Name: Describe people in English with animal adjectives & idioms: sheepish, sluggish, fishy...
Uploaded: 2020-07-30T16:35:14.000Z
Duration: 16 min 57 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...

Hi, James from www.engvid.com . We're going to work on some animal idioms in a different

What I mean by that is you've probably heard many idioms using animals.

The ones I want to use now is how we use them as adjectives to describe something, and why

I've said before, when it comes to idioms, they are shorthand.

So, instead of saying five sentences, we can use two words, five words, or one sentence

Or, when someone says it, you go oh, I have it.

So, I want to teach you these ones because they're commonly used to describe people's

I will go over and explain what they mean.

Before I start, I'll do vocabulary, because how I will help you is by teaching you some

maybe foreign vocabulary, then we'll do a quiz to help you make sure we further your

And I'm going to have - may have - I do have a bonus section for you.

So, Mr. E says "Something seems fishy", and that looks like a dead fish.

If you have a dead fish, you put it in a car at say, 30 degrees centigrade, leave it for

But before we get to "fishy", let's look at the other ones we have on the board.

A backstabber is someone that, when your back is facing them, they take a knife and they

Usually, a backstabber is somebody that looks innocent and you think you can trust, but

They may even seem to be your friend, but they are not nice to their friends.

They're actually worse to their friends than they are to their enemies.

So, a backstabber is someone, when you turn your back, they stab you with a knife.

When you have a grudge is to hold bad feelings against somebody for something they've done

So, if someone did something to you three years ago and you hold a grudge, you don't

You remember it and you still feel angry about it.

So, those are two key words we're going to use for the vocabulary to work on our adjectives

They're fluffy, they feel nice when you touch them.

If somebody is sheepish, it means shy, nervous, or no confidence.

So, if someone had a sheepish smile, it'd be like - not really a smile.

Barely a smile, because they have no confidence to really smile or they're a little bit shy,

When someone is chicken, we have two ways of saying it.

"You are a chicken", or "You are chicken".

If you are a chicken, it means you are afraid of many things.

Everything makes you afraid, because that's what "chicken" means, afraid.

When someone says, "You're chicken", it means in this situation, you are afraid.

So, if I said, "Do you want to jump off a tall building?"

I go, "Yep, I'm a chicken, because this is not smart, it's dangerous, I'm afraid of it."

But if you're a chicken, everything scares you.

I heard a noise, that scared me, you're a chicken.

Traffic scares you, everything scares you, you're a chicken.

So, it's a little different how we use it.

If someone says, "You're a chicken", it means you're afraid of many things.

If they say, "You're chicken", you're afraid of that particular situation.

It's a small difference, but it's a difference.

A pig is an animal, "Oink, oink, oink", that likes to be in the mud.

Mud is earth and water mixed together, and it's dirty.

It's a happy animal, but it's also a dirty animal.

In fact, in some cultures, they don't eat pig or pork because they think pigs are dirty.

When we use the word "pig" in English, we can use it for some slang as well as a basic

Remember I said earth and water mixed together and the pigs play in it?

We don't like to get dirty, so we don't like to be like pigs.

If someone doesn't wash themselves regularly, or here's something else that seems strange

If they use bad language, if they're always saying the f-word or the s-word or saying

bad things about people, they are unpleasant to be around and we call them a pig.

Sometimes, especially, women will call a man a pig if he talks about a woman's body and

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Describe people in English with animal adjectives & idioms: sheepish, sluggish, fishy...

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