk about that in a second, but the more important point here for you as a

language learner, if you're especially trying to learn English and you want to communicate

fluently, it's better to be correct grammatically first than to try to use expressions that

don't really, maybe they kind of don't sound right if you're not speaking correctly.

The idea is kind of like if you live in a very messy house, but you have a really clean,

just like some like nice piece of furniture that's really clean inside your house, but

Why is that like your sofa or your chair looks really nice, but everything else in your room

And is kind of what it feels like when you listen to a grammatically incorrect sentence,

but it's got some really interesting conversational word or expression in it.

He said, "It got to be cool or it got to be fun.

so, the full non-contracted form is, it has got to be, but we contract this to it's got

But, he said, "It gotta", instead of, "It's got to."

This is really important and even though he's just missing just that little s sound on both

of those words where he says, "It gotta be fun.

And then, he probably meant to say, "It's got to be sexy as well."

But, he said, "You gotta be sexy", where you can kind of hear that a little bit.

Now again, the correct thing is, it's got to be, so it has got to be.

Now, we can get to talking about the word sexy and did he use it correctly or not?

Now in my opinion, I understand exactly what he's saying.

I don't really understand why the Japanese media didn't really understand that, but it

Thinking about kind of the Japanese media is looking at a word like sexy and they wouldn't

describe that for this kind of situation.

Now, a person from the United States would describe this kind of understanding what he's

talking about, where he's saying that if we want to make people think about climate change

or to care more about the environment, we can't just say to them like you should care

about the environment because it's important.

Now, even if that's true, a lot of people just won't listen because it's not sexy.

To describe something as sexy, what you're really saying is that it's something interesting

or that people care about that, whether that's really good for them or not.

But, the point is it's attractive to people and that's what he was trying to say.

I really understand his point, exactly what he was trying to say.

Although, the grammar was incorrect, which was like a little bit weird.

Especially if you're trying to give a talk, you're like a politician or somebody and it's

It's better to be correct than to try to use something that sounds a little bit more interesting

that might be remembered and you're not really using it correctly.

When he's saying we need to care about the environment because it's a good thing to do,

but to convince other people about that we have to make it fun.

Now, you'll hear this used in business terms a lot where business expressions, where people

Now, a sexy industry might be technology, people making like some kind of different

Software now is like a sexy business or a sexy industry to be in, but maybe making aluminum

cans or sofas or something is not very sexy.

You could say, I work in a very boring industry, like I don't know, making tables.

Maybe something like that, it's a good thing and people need tables, but it's just not

I understood exactly what he was trying to say, but remember, when you are trying to

So , he said got to correctly, but instead of it's got to, he said it got to.