- Hello, everyone, and welcome back to English With Lucy.

Today I'm going to talk to you about how to describe

the weather in English.

We're going to start off quite basic

and move up to more advanced vocabulary.

I'm going to guide you through seasonal weather,

hot weather, cold weather, wet weather, windy weather,

and I'm going to give you verbs, nouns, adjectives,

and idiomatic expressions.

Idioms.

We're also going to do a little bit of basic grammar

at the beginning.

But very, very easy.

Don't worry.

Before we get started,

I would just like to make a recommendation.

This video is going to improve your vocabulary

and your speaking skills,

and it will also improve your listening skills.

I know a lot of you do want to improve your listening skills

so this recommendation is really for you.

In my experience teaching students,

listening to audiobooks is one of the best ways

to improve your accent, your understanding,

and your speaking.

Audible are offering a 30-day free trail,

that's one free audiobook,

when you click on the link in the description box.

If you can listen to a book and read it at the same time,

you can hear how the words are pronounced

and see how the spelling correlates with the pronunciation.

I've made some recommendations for audiobooks down

in the description box as well.

So do consider signing up and claiming your free audiobook.

Right.

Let's get on with the lesson.

You may know that British people are famous

for always talking about the weather,

and this is because we are lucky enough

to have four strong seasons.

Winter, which is really cold.

Spring, which is sunny and wet at the same time.

Summer, which is normally hot and sunny.

And autumn, which is colder and with lots of wind,

and when all the trees lose their leaves.

I'm going to talk to you today

about different weather vocabulary that you can find

in each of the four seasons.

But first, let's discuss how to talk about the weather

from a grammar point of view.

This grammar is fairly basic.

So if you're looking for advanced vocabulary,

click to the time shown onscreen.

If you want to use an adjective, for example, warm,

you could say, "The weather is warm."

The weather is adjective.

You could also say, "It is warm."

It is adjective.

But it only really makes sense if the adjective

is related to the weather.

If you say, "It is good," I might wonder, well, what's good?

But if you say, "It is warm,"

I know that you're talking about the weather.

You can also say, "It's a warm day."

It's a adjective day.

But what if you want to use a verb, for example, rain,

the verb, to rain?

You would say, "It is raining."

It is verb plus I-N-G.

That's if you want to talk about the weather right now.

If you want to talk about yesterday or the past,

you would say, "Yesterday, it rained."

Yesterday, it verb plus E-D.

Apart from the irregular verbs,

which have their own conjugation.

If you want to talk about tomorrow or the future,

you can say, "It will rain tomorrow."

It will verb tomorrow.

Or, "It's going to rain tomorrow."

It's going to verb tomorrow.

If you want to talk about a noun, you would say,

"there is," "there was," or "there will be."

That's present, past, future, plus the noun.

There is a storm.

There was a storm.

There will be a storm.

Right.

So now that's out of the way, first let's talk about winter,

the month that I am in now in England.

I'm going to start out with adjectives,

and I warn you, there are a lot of adjectives

associated with winter.

You can say "cold."

Cold.

Bitter, bitter.

That's very, very cold.

It's just a step further than cold.

You could even put them together

and say, "It's bitterly cold."

It's bitterly cold.

You can say "It's chilly," which is slightly cold,

or chilling.

That's a little bit more.

Crisp.

Crisp normally means it's cold and dry,

or maybe it's icy.

Icy.

You can say, "It's freezing," or "It's frosty."

You can also say, "It is severe," or "It is wintry."

That means it's a very wintry day.

It feels like winter and it is winter.

If it's winter and the weather conditions are very bad,

the skies are grey, you can say, "It's gloomy,"

or "It's bleak."

Or if there's a lot of very aggressive weather,

you can say, "It's harsh."

We often talk about a harsh winter.

Now let's talk about some verbs.

You can say "to snow,"

which is obviously white, fluffy stuff falling from the sky.

To sleet.

Sleet is partly frozen rain.

So it's like very wet snow or very, very cold,

almost frozen rain.

It's normally very unpleasant.

If it's sleeting, I go inside.

You can also say "to hail."

If it's hailing, it means that little hailstones,

little, tiny balls of ice, well, normally tiny,

but there are big ones, are falling from the sky.

It's completely frozen rain.

You can also say "to freeze," or "to freeze over."

And to freeze over means covered with a layer of ice.

So I might say, "My pond has frozen over."

My pond is covered with ice.

Now some nouns you might use to describe winter.

So we've got sleet, hail, snow, frost,

as I've mentioned before.

You also have blizzard, which is a windy snowstorm.

And for some idioms, you can have a cold snap,

which is a short period of cold weather,

or you can be frozen to death, or frozen to the bone,

which means you are completely frozen through.

Right.

Let's talk about spring.

Spring is known for being sunny and rainy.

It's warm and it's wet,

and it's when all of the plants start to grow.

Adjectives you can use are cool.

It means it's not cold.

It's not unpleasant.

Nor is it warm.

Mild is the same thing.

Mild.

Fresh, as well.

It's a very fresh day.

You can say, "It's bright."

The sun is out.

You can say "breezy," which means a light wind.

It's normally very pleasant and welcomed.

When you're talking about clouds, you can say "cloudy,"

or slightly more advanced, is overcast,

where there is some sunlight,

but there are also some clouds,

meaning that you don't have a completely sunny day.

It's overcast.

You hear the meteorologists on weather stations

talking about an overcast day quite a lot.

One that's not so positive is muggy.

And this is if the air is very, very humid.

It's can be cold or hot,

and you can have a muggy summer's day as well,

but it means there's high humidity in the air.

Another word you can say is simply "wet."

It's a wet day.

It's been raining a lot.