This is an All-Ears English podcast, How to Dance Around Tricky Past Participables.

Welcome to the All-Ears English podcast downloaded more than 200 million times. Are you feeling stuck with your English?

We'll show you how to become fearless and fluent by focusing on connection, not perfection,

with your American host, Aubrey Carter, the IELTS Whiz, and Lindsay McMahon, the English

adventurer, coming to you from Arizona and Colorado, USA.

And to get your transcripts delivered by email every week, go to all-earsenglish.com forward slash subscribe. There is a funny thing that native speakers do when they

want to avoid using certain less common verbs in English.

Find out what they do and how you can do this too.

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Hey there, Aubrey. How's it going today? How you feeling? I'm great, Lindsay. How are you?

Good, good. It's really hot today here in Denver. It's 99 degrees that I just saw.

That is hot. It's hot in Idaho, too. I'm like trying to escape the Phoenix heat and it gets 95 here.

So it's still quite warm.

Pretty hot. Yeah. Well, have you drunk a lot of water today because it's so warm out,

Aubrey? Oh, great question. I haven't drunk a lot of water. That question sounds a little weird to me.

Does it sound weird to you? It totally sounds weird. It totally sounds weird. Before I said it, I was like, is this right? Let me just double check in my head, right? Yes, right? Because we avoid saying the word drunk, even though that is correct grammar to say, have you drunk a lot of water? That's the past participle. Yes. We really avoid it. Everyone, I feel like in the United States, you don't hear this a lot. And even when I've taught this, you know, you and I have both been teaching English for 20 plus years, every time I've had to teach this, I will go back and double check that the grammar's right. Right. Because it feels wrong because we don't hear it very often. Totally. Exactly. So this is what we're going to get into, this little funny thing that native speakers do, which is what, Aubrey, what exactly do they do when they feel weird

about a past participle of a verb? Yes, we have a few techniques we use to avoid them. We dance around

these past participles and we're going to teach you today what natives do that you can do

too. If ever you're not sure about a past participle, there are a couple of little hacks you can use.

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