Hello and welcome to Real Easy English.
In this podcast, we have real conversations in easy English to help you learn.
I'm Phil.
And I'm Beth.
You can find a video of this podcast Hi Beth.
Hello Phil, how are you?
I'm good, I'm good.
You?
Yes, I'm very well, thank you.
Okay well, today we're going to talk about fears and we're going to talk about the things that make you scared.
Okay, let's get started.
Okay Beth, what are you afraid of?
What am I afraid of?
I'm afraid of spiders.
I really hate spiders.
I'm really scared of spiders.
It's okay if they're small.
Maybe, no, yeah, I was going to say medium-sized is okay.
They're not.
Anything like medium, large, long legs, no, don't like spiders.
What do you do if you see a spider?
Make weird noises.
Help!
There's a spider!
What are you afraid of?
This is a strange one because it doesn't really happen to me very much.
But I'm scared of being in really small spaces.
You know, people who work under floors and do things like that.
I'd be too worried about getting stuck.
Yeah, I completely understand that fear.
Phil, do you have any phobias?
A phobia is a really bad, extreme fear of something.
I don't think I do really.
I don't think there's like one thing that I am absolutely terrified of and can't see.
I think just sometimes there are situations that are scary because you know maybe they could be dangerous or worrying.
But I don't think there's one thing that I see and go, ah!
Yeah.
I have a friend and she has a phobia of bananas.
I know it sounds silly.
She is terrified of bananas.
If she sees a banana, she will cry and scream and it's very dramatic.
And that is a proper phobia.
When you see something and you break down, you completely freak out.
That's a phobia.
So i don't think i have any phobias either, like i don't like spiders and i am scared of them, but they don't make me freak out and panic.
So beth, is there anything that you were afraid of when you were younger but you're not afraid of now?
Actually yes,
So when I was young and even a teenager, I was scared of looking out at the sea.
So if I was I was always good at swimming.
So swimming wasn't the problem.
But looking out to the ocean and seeing the horizon, that's the end of the ocean, really scared me.
And I just couldn't look at it.
And I had that for quite a long time.
And I don't really know why, because I don't know what I was scared of.
It was almost so big that it scared me.
I've got a watery one.
I remember when I was learning to swim and the teacher taking me to the deep end of the swimming pool.
So it was about two meters deep nearly.
And I wasn't very tall then.
And I had to jump in.
And I was absolutely terrified.
But now I can swim, so I'm not scared of water in that way.
Do you often jump in pools these days?
Now and then, when I get the chance.
I don't go swimming very often, but when I do, I can jump in and it's fine.
Let's recap the vocabulary that we used in this conversation.
We used a lot of words to describe the feeling of fear.
So we can be afraid, frightened or scared of something, which all mean something makes us feel fear.
And we also had terrified of.
If you are terrified of something, you are really, really scared of it.
We heard the word phobia, which describes a very bad fear of something.
Yes.
For example, my friend has a phobia of bananas.
She cries when she sees them because she's so scared.
And we also had freak out.
If you freak out, then you panic because you're so, so scared of something.
That's it for this episode of Real Easy English.
Test yourself with the worksheet on our website, bbclearningenglish.com.
And we'll be back next week with another conversation in Easy English.
Goodbye for now.
Bye.
