Tintin in: The Secret of the Unicorn #12
Tintin in: The Secret of the Unicorn
Episode 12
Beginner
Hi, my name is Ben. Welcome to Ben's Language Lab. Stories are one of the best methods to improve at a language, and stories with pictures are even better. And so today, we're going to read a comic together. This video is meant for beginner level English learners, and if you need, there are subtitles available or an entire transcript on benslanguagelab.com. Make sure you subscribe for more videos like this one. Right now, your job is to listen, watch, and enjoy. We're currently reading Tintin and the Secret of the Unicorn. If you haven't seen the other episodes, click the link in the description to watch all the way from the beginning. Okay, let's start learning. Remember to last time when Tintin had tied these sheets together, he had tied them into knots here and connected them to this beam because he needs to break out. He's stuck in a basement and there's no way out. However, we're gonna quickly take a look at what's happening to Snowy, because Snowy's looking for Tintin. So meanwhile, as Tintin is doing all this and getting ready to escape, Snowy is walking along. He's trudging along is a great word. Trudging is usually when you're tired or you're... He's covered in mud, he's tired, there's water puddles, but then, oh, look, he runs down the hill. He's bounding down the hill and finds a creek, a river, rather. A creek is really small, a river is a little bit bigger. A quick bath and I'll soon get rid of this mud. He feels very dirty. Oh, sorry, I just punched you. He feels very dirty, and so he's going to take a bath. He's going to get in the water and get rid of the mud. Splash! Ah, it's good to be nice and clean again. Here he is, all white, as snowy is, and then... He gets smushed in the face, he gets smacked in the face with a bunch more mud from this passing car as it drove by and hit a puddle and splashed him with more mud. Poor Snowy. Now let's go back to Tintin. That's it. There's the beam under the ring. So here's the ring and here's the beam. So now he has the beam under the ring. And what he wants to do is, well, this. Now I'll tie a small stone to the end of this ring, just like this. So here he has a little rock. It's not a very high quality, but you see it's a little stone that he's tying to the string. And so, there we go. he's going to throw the stone through the ring. Whoops, he says as he throws it right through. Whoopsie-daisy, there we go. That way he can pull on the string. As he pulls it down, it'll pull the... the sheets up and that way he's going to be able to hoist the beam upwards and we'll see. So he pulls it all the way through and then ties it again. So now we have the knot here a second time. And so he has this fine battering ram. And that's made a fine battering ram. Now then, here we go. So what he's gonna do with this battering ram is pull it back and then let it go and it's going to swing forward and whoosh and smash wham into the wall. Wham, he says. Did you hear that? Says this man. Yes, a muffled thud. It shook the whole house. So a thud is, or that was kind of a more of a smack, right? A thud is a boom, some sort of crashing thud, right? Boom, thud. And muffled is when something you can't hear very well. So for example, right now my voice is muffled and you can't really hear what I'm saying. So a muffled thud sort of sounds like, Something like that. If there's just a thud somewhere in the house, and you hear this muffled thud. Boom! There it is again, he says. Another time. That's odd, says the man in the black suit. Sounds as if it came from the cellars. The cellar is another way to say basement, where you put stuff below ground, usually to keep cool. And so that's where Tintin is right now. He's in the cellars or the basement, however you want to say it. Sounded as if it came from the cellars. Boom, another thud. From the cellars? But by thunder, it must be Tintin. I expect he's calling us to tell us where those scrolls are hidden. So they're a little slow. They're not the brightest people. But then they realize, oh, that must be Tintin, our prisoner. He's gonna tell us where the scrolls are. He's decided to tell us. And so they open up this speaking tube again. And they say, hello. Hello, Tintin. Hello? Hello? That's funny. He's not answering. He's not saying anything. But the noise is still going on. Thud. Thud. They keep hearing. We must get to the bottom of this. We have to figure out what is happening. That's what get to the bottom of something means. It means you just figure out what's happening. You discover the problem or the issue. Those are the same word. But they have to figure out what's happening with Tintin. Come with me. We'll see what's happening. Thud. Thud. More thudding noises as Tintin continues to try to escape. It's coming from the cellars all right. Boom, boom. Now it's louder. Now one last go. The wall's already cracked. So a crack is this when there's a line in something or it's like beginning to crack. actually my phone screen has a crack I think you can see that those are cracks in my phone screen and so it's already a little cracked and so here hooray there she goes crash and he shoves the battering ram through the wall but then he hears kind of tinkling cling ching ching ching there's this musical sound almost because, oh no, it is music actually. So. There is actual music playing and he goes, what? And so he looks through and he sees that on the ground, there's a music box. These music boxes are these older things that use a very simple mechanism to turn around. So you wind it up. and then you let it go, and it starts to spin. And it hits these little ding, ding, ding, ding. I don't really know what they're called, but they're like this, and whenever you go bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, they have different music, and so then it spins around and it makes music. A very famous one is the jack-in-the-box. That's the jack-in-the-box tune, and it's doing some sort of music. We don't know what it is. It's a musical box. It fell over and started to play. That's what I just said. There he is, they say. It's Tintin. And he goes, huh? Looks behind him. Over there, by thunder, he's rammed a hole through the wall. They're very surprised that he's opened a hole in the brick wall in a room they thought was empty. By thunder, he says. That's another way of saying, oh my god. Right? Stop. Stop, you little devil. He's bolted. This is a good word. Bolted is, so there's like a door bolt, so you can close a door bolt, or, right, when you close a door and you can't open the door again. But to bolt away is also to run away very fast, right? So he didn't just run away, he sprinted away, he ran fast away, he bolted. It can also be when you bolt down something is when you eat food really quickly because you just need or you're just hungry, right? You just bolt something down and you go off to do something else. And so they follow him and they go through the hole and one of them asks, do you see him? There are plenty of hiding places here, but we'll get him. And because they're they're looking for Tintin in this big room. We see there's all this stuff around here And so there's plenty of places to hide right when you hide you're you're behind some You're hidden right so you're hiding But they're gonna find him they say careful. We must be on our guard though That's when you're ready for what's gonna happen on guard, right? Oh Or in this case, he has a gun. And so they're ready just in case Tintin attacks them or something. There, that armor, it moved. This is the armor, it's a suit of armor. And he says that it must have moved its arm or something like that. And so they think it's Tintin. So my friend, you thought you'd be smart and hide in the suit of armor. Well, you're caught. Come on out. They say he's gonna be clever and hide inside the armor, right, put on the armor. But then they say, well, we found you, my friend. You're caught. We have you. Come on out. Oh, you won't? That's too bad for you. I'll count up to three and then I'll fire. One, two, three. three bang bang he shoots at him and it hits the armor and ricochets off so it goes ching ching bounces off that's a ricochet when it goes and like, boom, boom, away. I don't really know how else to describe it, but that's a ricochet, and then it hits this gong and goes, dong, dong. And this is called a gong. That's a good word. Not a very common word, but a good word. And so it hits the gong, which is where Tintin actually is, and he looks up and goes, hoo, I almost got hit by the bullet. Confound it the man in the black suit says he wasn't inside the armor Did you hear that says the other man? He's listening Yes, it's nothing a bullet ricocheted off the armor and struck that gong over there. Come on. Let's Don't let's waste time Don't let's waste time That doesn't make any sense to me. That's not grammatical. I would say, let's not waste any time, or don't waste time, or don't let us waste time. That last one I don't like, but I guess that's what it is. Must be an older way of saying, don't let's waste time. But let's not waste any more time, he says. We can't look at gongs. And then Tingent goes, phew, what luck? They've gone past. I'll just slip out. And because he's lucky, they didn't look into him. And so he's going to, because they went past, right? When somebody goes past, they go by you and they're gone, right? And so he's just going to slip out. And that's where you're very careful and you silently leave somewhere. Whoop, I'm just gonna slip out. But then he says, where are they? I can't see them. I don't know where they are. He's looking for them. He lost them because they went past. And then we hear, cuckoo, cuckoo. And he goes, huh, huh. And there's a clock, a cuckoo clock, we say, and those are the clocks that go, cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo. And then he's looking at the clock going, ah, stop it. Stupid, that's not Tintin, it's a cuckoo clock striking. Now come on, let's get with it, he says. As this other man looks back at the clock as well, he hears cuckoo and goes, where was that? What was that? And the other man calls him an idiot. That's just a cuckoo clock, you idiot. When a clock strikes, and that's when it makes the noise. So you might hear, when the clock strikes five, that means it's five o'clock. Because if you think, chk, or rather this way, or chk, chk, chk, chk, ding, that's when it strikes the hour. The heck? It's something in my teeth. So anyways, let's get on with it, he says. And Tintin's watching them. On you go, Tintin. You're in luck, he says. He's lucky again. And then, uh-oh, he trips on this exposed string or wire that's on the back of this painting. So this is a painting here, it's the back of it though, and he trips on it, and this starts to fall, this big vase is beginning to fall, and he goes, oh no! Let's see, and then it's falling, and so he catches it, and then, whew, I saved it just in time. But, as we can see, the lid fell off. Boom, it hits a big drum. Drum, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And so the lid fell right onto the drum. This time it's Tintin. We've got him now. He can't be far off. And they start running after him. They're running after him. They're chasing him. And they think they've found him because he can't be far off now. He can't be far away. There he is! Stop or I'll shoot! Stop! Stop! He says. He's yelling. Bang! Bang! Oh no! And Tintin's running away as the bullet hits this thing and it explodes and he turns around the corner of this pillar. This is a big old pillar. And he comes around the pillar and sees this thing. Oh, a counting frame. That gives me an idea. So this is a counting frame, or as you might also hear, an abacus. Abacus. I think it's spelled like that. An abacus. And it's an older way, kind of calculator. It's a way of keeping track of numbers, right? You move over one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. And so you can keep track of more complex numbers that way and be able to do multiplication before we had or addition before we had everybody had a calculator like this on their phone. So it's an old way of counting. It's an abacus. And then he cracks it on the ground and the balls all roll around and the man as he comes around the corner with his gun steps on one and falls right on his face and the other one grabs the armor around the neck. Here we see that he grabbed the armor around the neck and is falling down as well. That was a good idea, said Tintin, and he continues running away. Little devil, he'll pay dearly for this, as he gets up again, and then, of course, steps on another ball, and whoops, falls on his face again, and kicks his friend in the face for good measure. Hits him right squarely in the jaw. By the way, a little devil is usually what we say to refer to kids that are being naughty. It's when they're causing trouble and doing things you don't want. So you might call him, you little devil. Anyways, so sorry to have to leave you gentlemen, he says as he goes back to the hole that he made, but I have to leave. And so he runs for the door And then he says, and now tough guys, it's your turn to be locked in. So he runs out the door and they have, they left the keys in the door. So when you unlock the door, you use the keys and then they opened it, but they left the keys there. And so now Tintin locks the door behind him and tells them it's your turn to be locked in. Ha ha. And so he runs or goes up the stairs carefully. This is called a spiral staircase. A normal staircase is just dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum-dum. But then this is a spiral staircase where he goes do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do. Sort of like that. And so he goes up the spiral staircase. and then looks out this door. He peeks out the door and comes out the door. Here we see a suit of armor and what looks to be a very fancy house, a very big house. This is very detailed, right? There's like some grapes here, some flowers, some leaves, all sorts of intricate decorations. And so he looks to be in this fairly large, big, expensive house. However, we're going to have to figure out what happens next in the next episode, because we're going to leave it there for today. Thank you so much for watching and enjoying. Make sure that you subscribe to the channel and comment below with how it went. What did you learn in this episode? And remember, the transcripts for everything is on benslanguagelab.com. I'll see you next time. Bye bye.
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