Subtitles section Play video Print subtitles hey aubrey how's it going today hi i'm great lindsay i have a funny question for you okay go for it have you ever fallen down in public oh my gosh yeah um not that i can think of but i've witnessed a friend of mine fall down and it was hilarious funny for everyone else so long embarrassing for them but funny for everyone else i did in high school it was a halftime show of a basketball game so like the whole school was there and they called a few students down randomly to participate and maybe win a prize in like a game where you're shooting and i was wearing these boots that had kind of not feel but like a big fell down in front of the whole school everyone's laughing and it was not the end of the world but i was thinking about this recently and i'm so glad social media didn't exist so no one was filming it wasn't posted anywhere the only people who saw it were their present yes i loved it terrible posted on social media for everyone to see so wait was it blurry time yeah a simpler time was it in the stands then when you were coming down the stairs no it was while i like shot the basketball and i went to grab it because it was like a competition during the halftime where some students had to play like lightning where you do oh yeah yeah i know how to get them out bump out some people call it yeah and i was playing that and like shot the basketball ran to grab it and kind of tripped and fell so literally you were in the spotlight like everyone was watching you okay that's good stuff worst case scenario it's funny how falling for adults is so funny and ridiculous but for kids it's just what they do they fall on their skin their knees but for adults it's the most ridiculous funny thing i like and for a teenager so embarrassing right yeah toddlers follow that's whatever adults fall you're like it's fine but a teenager is mortified it's something like that happens yeah you are truly lucky aubrey that there was no social media back then right and i also went through that era of not really having social media in high school thank goodness but now we have it so everything is different right i know and there are so many perks my kids love social media i love it i love using it for all there's english it's so great to have these quick tips idioms slaying that we can teach with a really quick social media video so if you guys aren't following us on social media wherever you find your social media instagram linkedin twitter youtube we're everywhere and in china with billy billy lrb and you can read longer articles for some more deep dives into things on our wechat official account as well so wherever you are in the world you can find all there's english on social media yes there are so many good ways to connect with us guys go on there and check it out because you get stuff that you're not going to see here on the podcast right videos commentary quizzes really fun ways to interact with us and to learn so good all right exactly yes and this is a fun one we often will be able to teach a phrasal verb on social media too we'll give a highlight of one specific phrasal verb and we got a question about some phrasal verbs that we want to focus on today which is why we were talking about falling down yes i love it this question of course i'd be happy this is from alexander here we go he says your podcast is getting more and more popular in our country i start every morning listening to your show while commuting to work so i wanted to thank you guys for doing such a great job well thanks alexander aubry that's wonderful to hear isn't it welcome that feels great so awesome it's so good and here's the question maybe you could help out with two phrasal verbs that i am stuck on i'm stuck on i guess you could say just imagine i was walking down the street and i tripped over something and i fell down so in this situation do i actually say i fell down or i fell over or are they both good to go or are they both good because you can say that go with that suggestion because looking at those two you would think they mean the same thing fall down fall over oh that probably means the same thing no right there are subtle differences in that case you would want to say i fell down if we tripped we say i fell down we wouldn't say i fell over but we're gonna dive into why what are the nuance nuances how do you know which one to choose this is going to be interesting yeah and you know just on a previous episode a few weeks ago i interviewed someone who does his whole show all about phrasal verbs so go over there and look for that episode guys it was a few weeks ago really good stuff to focus it's so tricky right aubry because if we change one preposition the meaning changes quite a bit exactly right with fall we have fall in fall off fall out fall over fall away there are so many different meanings depending on that second word that preposition so you guys are aware of this phrasal verbs are tricky i love that you did that interview lindsay so that we can have another resource for figuring out how to learn phrasal verbs yeah guys you can find that by coming back to our blog and just type in alex bricker or i can actually get the name for you the episode number right now that is episode 1742 guys so check out that episode good stuff nice but i thought it would be interesting to talk a little bit just about the verb fall without a preposition because okay it's actually a tricky verb on its own right word because it can be both a noun and a verb and each of them has multiple meanings so let's quickly talk about that first the noun lindsay what is the first meaning of the word fall noun okay all right so to so the noun again is the act of falling right he had a bad fall and i hear this a lot when i hear about elderly people does that ring a bell to you aubrey definitely maybe you get a call from your mother you say or your grandmother had a bad fall something like that right yeah and we're using that as a noun the fall is a thing that you're talking about right yes i love it and a second meaning is a thing which falls and we usually talk about this especially with snow or rain so for example you'd say yesterday we had the first fall of snow and now we're describing we're using fall as a noun to talk about a thing that falls or it falls out of the sky right yeah and i would say that this one feels to me a little bit more formal what do you think aubrey does this feel a little more formal to you or do you use this a lot it is a little more formal i feel like i hear it in song lyrics and i see it in poetry and it's sort of a beautiful way of speaking to say the first fall of something like oh it's been a long time since we had a fall of rain right and so you can switch that and say rainfall or snowfall also a noun yeah we say it both ways and it is a little more informal but it's also a very beautiful way of speaking i think yeah i mean guys if your personality is such that you like to create poetry in your words there are a lot of people that love to speak right they love to be articulate and kind of wordsmith things and kind of be more of an artist we want to give you that option so this would be a good one to write down if you want to speak in this poetic way okay definitely and then there's a third noun which is the season autumn we also call fall would say i love fall it's my favorite season yeah three meanings for this one noun which most people think of as a verb fall i love it is fall your favorite season aubrey what would you say it used to be when i lived in the east when i lived in new york fall was my favorite season in arizona it's my least favorite season because it's still so hot and miserable and nothing really changes arizona is horrible it's just more longer summer oh yeah but in new england new england is the place to be in the fall i don't know if you ever went up to vermont but the leaves up there are just amazing in the fall yes we drove from new york up to quebec montreal and so we saw all of the foliage from in between and then oh my goodness the leaves were beautiful it was right when they were turning red and orange and yellow and it was breathtaking it's so good it's so good so guys we've seen a lot of different ways to use the noun use this as a noun what about as a verb let's get to the the more common one right the one that we're going to then after we're going to tack on the preposition and make it a phrasal verb right exactly so first of all just to move downward right yeah the snow fell all night now you're talking about that snowfall but using it as a verb the rain falls the snow falls the snow fell right i love it and then the second way guys is just to lose balance and collapse usually this is talking about you your body but it could also be something else like um i have the worst cabinets right now in my in my home and every time i open the cabinets a lot of times something just falls down and breaks and everything like the olive oil spills all over the cabinet it's so bad that happens to me with it my kids will put something in the fridge very precariously oh yeah like a booby trap and then you open the fridge and something falls out and spills all over the floor it's normal this is live having children yeah i can imagine i can't imagine exactly so that just means something loses balance it collapses we could say it's so embarrassing to fall in public especially if you're a teenager i love it and there are actually so many phrasal verbs right aubry and we're not going to go into all of them today we don't need to do them all today guys that'll break your brain to do it i don't want to break your brain that's why you got to hit subscribe hit follow on this podcast you get future episodes we'll go into them later but there are ones like fall in fall off fall out fall away right so many and the two from today's question that we're going to focus in on are fall down and fall over which are very similar i understand why the student could confuse these or wasn't sure which one to use so let's first talk about fall down we use this more specifically it means you tripped it's resulting from tripping or stumbling and sometimes it's just over your own feet like we were talking about how toddlers young children fall down when they first learn to walk they might not be tripping over a rock or something they just are tripping over their own feet yes i love that i love that it's so cute i love it so just falling down tripling over your own feet um i had a friend in college who every time she would attempt she wasn't very athletic so every time she would attempt to go for a jog she would fall she would just like always have a fall during their phone that's such a nice way of saying clumsy to just say she's not very athletic that's a good strategy here you guys if you think someone is a little clumsy the kind way to say that is she's not super athletic yeah guys write that one down as a bonus for today so good we could do another episode on that topic aubry on how to be kind be kind i like that right i would prefer someone call me unathletic as opposed to clumsy yes i love both are probably true okay so the second one we this is the same that you're tripping you're falling but we talk about falling down something falling down the stairs falling down a mountain right i fell down the mountain and that same you're kind of either tripping over something or over your own feet and falling down a thing yes i love it it makes me think of when i go skiing there's so much ski lingo skiers have their own lingo for everything and whenever you know you're on a ski lift and people see someone who essentially they've fallen down on their skis but literally everything has released your skis have released your hat's going you know your helmet everything's going off they say yard sale right they yell yard sale and they make it even worse for the poor person oh that's happened to me so many times one skis off in the powder and once he's up the hill aways and then you're like trudging around trying to collect everything yeah there's definitely a culture and skiers are not always yeah they're joking but they can give people a hard time so the moral of the story is don't ski below the chair right right exactly where anyone sees you from the chair lift exactly i love it so good okay okay so let's go over right because in all of those cases you wouldn't say i fell over if you're tripping stumbling and falling right we would not say i fell over this is very different this is referring to falling from a flat surface it's not from a result of tripping yeah it doesn't even have to be a human right you could say the tree fell over or the display fell over when i bumped it right right whereas uh we wouldn't say that a tree or a display fell down because that's something that it would have to be animated it would have to trip yes it fell over right right right and usually people right i mean yeah and people don't really fall over again like we said it's more of an object right yep exactly but here's the trick a person can fall over but there has to be some kind of outside force causing that right you could say i fell over when she pushed me you wouldn't say i fell down because you didn't trip on anything it's really this is when we use this as it's not something i did i fell over either because maybe i lost my balance someone pushed me something like that then would say i fell over yeah this is actually trickier than i thought when we started the episode today this is pretty nuanced for our listeners right to understand the difference right when i think about fall over i think about something that is just self-contained it's sitting there on a flat surface like you said and then it just tips right and usually as you said a result of something maybe the wind right causes it to fall over yeah yep somebody bumps it but it is true we'll use this for humans as well so there are some expressions where we'll say like i laughed so hard i fell over right and it's just like that expression where something was so