Subtitles section Play video Print subtitles Vanessa: Hi, I'm Vanessa from SpeakEnglishWithVanessa.com. Do you have some technology? Let's talk about it. Do you have a smartphone? Do you look at your smartphone every day, five times a day, 20 times a day, 200 times a day? Today, we're going to be talking about some important words to describe technology in your life, but not only these items, we'll also be talking about some important phrases and expressions or idioms that you can use to talk about your relationship to technology. To help you with this, I have created a free PDF that you can download in the link below this video. This PDF includes all of the phrases, sample sentences and proverbs that we are talking about today. You can review it, download it, print it, study it, put it under your pillow to sleep on. I hope it will be a helpful tool to you. All right, let's get started by talking about some common technology that you might have in your life, in your house. Maybe you're using it right now. Let's start. A computer. I do a lot of work on the computer. This is a desktop computer. Actually, my husband, Dan, built this desktop computer and we have a screen to go with it. Or maybe you have a laptop, a laptop. We usually don't call this a notebook. I think this can be a common mistake a lot of English learners make is they say, "I need to get my notebook," or, "Let me write that on my notebook." But really a notebook is with paper in English, this is a laptop, a laptop. Sometimes I take my laptop to a coffee shop to do some work. A tablet. I don't have a tablet, but a lot of people like to play games on their tablet. What about this? This is a phone, a cell phone or a smartphone. Sometimes the opposite of this, we call a dumb phone. Do you remember those days? Maybe you still have a dumb phone. It's like a flip phone. It can't access the internet. All it can do is call and maybe send a text message. But a smartphone can do almost everything. So, you might say I rely on my smartphone a little too much sometimes. A TV. Sometimes we call this a smart TV. I guess the other old TVs were dumb TVs, I don't know. But we could say that I use a smart TV to stream TV shows and movies, this can be a very useful feature for learning English. You can stream some English movies or TV shows on a smart TV. Do you have a smartwatch? I don't, I have a dumb watch. It just tells me the time. But you might track your physical activity and other important notifications on your smartwatch. What about a game console? Do you have a game console? I don't, otherwise I would show you, but we might say that the teenager thinks he needs the latest game console to play the latest video games. So here we have a game console and video games. All right, let's move on to our next category, which are some specific words dealing with the phone. If you want to talk about something that is always around us in English, it's important to be able to describe your phone. So, let's start. If you are going into a meeting, it's important to turn off your phone. So, we say to turn off or to turn on your phone, it makes the screen turn on and you can start to get some sounds, which maybe is not good for a meeting or if you're watching a movie, it's a good idea to turn off your phone during the movie, and then you can turn it on later. Let's talk about some of the different buttons. To turn off or turn on your phone, you need to push the power button, the power button, usually it's on the side. The other buttons you might have are a volume button to make the volume higher or lower. And your phone might have a charging port. What do you put into the charging port? This, you put your charger in the charging port, the charging port. So, this is my charger and I put it in the charging port. You might also have some other things here. Like this is a headphone jack. Let me show you how it works. I have my headphones here. Can you hear me? I plug in my headphones to the headphone jack. Some people call this an auxiliary cord or an auxiliary port, but I think most people just say headphone jack, that's the hole and you put your headphones into the headphone jack. You could say I put it in or I plug it in. I plug in my headphones and now the music is coming into my headphones. It's a very useful feature so that you don't annoy other people with whatever you're listening to. It can be private. You can plug in your headphones and listen to it privately. If you don't have those fancy noise-canceling headphones, you might have just simple earbuds, earbuds. These earbuds have a wire, but nowadays a lot of people have wireless earbuds to listen to music. I think that's a lot more convenient. You don't have to have a cord dangling around everywhere, but I just have the old-fashioned ones with a cord. These are ear buds for listening to music or whatever you'd like. Some other features of my phone is that I have a screen protector on my phone. Right now, it looks like there are some scratches on my phone, but actually it's the screen protector. The screen protector did its job, it protected my screen from getting a scratch. Also, my phone case protects my phone, so we could call this just the case, my phone's case, or we could say the case, the phone's case, this is for protecting my phone. It's the case and the screen protector. In my opinion, this is essential for every phone, because you are going to drop it, someone else is going to drop it, something's going to happen. And no one wants to pay a crazy amount to have their screen fixed. Just get a screen protector, simple, easy way to protect your phone. I guess this would be a good time if I was sponsored by a special screen protector company, but I'm not. I just think it's a good idea to get a screen protector. All right, let's talk about some other features. You might hear this sound. What's that mean? It means that you have a notification. Personally, I hate notifications. I have every single notification turned off on my phone. Every sound turned off and I have to look at my phone to see if my family has messaged me, that is the only notification that appears on my phone. For every other, Facebook, social media notification, I have to go to the desktop computer because, personally, I think that's one of the negatives, we'll talk about that in a minute, of social media and of phones is that it's always disrupting our moment. It's disrupting where we really are in life and making us go somewhere else in the phone. So, for me, I like to turn off my notifications. What about you? Let me know in the comments. All right, now let's go on and talk about some computer words. These words also apply to a laptop, but we're going to be just looking at the computer here. This is the screen, the screen. Your laptop has a screen. Your tablet also has a screen. Hey, your phone has a screen too. This is the screen. And here I have the keyboard, the keyboard. Because my husband Dan and I share an office, it's a little secret, we actually have two keyboards, a little bit embarrassing to say, I guess, because I prefer one keyboard and he prefers the other. So, this is his keyboard. When he's doing work on this computer, he uses this keyboard. I think that the keys are too clunky and make too much noise. So, I have a different keyboard that I like to use and I plug it in and use that one. A little bit silly, but... Oh, well, you got to make some concessions, right? So, we have our screen, the keyboard, we have some speakers. You can see the speakers here. And in order to navigate around, you're going to need a mouse. This is a mouse. There are a couple of buttons on the mouse. We call these the left click and the right click. So, in the middle, you scroll. So, you might see some directions when you're downloading a program, for example, it might say, "Open the program and left click on start, or right click on start." And that's what it's talking about. Left click or right click. So, if you know your left and your right, that would help. But this is the mouse. And we have a mouse pad, helpful for using the mouse. If you are in the technological field, you might have a microphone, or this is an external microphone. You might just use the built-in microphone. So, on your laptop, for example, there is a built in microphone. You don't need to plug in a microphone for someone to hear you. On your phone, there's a built-in microphone. On your tablet, there's a built-in microphone. On this desktop, there is not. So, I need an external microphone and also for my job to make some beautiful sound recordings