I'm taking

Welcome to Welcome to Efforteur. Welcome to Effortless English. In today's conversation I talked to my mother about some of the problems that immigrants and international students and visitors to the United States

often have when they try to communicate with Americans.

We begin the conversation talking about a coworker of my mother's. My mom works in a dental research lab and she works with

a lot of doctors and dentists who are from other countries.

Now he does get a little stumped. who are from other countries.

Now he does get a little stumped with, I forgot what the English word is, kind of the slang that we use.

Uh-huh.

He gets, you know, like someone will say, oh, he got cold feet.

Mm-hmm. He doesn't. He thinks his feet are cold. Yeah, those are hard in all languages you know it's it's

because they're you know there are metaphors basically and right you got to know what they mean

Spanish has a decent amount of those also.

Oh, they do.

Yeah, well there's a guy that I work with this guy Steve Kaufman who speaks nine languages.

He's got this internet learning site

uh-huh but he really makes the point and he's totally correct that um

really in in a in a language you have to learn phrases not so much individual

words uh-huh You know individual words will only get you

so far. Well that makes sense. Yeah and after that you've got to learn phrases. That's how

you learn the grammar, that's how you learn the slang. So it's really, the phrases are the most important block of language that you've got to focus on. And, you know, most people focus on just the individual words and they struggle because of that.

There's you know there's so many of them. There's so many of them that it's very confusing. And I think I told you one

that, well this wasn't Dr. Soto, it was a Japanese student we had and Sharon said that her sister had a lead foot and he said oh I'm

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