Ben's Language Lab

Daily Dose of English 106

Phases

Daily Dose of English 106

Intermediate

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Hey everyone. My name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about phases. What a good word, right? Phases. Has some great sounds in there, has that good A, and his spell is a PH, which is a lovely combination of letters and sounds like phases. Not to be confused with faces, because that's a different word. So, phases Why did I wanna talk about this? Oh yeah, I remember. So phases or a phase is a pretty common word and there's a couple of different meanings and I wanted to talk about those, especially because there's a bit of a cultural one that you might not have heard before. So the literal definition of a phase is when something is in different parts of time. For example, there are sections of time that are called phases. and they're usually numbered or given a name. So you might have phase one, phase two, phase three, phase four, and that's the entire part of a plan, for example. And so in a typical story, you might have a beginning, a middle, and an end, or introduction, body, problem, resolution, conclusion, something like that. There's different phases that something goes through. but also people can be in different phases. And this is the more common meaning when we talk about usually somebody's life or a person, they might have a specific phase or be doing something during a set amount of time. But the idea is that there is a beginning and an end to this amount of time. So your life isn't a phase, but your 20s, so when you're between the ages of 20 and 29 is a phase. Your 20s is a phase of your life. And there are a lot of different phases that you might go through. And people often talk about them in terms of themselves, saying things like, oh, I'm in my gardening phase right now. Or I'm in a home cooked meal phase. I don't know. When you do something a lot is generally what it means. So in the case of the gardening phase, somebody would say that if they've They're enjoying gardening, they're doing gardening a lot, they're thinking about gardening more than they usually would. So like a year ago, they barely thought about gardening at all and the assumption is that they're probably going to stop gardening in the same way in a couple years or something like that. You can also look back on your life or somebody's life and say that this is their something phase. Oh, excuse me. Um, and so at some point I'm going to stop doing Ben's language lab. Um, but we might look at it and think about the, the phase of my life where I was making, uh, English videos for you lovely learners, um, and things like that. And so phases are pretty common to talk about our lives and how we go through them and different things that happen. because our lives change. Something that is the same about everything is that there's always gonna be a change in the future because nothing exactly stays the same, right? That's just the reality of living in this world. And so you might talk about all sorts of different phases that you went through, either big, long phases that are multiple years or a phase that you had for a week. And getting into the more cultural kind of reference, I guess, is the classic phrase of, it's not a phase, mom. It's not a phase. Which is what a teenager or a kid might say to their parents when their parents say that they're doing something temporarily. Usually it's they're doing something a little bit silly or adolescent that makes them look very obviously young, and they think it's the most amazing thing in the world, and the parents go, oh, they're just in this phase of X, Y, Z. But then the kid says, oh, it's not a phase, Mom. This is who I am. This is who I really am, okay? It's not a phase. And that has sort of become a cultural reference, definitely in a lot of the English-speaking world. Because, I mean, teenagers do pass through phases. That is a natural part of our biology. And so it's a thing that's pretty universal. Everybody's teenager will do something like that where they They think that they've figured it out, they understand everything, but they haven't actually. They're doing something to seem cool or because it's whatever their reason might be. It's usually typically just to feel like they're cooler than they are or something like that. A relative, a related word is fad, which is like a phase that a lot of people go through. A fad, F-A-D, just as it sounds, is a sort of a phase that's more culture-wide and typically has to do with something specific, like a a product or a style or a kind of music or an artist or something like that where it's a specific thing that is popular for a phase during an amount of time. And the word fad usually says, again, that it's going to end, right? The idea with a fad is that it starts and then it ends. It's not something that's just new, right? So smartphones aren't a fad. Smartphones started, they got better and better and they're going to stay around. They're going to stick around. But something like, I don't know. What's the word? Moda? No. It's like what you wear. Fashion! Jesus. Can I speak English anymore? I don't know. I'm tired. Sorry. Fashion usually has fads, right? There's this a couple of months even where everybody's wearing this color or this style or this thing. Then a couple of months later it changes. It's a different fad. different websites or platforms or fads. There's this fad of using everybody uses this site then it becomes terrible and everybody leaves it and things like that. There's this up and down and ebb and flow in stuff in our daily lives because that's just how things go. Things go in and out of fashion and they come and go in phases. You can also call something like that a wave. A wave is when something comes in and then leaves again. A wave can be a little bit more, not aggressive, but it feels bigger, right? It feels like there's something building up and it builds up this wave, which then crashes down and goes away. That's more like what a wave might be. So a wave of something is sweeping over the country. whatever that might be. But yeah, another way that you might use phases is to think about projects. And this is something that I do all the time. This is probably the most common way that I use the word phase is within a personal project or a project for work or something like that. I even think about it a little bit like with this channel, it's not called, geez, Ben's Language Lab. God, I know my own name. With Ben's Language Lab, I also go through different phases and focus on different things. But a good example is my check learning, for example. I split up my learning into different phases back when I started. Okay, let me grab my, I actually have a sticky note that has my phases on it. And I can see the distinct five different phases for reaching the 1,000 hours mark. And I wrote those down. And so phase one was 100 days at one hour per day. I did that. That was a while ago. Then I did phase two, which is 100 days at one and a half hours per day. Phase three was the longest phase, 120 days at two hours per day. Phase four is 80 days at two and a half hours per day, and phase five is 100 days at three hours per day. And I am right now pretty much in the middle of that. I'm about to reach, yeah, I'm a little over halfway through that phase. And so I'm about to reach phase six, which is going to start being output and speaking. I think I actually made like seven phases total in my plan, maybe eight. Yeah, I think it was eight. Yeah, it's because it's another 100 days of speaking and input and then 100 days of more like double speaking and input and then 30 days. The last phase is the shortest phase and it's like a big sprint of a lot of input, a lot of speaking before I go to visit the country. And I made that plan. over a year ago now, and I included phases as a big part of that. Because it's very helpful for splitting up a bigger problem, a bigger project, into smaller sub-projects. I'm doing the same thing at work right now. We have a large project that I'm working on and managing, but it's nice to think about each phase as a distinct thing. Focus on phase one, get that going and finished, and then move on to phase two. In reality, there's a little bit of overlap because I don't have a ton more to do in phase one, so I prepared phase two in advance, but we haven't really started it yet. And then they'll probably go into phase three and then maybe a phase four. I think we're probably going to stick with phase three though. But yeah. So anyways, that's my episode on phases, a very fun word. It's a useful in terms of what it means, but also it's just a fun word to say. Phases. So yeah, I hope that you enjoyed this episode. I apologize for being a little bit sweepy today, but I hope that you enjoyed and maybe learned a few things here and there, and I'll see you again tomorrow for another episode of A Daily Dose of English. I'll see you then. Bye-bye.


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