Ask an English speaker whether they’d like to be a captain and you find out very quickly whether they know what a captain does. One of our speakers admits, cheerfully, “I have no idea what captains do or should do”, adding “I don’t believe I’ve ever met one”. Another pictures …
Listen nowZapp! English Listening Lesson 2.17 – Professions & Kinds of People
Nicholas talks us through his family’s spaghetti puttanesca — olives, capers, big chunky tomatoes, extra garlic — and then admits the recipe calls for anchovies, “which I don’t put in”. A few minutes later Ronny introduces a word Katie has to stop and query: “stoups”. Not a mistake, it turns …
Listen nowZapp! English Listening 2.16 – Food (& Ingredients)
Katie asks two friends what they spend their money on, and Sybil answers by singing: “Money, money, money, makes the world go round”. A few minutes later someone explains why a three-hundred-pound pair of shoes is unthinkable even with the cash in the bank — “That’s half a plane ticket!” …
Nicholas has a system for friends who are always late: if the meeting is at twelve, he tells them eleven thirty. Ronny takes the opposite approach and waits “till the eleventh hour” to start showering and dressing, then turns up five minutes late and hopes nobody minds. This episode is …
One of the speakers in this episode once lived in a converted chicken coup in the woods in Maryland: twenty feet long, split down the middle with a wall, half studio and half bedroom, with a roof so low that his head would graze it while he worked. In the …
Sandra sums up the whole topic in one sentence: “I have a love-hate relationship with my computer because I can’t do without it, but it doesn’t do what I want it to do.” Ronny puts it more cheerfully — “And I Google the world.” In this episode of Zapp! English …
Alec has a problem with his new bedroom. “the whole room is exactly the length of me”, he says, so “my feet touch one wall…when I’m in bed. And my head touches the other”. He calls it manageable. That’s the tone of this episode: six people describing the rooms they …
Listen nowZapp! English Listening 2.11 – Things in the House
One speaker owns almost nothing on purpose. After a friend lost everything she had collected in a fire, Ronny decided “I never wanted to own anything that I couldn’t bear to part with” — and then admits to one exception: a clay Buddha head she has kept for fifty years. …
A foot in the water, and it was “absolutely lovely”. Then the sea took her out. Sybil is an experienced swimmer and a body surfer, and she still admits: “I should have known better, Katie, but I…I think I got a little ahead of myself.” This episode collects three conversations …
Katie starts one of these conversations by asking two friends to tell her about their best friend — and then undercuts the question straight away: “Have you got any?” The answer comes back flat: “One or two.” That dryness runs through the whole episode. Nobody is performing. Two people compare …