Name: The Best Present Ever┃Learn American English Pronunciation On the Go
Uploaded: 2025-06-18T18:19:49.000Z
Duration: 24 min 25 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...

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I'm Rachel and this podcast is made especially for non-native speakers to help you learn the phrases and idioms that Americans use while speaking natural American English.

Sentences with would like

If you would like a free copy of the transcript of this episode, just go to rachelsenglish.com slash podcast and search for this episode.

As we're in the holiday season here in the US, many people celebrate Christmas.

It's become a commercialized holiday here in the US and even people who don't go to church regularly or don't identify as Christians do often exchange Christmas gifts.

So at the end of the year here, we're going to be discussing gifts and we're going to be talking about the best gifts we've ever gotten.

As we go along, if an interesting vocabulary word or idiom or phrasal verb comes up, we'll stop and discuss it to try to make sure that everyone understands how we use these in American English.

All right, I'm going to sit down here with my husband David.

David, do you have any gifts from childhood that are very memorable for you?

I was maybe eight or nine years old, maybe six or seven.

And there were two things that I really, really wanted.

Is that something that plugged into your TV or was it a...

Yeah, I didn't think that I was going to get that.

And the other one was this, I forget what it was called.

It was this self-contained electronic toy that taught you about spelling and punctuation that I thought was really cool.

And I didn't really think that I would get either of those.

That means something you don't think you're going to get, but you're going to ask for it anyway.

We would use that like if you're applying to college, you have a reach school and a school that you think you might actually get into.

And I think you could also say if you set goals for yourself, like you could have an easy goal, a challenge goal, and maybe a stretch goal.

And a stretch goal would be something you don't think you're actually going to be able to achieve, but you set it just to motivate yourself.

Like my goal this month, let's say, is to lose two pounds.

My challenge goal is six pounds and my stretch goal would be 10 pounds maybe.

Both of these things individually were things I did not think that my parents would get for me.

And so we got to Christmas morning and I opened the speak and spell thing and I just, I was freaking out.

I could not believe that I had gotten it.

Did you get kind of hyper about it, do you think?

So my Christmas was already going to be the greatest Christmas ever because I had gotten this thing.

And then there were a couple more presents under the tree still.

And I opened it up and the Atari was in there too.

What's the difference between implode and explode?

So explode is something that happens outward, right?

And implode is something that happens inward.

A building would implode when it falls down upon itself.

It would explode when it gets blown into bits and pieces that go everywhere.

Anyway, that was incredibly memorable because the two things that I really, really wanted, didn't think I would get either.

That's pretty amazing when you get your, oh my God, gift and then there's an even bigger, oh my God, gift coming.

That's reminding me of one year we had all gotten all of our gifts and it was like a good haul.

My parents always got us a pretty good amount of gifts.

We would, between friends and family, we would probably each be opening like eight gifts each year.

So we were pretty excited about what we got.

And then there was one more gift that got pulled out.

I was 10 years old and it was a family gift that my dad bought and it was a video camera.

It was one of those big ones that goes on the shoulder.

And we immediately both became filmmakers, my brother and I.

He was more of the director, but we had a lot of fun making fictional movies.

My dad bought it for home movies, of course, for making memories of trips and this kind of thing.

But my brother and I really used it for dramatic purposes.

I remember one time we were at my cousin's house and we were making a scary movie that involved a lot of fishing line tied to objects to make them move.

And then also we put together an outfit and like stuffed it with other clothes or something.

We made a dummy that we threw off a balcony.

And the worst part of it is that movie got erased.

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The Best Present Ever┃Learn American English Pronunciation On the Go

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