Name: Speak With Me: English Speaking Practice
Uploaded: 2024-12-09T05:05:56.000Z
Duration: 19 min 9 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, I'm Vanessa from SpeakEnglishWithVanessa.com.

Gerund

Are you ready to practice speaking English today?

If I asked you, what you up to this weekend?

Would you freeze and panic because you don't know how to respond to this question easily and naturally?

Today, I'm going to help you to naturally have a conversation about your weekend plans, which is a really common conversation topic.

Maybe you're leaving school or work on a Friday and someone asks you, hey, what you up to this and they ask you about your weekend plans instead of freezing and panicking.

Today, I want to help you learn the most important conversation question that you can use in these situations.

Also, some common vocabulary for talking about your weekend plans.

And then at the end of this lesson, we're going to practice a little exchange back and forth.

I hope that you can get your pronunciation and speaking muscles ready so you can really use what you've learned during today's lesson.

Are you ready to learn the most important conversation question of all time?

Is that question, will you give me money?

The most important conversation question is, there's actually two parts.

When someone asks you about your weekend plans and you say a little reply, I'm going hiking, I'm not doing much, there might be an incredibly awful, awkward pause.

Well, this is where the most important question comes in.

You can kind of imagine tossing a ball back and forth.

The other person has asked you a question.

Now you reply and you say, okay, I'm going hiking or I'm not doing much.

You need to throw or toss the ball back to that person.

It means you are asking the same question back to them.

So I want you to remember this wonderful question.

Either of them, actually, they have the exact same meaning.

Remember these questions because later when we practice this at the end of this lesson, during our conversation speaking time, remember these questions and use them.

All right, let's go some common vocabulary that you can use to talk about weekend plans.

The word brunch is a combination of breakfast and lunch.

And that's because we usually eat this on the weekends, maybe a Saturday morning or a Sunday morning between 10 AM and 2 AM.

It's a time when you could eat either breakfast or lunch, and it's usually a long social event.

So you might go out to brunch with your friends or have your friends to your house to eat brunch.

My friends and I are meeting at our favorite brunch spot on Sunday.

It's a restaurant where you can eat breakfast type foods, usually with some kind of alcoholic drink like a mimosa or something with fruit in it, or maybe some champagne in the morning.

And you can eat this in the company of your friends.

Another common weekend word is social butterfly.

A social butterfly refers to someone who makes a lot of plans.

They are flying around to events, to another event, to another activity.

They're always doing things, usually involving lots of other people.

If you are a social butterfly, probably the year 2020 with lockdowns and all of these things were probably really difficult for you because you love to get together with other people and always be active.

So we can use this in a sentence like this.

She has invitations to three brunches and four afternoon teas.

Someone who enjoys just doing things slowly and staying at home.

They feel most comfortable in a comfortable place at home.

You could say, my friend is a social butterfly, but I'm more of a homebody.

When I get together with friends, I would rather have dinner at my house and then play games here.

I think this is kind of true for me personally, as I get a little bit older, I prefer these kind of intimate group settings.

Instead of lots of people, I prefer just a couple of friends at home, maybe having a bonfire outside, roasting some food or some marshmallows and this kind of intimate setting.

I enjoy doing activities at home more often than when I was a little bit younger.

Unfortunately, that has been probably a lot of our weekend plans for the past year.

And it means that you're just to stay at home.

It doesn't mean you're going to do nothing.

It just means you're not going to go anywhere.

You might say, it's supposed to be cold and rainy this weekend, so I'm just going to stay in and read a book, or I'm just going to stay in and do some things around the house.

This means that you watch a lot of movies or TV shows, usually back to back without stopping.

So several hours, maybe you watch four seasons of a TV show in one day.

This expression comes from a term we usually use with alcohol, to binge drink.

This means that you drink a lot of alcohol at one time.

But when we say to binge drink, that has that same idea as you're doing a lot back to back.

So you might say, last weekend, my husband and I binge watched all of the Star Wars movies.