English Tea Time #4 – McDonald’s

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by
Nick
in
Nick's English Tea Time

Hello there!

In this regular newsletter, I sit down with a cup of tea and tell you about my recent worksheets, video lessons and social media posts. I also share study tips, cultural insights, and try to motivate you to keep working on your English fluency! Subscribe to get this newsletter in your email.

Site News

Since the last newsletter, I’ve made three new lesson worksheets and two YouTube videos:

Nick’s News

I’ve had a very productive week! As well as making the things above, I also recorded my first Live video. Check it out!

I also started clearing out some old junk from my teacher’s cupboard in the classroom. It’s full of old papers and picture cards I never use anymore.

Did I tell you I’m doing a January Yoga challenge? It’s true! I have to do yoga every day this month, and today I’ll complete week 3!

To reward myself, I had a McDonald’s Samurai burger meal last Friday night. I love that burger! 😀

British Culture

Speaking of McDonald’s, I remember when a restaurant opened near my hometown in England. It was in the 1980s and I was just a kid. Children had birthday parties there. Inside the restaurant was a big pirate ship with tables in it (example picture). Ronald McDonald the clown came to do magic tricks and entertain us. It was a lot of fun, and very different to the McDonald’s of today.

In Japan, you have a “Happy Set”, but in the west, it’s called a “Happy Meal”.

“One Big Mac Meal, please, with Coke and chips!“

Actually, McDonald’s used to make its own cola – McDonald’s Cola – and if you asked for “Coke”, they would correct you: “You mean McDonald’s Cola?”, “Errr…. yeah, okay.” 😀

British English

Here are some common English phrases used to talk about fast food:

  1. Grab a takeaway (= get “take out” from a fast food place)
  2. Fancy a chippy? (= asking if you want to go to a fish and chips shop)
  3. I could murder a curry (= I really, really want to eat curry)
  4. A ‘butty‘ or ‘sarnie‘ (= a sandwich)
  5. Let’s get some grub (= Let’s get some food)

Study Tip

Here are two fluency slides based on my Instagram post about a man who came back from the dead!

Notice the rhythm when we stress the important words. See also how we use contrastive stress to highlight two big differences.

Motivation

Last year, I spent a lot of time programming. I was really excited about ChatGPT and AI tools. I thought I could use them to help me make YouTube videos. The best program I made was able to create this video. I used AI to make the scripts and background pictures, I drew the characters myself, and made a whole system to automatically generate a visual novel style “video game”, which I recorded as I “played” it. It was amazing!

However… as my system got bigger and more complex (such as making character mouths move when they speak), it started to take longer and longer to make the videos.

My point is, I wasted a lot of time. I should have made videos, not computer programs. Sometimes it’s better to take the most direct path to your goal. So if you want to speak better English, focus on that! Learning new words and reading books is awesome, but you could spend that time doing speaking practice instead! 😉

Thank you for joining me for tea! If you’re enjoying my blog, please share the link with your friends. I really appreciate it!

All the best,

Nick

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