Hey everybody, welcome to another phrasal verb episode.
I hope you're doing excellent.
I hope your English learning is going well and that you're ready to learn some more phrasal verbs.
You might hear that it's raining right now.
It's raining pretty hard, so you might hear that in the background.
I just wanted to let you know in case you hear some background noise.
So, in today's phrasal verb episode, we're going to look at two phrasal verbs.
The first one is branch out, and the second one is break down.
And for the second one, we're going to look at two different meanings of break down.
So first, let's define these phrasal verbs and hear an example of each one.
Branch out means to expand your activities or interests in a new direction.
For example, I could say, the company is branching out into Asia.
Here, what I'm saying is that previously the company did not really have its activities in Asia.
That wasn't its market.
But now it's going to expand into that region.
It's branching out into Asia.
Okay, how about breakdown?
The first definition of breakdown is to suddenly stop functioning, to suddenly stop working.
This is in the case of a machine or a vehicle.
For example, I could say, the brand new machine broke down after just one week.
This means that the machine suddenly stopped working.
It was suddenly broken after just one week.
So that's one definition.
Another definition of breakdown is to start crying in a very emotional way, and with this one we often say break down crying or break down in tears.
That's very common.
So, for example, i could say She broke down in tears when I asked her about her father.
This means that she immediately started crying and got really emotional when I asked her about her father.
So that's another definition of breakdown.
There are other definitions as well, but we're just going to look at those two today.
Okay, now let me talk about a couple different things.
And while I'm talking, I'll use these phrasal verbs over and over again.
And hopefully by the end of this episode you'll have heard these phrasal verbs in many different sentences and you'll feel like you can understand them and maybe even use them in your own sentences.
So first, let me tell you a little bit about my English teaching journey.
So I'm an English teacher obviously, and I've basically been an English teacher throughout my whole career, if I don't count the odd jobs, the part-time jobs that I had before teaching English.
We sometimes use the phrase odd jobs to talk about the random jobs that you do to earn money that aren't really related to one overall career.
So talking about my English teaching journey, I started as an after-school tutor many years ago.
This was my first experience in the education field.
And then shortly after that, I also started teaching at a language school in Mexico.
But I quickly branched out on my own after that.
I didn't want to continue in that environment.
I wanted to branch out and start teaching online.
I thought that this would be a good opportunity.
At that time, this type of job teaching English online wasn't nearly as common as it is today.
The websites that people use nowadays to teach languages weren't as big back then, but I knew about these websites and I knew that it might be good for my career to branch out and try online teaching.
So I did that and it was successful in the sense that I was able to work many hours.
I was able to get enough hours to be able to pay my bills and live a decent life in Mexico.
So that was good.
But I also wanted to do something else besides just teaching one on one classes.
And I decided to branch out into content creation.
I started making videos.
YouTube videos back in 2017, I believe.
I started with the common types of English videos that you might see on YouTube, where they focus on different technical elements, different vocabulary.
You've probably seen these types of videos made by online English teachers, and These are great, but I decided to branch out into certain topics that aren't quite as common.
Elements of English that are really important, but at least at that time they weren't taught as much maybe in online videos.
For example, pronunciation and listening.
I kind of branched out into this type of training, the sounds of English.
I was really interested in this and I thought that I had a good way of teaching the sounds.
At least, I thought I had a good way.
I think I probably developed my skills over time, but people liked those videos so I continued doing them and then eventually I branched out and started podcasting.
This was a new thing for me.
I had no experience podcasting prior to 2021, but I wanted to branch out into this world and just do solo podcasts, just me talking.
And I did this to create listening practice content for English learners, so obviously You're listening to this now.
So I started with just purely listening-focused episodes, and I still do those now, obviously.
But I also branched out into phrasal verb episodes, what you're listening to at this moment.
So I have those two different types of episodes now.
And of course, I didn't just do my podcast and my YouTube channel.
I branched out into memberships via Patreon and that's how I am able to publish my exclusive content, all of my bonus episodes, advanced episodes, my training, like my pronunciation seminars and listening seminars, and all of that.
And I even branched out into ebooks.
I published really just one collection of short stories, but it is translated into two languages Spanish and Portuguese.
I did that.
That was fun.
I don't think I'll do other e-books.
I'm guessing I won't.
But yeah, that's kind of my English teaching journey.
That's kind of a general outline of the path that I've taken and how I've reached the point that I'm at right now.
All right, let me talk about something else now.
Let me tell you a story.
This might be real.
I won't tell you.
You can guess.
So this story is about a friend whose car broke down on the way to celebrate Christmas with her family.
This is probably one of the worst times to have your car break down.
I'm sure a lot of you would agree.
So this friend was driving pretty far to see her family on Christmas.
It was a three-hour drive, and she was kind of in the middle of nowhere.
She was at a certain place, halfway there maybe, where there weren't any big cities, and her car broke down right there in the middle of nowhere, unfortunately.
She tried to get it running again.
She tried to see if there was anything she could do to solve the problem.
She looked under the hood, as we say, meaning she opened the front part of the car, but there was nothing she could do.
Her car had broken down the middle of nowhere.
She had no help and unfortunately her cellular signal was spotty, meaning it wasn't strong, it was going in and out.
She couldn't really make calls.
Well, it was a really bad situation.
She had broken down and Couldn't really get help and there weren't that many cars on the road going in that direction on that highway.
It wasn't a major highway, and so she couldn't really get help, unfortunately.
She couldn't call for help, and... the people that were passing her in their cars didn't really want to stop and i think many of us know how that is nowadays we don't really feel comfortable stopping for strangers that we don't know Because we've heard stories that scare us.
So she couldn't really get anyone to stop.
So my friend was devastated.
It was Christmas.
She wanted to be with her family.
She hadn't seen them in a while.
And she broke down.
She broke down and started sobbing.
She couldn't control her emotions, her sadness because of the situation.
So she broke down crying and it was a pretty pathetic sight to see her with her broken down car sobbing, meaning she was crying crying, really hard.
And it was a really pathetic sight, I'm sure.
And because she looked so pathetic, finally someone stopped to help her.
So it took her breaking down and crying before someone actually felt the need to stop.
So that was actually good thing that she started crying, I think so.
The person who stopped to help her was a very nice lady and when she saw my friend with her car broken down, when she saw that my friend was crying, she was in distress, the person stopped and gave her a ride and And when they reached the next city, she was able to use this person's phone and call her family, call for help for her car.
So that was good.
But of course, before she got help, when she was just the side of the road for 20-30 minutes or maybe longer, she was pretty desperate.
She felt pretty helpless then.
That's why she broke down in tears and just felt so bad to have broken down on the side of the road on Christmas Day when her family was expecting her.
That's just an awful situation.
I'm sure many of you can sympathize with that.
I would hate to be in that situation.
Thankfully, I personally haven't had My car break down in the middle of nowhere like that.
However, as a kid, I remember being with my family on a road trip and our car broke down in the desert.
I was a kid at the time, so it wasn't me driving, and my family was able to solve the problem somewhat.
But I remember that they were super stressed.
And I hope that I never have this situation happen to me.
I hope that I don't break down on the side of the road, especially on Christmas when I'm gonna go celebrate with my family.
This is one of the worst possible times for your car to stop working and it's understandable that my friend broke down crying after receiving no help for a pretty long time in this situation.
I can sympathize with her and understand her distress.
So I hope that as I was talking, you were able to hear these phrasal verbs used again and again.
And hopefully now you understand them well and well.
Maybe you can even try using them in your own sentences.
And I want to remind you that you can access my training, my pronunciation seminars, my listening seminars to help you with your pronunciation, your listening, and you can also use my advanced podcast episodes.
Those are available for listening time, family members.
So check all of that out.
The link is down below and also check out my us conversations podcast.
In which I talk to native speakers from around the U?
S about their different cities, their region, the differences in the different parts of the country.
We talk about a lot of interesting topics.
I'm sure you'll love this podcast.
It's also great practice for your listening.
The link to sign up is also down below.
And as always, please give this podcast a five-star rating and write a review if you can.
All right.
Thank you so much for listening to this phrasal verb episode, and I'll talk to you in the next one.
