Daily Dose of English 62
June
Daily Dose of English 62
Intermediate
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 June. The month of June. Because the day that this episode is releasing is the first of June. The first day of the sixth month. And so, naturally, we write it 6-1, and then the year, which is 24 in this case. 6-1-24. which I know is backwards for most of you listening, but I'm sorry, that's just how we do it and that's how I think about months. It's very hard for me to see the date in the reverse, where it goes 1-6-24, just because to me that is the 6th of January, not the 1st of June. And so, Yeah, you're right. You all are correct. It's not that this is more correct or anything. It just doesn't make sense to have month, day, year, but it's what we're used to. And so it's really hard to change because that's just how things go. Today though, I want to talk about June because I thought it'd be sort of a fun thing to do and talk about the months as they're starting. I didn't do that with the past two months, but oh well, maybe we'll make up for it in another time. And I want to talk a little bit about what June feels like to me and generally what I think of and that sort of thing. as we, and so that you can get a bit of a look into, I guess this is more of a cultural episode than it is about the language itself. Maybe we'll come across some interesting words, but whatever. Let's get into it. Let's start talking about June. So June, like I said, is the sixth month, and so I always think about it as being almost halfway through the year. Right? It's the first half of the year. It's the end of the first half. January, February, March, April, May, and then June is number six. And right at the end of June is the middle of the year. And so that's one of the things that I think about when I think about June, which is the solstice. It's called the summer solstice. And I think it always happens in June. It does change a little bit, but the solstice is when there is the longest day of the year, which means that because as the earth rotates around the sun and it spins, we ended up getting longer and shorter days throughout the year, depending on where you are. If you're on the equator, so right around the middle of the earth, that's what the equator is. The equator is that invisible line that goes right through the middle of the earth. It goes through Ecuador and South America and parts of Africa and not a ton else, right? There's not a ton of things that are on the equator except for a few parts of continents. If you're on the equator, the length of the days doesn't really change very much. you have about 12 hours of day and about 12 hours of night, darkness, not necessarily day and night, but like darkness and light, most of the year. It changes a little bit. I think on the equator itself, it's got like an hour of difference depending on what time of year it is. But the further north you go, the more obvious the difference is. If you go all the way north in the country, not the country, the world, if you go all the way north in the world, the days can be really, really long or really, really short depending on the season. And so in summer, for example, in the north of Sweden, in the summer, the days are really, really long and there's barely any darkness at all. There's a couple of hours of darkness, that's it. And then the other thing happens in the winter, almost the entire day is dark and you'll have just a few hours of light. And it's pretty, I think in the Arctic Circle or something at the very top of the Earth, there is a couple of days of complete darkness or a couple of weeks even, I think might be true, whatever. But I'm from a place that's about in the middle of the two. My home city is about between the equator and the top of the Earth. And so we get a pretty big difference between how long the days are and how short the days are in the winter. And so to me, I always think of June as having really, really long days because the sun would come up normally right around seven-ish, and then it would set, it would go down at nine o'clock sometimes, 8.30, nine o'clock in the evening, which is very late. And I remember, um, like the summer times when I was growing up being, having so much light, so much as a day was bright because of that, like all the way down into the, the late afternoon and early evening. And the solstice is the day where the day's the longest. And then the day after it starts to slowly get shorter and shorter and shorter all the way until the winter solstice, when there's the shortest day of the year or the longest night of the year. And at around that time, the sun would set in my home city at about 4.30-ish, something like that. I'm not exactly positive. I could look things up, but I'm not going to. And so that's one of the things that I think about of June. The other thing that I think about, even though it's not relevant for me anymore, is the end of school. Because as a kid, when school gets out for the summer, it's always a big deal. It's always really important because I get to go outside and hang out with my friends and be outside and play and not go to school is the big thing. And that always happens sort of in early-ish June. I think it's like the first couple weeks of June. At this point I've forgotten, but it's around the 10th to the 15th typically. And that was always big for me. And my family frequently had like an end of school party and we'd have a bunch of other families over. We'd make dinner and have food outside and everything like that. And so that's another thing that I think about with June. The other one is generally just the weather because, again, where I'm from, fairly northern, does get a good amount of rain and sad weather, let's say. It's not always that nice. And so, June is when it starts to get quite nice outside. May can be a little bit rainy, a little bit sad, but then June, the sun starts to come out, the days are longer, it's a little bit warmer, because we really only have June, July, and a bit of August of really nice weather there. And so it was always something that I'd look forward to, to go to the local pool, to go swimming and to enjoy like the feeling of summer, because it's really nice. If you live in a part of the world that has a lot of rain and wetness, then it's really nice to have those months of summer and sun and just have a different feeling of things. I don't actually have a ton more things about June now that I think about it. It's kind of just like summery stuff and that because as an adult, right, the months aren't that different and there's not like any holidays that happen in June other than like Father's Day happens. There's also a couple others, but June is pretty open. It's sort of just a regular chill month where you hang out and do stuff. And so maybe I'll talk about some of those. Some of the summer memories that I have are about popsicles, actually, or some kind of iced treat that you eat. Because like I said, if the entire year is pretty cold and rainy, you don't really want to eat ice cream or popsicles in the rest of the year. And so during the summer, that's when everybody starts to make popsicles or buy popsicles and enjoy them because they're a lot more enjoyable if it's hot outside because it just is nice. And I remember that pretty frequently, like having a couple of popsicles in a day and running outside and hanging out and being outside generally. Another thing that that reminds me of is actually the fruit. Because again, I said this like five times today. I'm from a more northern part of the US in Oregon. And there's really, really good fruit that starts to bear fruit. It's actually the verb is also to fruit. And so I remember going around the neighborhood and picking raspberries and blackberries and just eating them because they were really big and juicy berries all over. And there was just so many of them, right? I could go fill up a container in one day, come back the next day and fill it up again from the same spot. And it was, they were really good berries, very delicious. And we'd also buy a lot of berries because they're not that expensive, which is great, because berries can be pretty expensive if you get them from some places. But because there's so many berries in Oregon, they were pretty reasonable. And so we'd get huge amounts of beautiful, amazing strawberries. And we would eat them and make ice cream or pies or whatever. A pretty famous summer pie is Strawberry rhubarb. Rhubarb is an interesting plant that you probably haven't seen before. It's not even that common in the US, but it makes really, really good pie with strawberries. So if you ever have the chance, try yourself some strawberry rhubarb pie and enjoy it. However, I'm gonna wrap it up here. That's been the episode on June, and I hope that you have a wonderful beginning of the month, or if you're listening to this on another day, a great day. I'll see you tomorrow. Have a good one. Bye.
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