Hey everyone and welcome back to the Understandable English Podcast.
Today we are going to be talking about a very interesting topic.
Things that you should know before you move to the UK.
Or simply things that you should know before you visit the UK if you aren't planning on moving here.
We will look at some things about life in the UK, culture and some funny things too.
So get ready and I hope you enjoy this episode of the podcast.
The first point is that British humour is quite strange and when you arrive in the UK you may not understand it so well.
In many cultures sarcasm and irony is not so popular in everyday humour.
But in the UK, this is absolutely normal.
So in British humour it's not so important what you say, but often it is very important how you say it.
Let me give you an example with the phrase, the weather today is amazing.
So we can say it different ways.
I can say it if I want to actually mean that the weather is amazing.
I might say, the weather today is amazing.
But if I want to make a joke or try to mean that the weather is really, really bad, I might say that same phrase like the weather today is amazing.
And as you might be able to tell from my voice, I'm making a joke.
I am actually saying the weather is very bad.
And speaking of weather, that brings us to our second point to expect all four seasons of the year in one day.
The weather in the UK is truly unpredictable.
You cannot decide or think in advance what the weather will be like in one hour's time, in two hours in the evening.
It is always changing.
On one recent day, when my fiancé and her friend were traveling with me, we had snow ice rain, fog.
It was very hard to see clouds sun, all in the one day of travel.
So if you do come to visit, make sure that you bring an umbrella for the rain, warm clothes, cold clothes, every type for the one day.
Our next point is one that is very popular with English language learners.
So I will probably make a future episode about this topic, but very quickly, not everyone speaks like the royal family or like the queen in the past.
Often when I'm teaching English, many learners want a perfect British accent.
They want to sound like people do in movies, or on TV, or how the royal family sounds.
But in reality, not very many people sound like this.
People that speak the same accent or type of English as the royal family it's called renounced pronunciation make up less than 2 of the British population.
That means that the rest of the UK, so 98%, have different accents.
They do not sound like James Bond or BBC News presenters or the Royal Family.
They have different and unique accents.
Which is great.
So do not worry about having a different accent in English.
In reality, the UK is a very diverse place.
Lots of different people live here from many different countries and cultures.
And each one have different accents.
And that is fine.
I think it's very important to own your accent.
You should love your accent.
And of course, you might want to pronounce words correctly, and that's fine, but I think you should be proud of your accent and your heritage, your culture and where you come from.
If anything, it makes for very interesting conversation when people ask you what kind of accent is that?
For example, even for me, when I travel to different parts of the UK, people hear my accent and they know that I'm not from London, for example.
They might say to me, are you from Northern Ireland?
Is that an Irish accent?
And of course, I'm always happy to answer.
The next point about language is that it's almost the same language as US English or American English, but not quite.
As you probably already know, we have lots of different words, or I guess we probably had original words and Americans changed them.
One example is in America they say pants or pants and we say trousers.
And in America they say apartment, apartment and we say flat.
College, we say university.
Chips, we say crisps.
Soccer, we say football.
So as you can see, those are just a few differences and there are many more.
So if you study American English, don't be surprised when you come to the UK and you hear some different words.
Another difference is that not a lot of people often realise that the UK is made up of very different cultures.
Within the UK there are four quite distinct, quite different countries.
We have England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
Each place has its own culture, its own traditions, its own food and even, in some cases, its own language.
Of course, everyone speaks English across the UK, but in Wales, for example, a lot of people speak Welsh language, which is very different from English.
But don't worry, everyone will understand and speak English to you if you don't know Welsh or Gaelic in Scotland, for example.
The next point is that the stereotype about drinking tea is completely true.
It is 100% fact.
Brits love tea.
In fact, tea is by far the most popular drink in the UK, with over 100 million cups of tea being drank every single day across the UK.
And to put that into perspective, there is only approximately 60 million people in the UK, or 65, I can't remember exactly.
So there is more than one cup of tea drank per person every day, almost two on average.
The next point is if you visit in summer, your home or apartment probably won't have air conditioning.
Compared to other countries around the world, UK summers are pretty mild.
They aren't very hot. although they can reach the mid-30s at times.
And actually, last year we had temperatures reaching 40 plus 40, so quite warm.
Perhaps with climate change and increasing temperatures the UK will have an increase in popularity of air conditioning in the next few years, but we will have to wait and see.
I personally don't know anyone that has air conditioning in their house.
So that's all of our points for today.
I hope this episode was interesting for you and if you don't follow the podcast, make sure you follow.
Share with your friends who are also learning English.
And I look forward to hearing well, not hearing, but I look forward to talking to you in the next episode of the Understandable English podcast.
Have an amazing day wherever in the world you are.
And thank you for listening.
