Tintin in: The Secret of the Unicorn #15
Tintin in: The Secret of the Unicorn
Episode 15
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 as we know, stories with pictures are even better. So today, we're going to continue reading this comic together. This video is meant for English beginners. If you need, there are subtitles available or you can find the entire transcript on benslanguagelab.com. Make sure you subscribe for more videos like this one. Your job right now is to watch, listen, and enjoy. We're currently reading Tintin and the Secret of the Unicorn. And last episode, we saw that Tintin, or rather, there was these two men that were attacking Tintin and he was saved by Captain Haddock and the two policemen, Thompson and Thompson. However, we hear wham, oh, ow, from around the corner as the two men maybe are fighting with the police officers. So we should find out what happens next. And so they come around the corner and we see, look, one's escaping, there, he just turned the corner. And they both have their hats jammed down over their eyes so they can't see. But then we hear Tintin yell, look, one's escaping, he's running away, he's getting away, he's escaping. He's the most dangerous of the two, he mustn't get away. So he's saying that of the two men, he's the more dangerous one, the one that is more likely to do something evil. And so they have to stop him. He can't get away. That would be terrible. Then we hear a car. That's a car starting up is what Tintin yells. So that didn't sound like a car or something like that. And so we see Tintin, or Tintin, Snowy, and Captain Haddock all running around the corner together to try to find this guy. Let's keep going there. And then we see the car drive by very fast, it looks like, and almost hit them, right? It would hit them like that, so they go, huh! And they jump out of the way so that they don't get hit by the car. And here we see him inside the car. And we see the license plate is LX188. Maybe that's important. I don't know. But that's the license plate. And we see the car taking off down the road. Road hog, cyclone, bashy bazooka, steamroller. And that's what Haddock likes to do. He yells at people a lot, right? He yells these names at them. But Tintin says, it's too late. He's gone. He's away, right? And so they go back around to Thompson and Thompson and say, we'll take care of the other one later. Let's go and help those two. So the other one is the guy that is still here, right? He's laying on the ground there, knocked out. And so Tintin is saying, we can deal with him later. Right now, it's fine. We'll do it later today. Let's go make sure that these two are okay. Let's go help them. So Haddock says, wait, I'll give you a hand, but then, Right at the last second, he goes, and pulls off the hat and smacks him right in the face. At last, got it, he says. And so he's, oh, oh, that really hurt, he's saying right there. And then we hear Tintin say, now, my friend, I'm waiting for an explanation. And then this man says, I'm saying nothing. He refuses to say anything. I'm not saying anything. I'm saying nothing. But Tintin wants an explanation. He wants him to explain what happened. He wants him to tell him why and what else and all this other information. Perhaps you don't know that your victim recovered yesterday and divulged your name. And so that's talking about the guy from several episodes ago who was shot. And then he recovered. So he was the victim, but he's now better. Oh, I feel better now. Oh, that's when you recover from something. And then he divulged, which is when you give away information. And so he divulged your name. To divulge information, again, that's not a super common word, but it's usually when there's something a little bit secret, right? And then the man says, our victim, Barnaby wasn't dead. Barnaby must be the man's name. Very well. I better tell you everything." As he realizes that Barnaby is not dead, and he's just going to tell everything himself. So it's better for him to say, Very well. I better tell you everything. When we bought this house two years ago, we found a little model ship in the attic, in very poor condition. So they're talking about the little boat, the model ship. So Tintin says, the unicorn? And he also mentions that it was in bad condition, so poor condition, which means it was broken, it was dusty, it had problems with it. It was sort of almost garbage, poor condition. And he also mentioned that they found it in the attic. The attic is the most highest part of a house where you might store stuff. So if we draw a normal house here, you might have the door right here, let's say, and then there's a second floor. So here's the first floor. Here's the second floor. Let's say there's even a third floor. But then this area up here, this is the attic. So it's this like extra space that you maybe don't have anything to do with, and so you put stuff in there. And so it's separate from the floors of the house, right? Floor one, floor two, floor three, and then the attic. You don't really call it the fourth floor because it's just the attic, right? Just for putting stuff. And so they found it two years ago, and it was in very poor condition. Yes, it was the unicorn, and when we were trying to restore the model, we came across the parchment. Its message intrigued us. My brother Mac soon decided it referred to a treasure. But it spoke of three unicorns, so the first thing was to find the other two. You know, we are antique dealers, so we set to work. And so they wanted to fix the model, they wanted to restore it. To restore something is when it's in bad condition and you improve that, you fix it and it's now nice. And they found that parchment, a little piece of paper with the notes on it. And they were intrigued, they were curious, hmm, could be cool. Because Max, his brother, thought it was about treasure and money, right? But it talked of three unicorns. It said there were three unicorns to find. And since they're antique dealers, which means they sell and buy and trade old stuff, they started looking. They set to work. When you set to work, that means you start working, right? I'm setting off to work. I'm working now. We used all our contacts, the people who comb the markets for interesting antiques, the people who hunt through attics. We told them to find the two ships. After some weeks, one of our spies, a man called Barnaby, came and said he'd seen a similar ship in the old street market. Unfortunately, the ship had just been sold to a young man. Barnaby tried in vain to buy it from him. That part we saw. That was the very, very beginning when Tintin bought the boat, but then Barnaby had tried in vain to buy it from him. When you try something in vain, it means it doesn't work. There's no use in trying it. And so Tinjan wasn't selling the boat, so he was trying in vain because Tinjan wasn't selling the boat. And so things that are in vain, you don't need to do it because it's never going to work, right? Watching my channel to learn German is never going to work. So it's a vain attempt. You would never learn German watching my channel because I'm speaking English, but it's great for learning English. What else? Barnaby was a spy, he said, so he's somebody who goes around and gets information and spies. And so they're people that know things sort of secret, right? And they tell them that the antique dealers, these guys. And they use their contacts. So that's a good word too. So contacts are people that you know that can do something. So for example, they know people who work in the markets. They know people who maybe sell houses. They know people and those people are their contacts. If you open your phone, you have your contacts app, which is going to have your different people in it. Contacts, so if I look here, that's my contacts app. Okay, it's not focusing, but that has people's names and phone numbers and dates of birth and stuff like that that I know. They looked through attics, and they wanted to find the two ships, but weeks passed, and one of the men, Barnaby, said that he found one, but he wasn't able to buy it because Tintin bought it. Yes, yes, we know the rest. It was Barnaby whom you ordered to steal my unicorn, but because the parchment wasn't there, he came back and ransacked the place. Again, unsuccessfully. And then, He asks, and that's a question actually, so going back again, right, ransacked, that's when you go through somewhere and you take things out looking for something, you throw things around, you're looking for one specific thing, here it is, right, oops. And so he ransacked Tintin's apartment because he wanted to find the parchment. Uh, note, whom is not something that we use anymore. You're only going to find it in written texts or older things. Whom is now replaced by who. Um, most speakers don't know how to use whom because it's unnatural to say for, especially in American English. It functions as the exact same word. So we would say, it was Barnaby who you ordered, or you could say that, it was Barnaby that you ordered. Although I would probably say, you ordered Barnaby to steal my unicorn, just to flip it around to make it more natural. But because the parchment wasn't there, he came back and ransacked the place. But he was unsuccessful, he didn't find anything. And then what happened? Then, oh, well, I'd better tell you the lot. The lot is everything, right? So that's a bit more British. So you might hear somebody say, we'll take the lot, which means we'll buy everything. We'll take it all. But here is, I'll tell you everything, he says. So let's keep going. More reading to do. Oh, good. Barnaby came back empty-handed. Then he suddenly remembered the other man who'd been trying to buy the ship from you. Right, that was the two men. There was the second one, Mr. Ivan, I think, or I forget his name, but he also wanted to buy the ship. Oh, there it is. The next day, the next day he visited Mr. Sarkar, Sarkar, chloroformed him and stole the third parchment, says Tintin. Oh, excuse me, this is all stuff that we saw before, except we didn't know that Barnaby necessarily did it. That's right, but after he'd given it to us, he and Max quarreled violently about the money we'd agreed he should have. Barnaby demanded more, but Max stuck to the original sum. Finally, Barnaby went furiously angry, saying we'd regret our meanness. When he'd gone, Max got cold feet. Supposing the wretch betrayed us. We jumped into the car and trailed him. Our fears were justified and we saw him speaking. So let's go, there's a bunch of good words in here. So quarreled, quarreled. He demanded more. They stuck to the original sum. Finally, he furiously angry until we regret our meanness. To quarrel is to fight or to argue. More specifically, in this case, they argued violently. infers that they maybe pushed each other or like, like, give me more money or something like that. So they were arguing very aggressively. There was a lot of arguing about money, right, about money, because they had agreed on a certain amount, right? They'd agreed on, let's say, $200. I don't know how much it was. But then Barnaby demanded more. They agreed on 300. You will give me $300 now! But Max stuck to the original sum. A sum is a number, and actually, if you want to literally talk about a sum, it's when you add numbers together. That's not a number. So five plus six plus, that sums to 11, right? So this is a sum is that, and then we'd call a number can be a sum. So they agreed on that original $200. And so Max stuck to it. He wanted to use that. He continued with it and said, no, we said $200. Finally, Barnaby went, he left furiously angry and saying, we'd regret our meanness. And then when he'd gone, Max got cold feet. When you get cold feet, it's not literal, your feet aren't literally cold, but it's when you get nervous and you don't wanna do something, right? You decide, oh no, I'm not gonna do it. And so imagine that you are going to swim in the ocean, Here's the shore. This is all sand. Let's see. Sand on this side of the ocean and then here's the shore and then it goes right up into the ocean. Here's the water. You're going to go into the ocean. Here you are and you're going to go swimming and then you get just your feet in. You're standing right here and you get cold feet and you go, no i'm just gonna i'm gonna go back i'm gonna leave i'm not gonna go in because you you touch it a little bit and you go No, that's too cold, right? That's getting cold feet, literally. But in this case, Max let him go and then was like, no, this is too risky. I want my money. And so, because what if the wretch, the man, Barnaby, that's like a mean name for somebody, the wretch betrayed us? What if he told Tintin? What if he told somebody else, right? So they jumped in the car and trailed him. They followed him. They followed his trail and their fears were justified, right? They were correct in their fears because we saw him speaking to you, panicking in case he'd given the whole game away. Max caught up with you in a few seconds and shot Barnaby as he stepped into your doorway. And so Max got a little wrapped up. He was very emotional and afraid. He was panicking. And so he caught up with them. He drove up next to them and then decided, he's gonna shoot him. And then Tintin says, I understand so far, but tell me, why did you kidnap me? Why did you come kidnap Tintin? Because Tintin got, they kidnapped him. They took him away to the, to the dungeon a couple of episodes ago. We told you to make you give us up the two parchments you had stolen from us a few days before the shooting, or a few days after the shooting, rather, he says. We told you that we, they were telling the truth. They think that Tintin has two scrolls that he'd stolen after the shooting, a few days after. But then Tindin says, I see, but I couldn't have stolen them as I didn't know they existed. But I wonder, perhaps it was, he's thinking again, because he couldn't, he didn't steal them, Tindin doesn't have the other two scrolls. He didn't know they existed, he didn't know they're real. But yes, perhaps it was Miss Sikaranain who took the two scrolls. And then we see that Thompson and Thompson are struggling with their hats behind Tintin as he's thinking, maybe it was Mr. Sakarine. Sakarine. Sakarine. Whatever. And then we hear, hurrah! That's it! Hurrah is like victory, yes, we did it. But we're gonna have to figure out what happens next in the next episode. We're gonna leave it there for today. Thank you so much for watching and enjoying. Make sure that you subscribe to the channel for more videos like this one. And remember, you can find all the transcripts on benslanguagelab.com. I'll see you next time, bye.
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