Image Talk #10
Image Talk
Episode 10
Beginner
Hi, my name is Ben. You're watching Image Talk. This video is meant for English beginners. Today, we'll be talking about five images. If you need, there are subtitles available, and the entire transcript is on benslanguagelab.com. All you should do is watch, listen, and enjoy. Let's start with this fun image. This is a picture of someone's hat, their phone and their glasses on a blanket of some kind or a shirt. This yellow cloth in the background looks to be some kind of shirt maybe or a blanket, a large blanket on the beach. Here in the corner and down here, we can see that it's on what looks like sand. Sand at the beach, you can hear the waves. You can hear people talking in the background. Maybe you have a drink in your hand that you're slurping. That's slurping. And they decided to take a picture of their stuff. Their hat, like I said, their phone and their glasses. We can also see in the reflection on the phone, we can see that there looks to be a palm tree above them. So that's the kind of palm tree. This is your palm, but it has nothing to do with a palm tree. A palm tree is nice and big. It has these leaves that are like this, right? Like this. A palm tree is sort of like this. Here's the base, the trunk, maybe. Oh, that's ugly. There's the trunk, and then you have palm tree-ness. There we go. That's a horrible palm tree. But that's a palm tree. We can also see the reflection in the glasses. So we can see what's above them. And also we can see the frame behind, or rather the arms. I guess these are arms. This whole part of the glasses, this outside, all of this is the frame. We also can see, like their hat we can also talk about. Their hat is used to protect yourself from the sun. So if you put on the hat, you have this brim. This is the brim of the hat. And this will protect you from the sun. It comes out from here and the sun can't hit you right in the face and make it really bright. So you're protected from the sun. So this is a fun image of what looks to be a vacation. You usually go on a vacation to sunny places, especially people that are from not sunny places because the sun is nice and it's nice to go to the beach and relax. Let's go on to the next picture though. This is a very different picture, what looks to be of a woman or a girl standing in a pool. She's in this big pool of water. It's all water. And there's a giant fish. The fish is huge. The fish is enormous. Because this is a normal sized person, right? They're about whatever, this tall, we might call them, let's say she's five foot four. No, five foot, that's the wrong way. Five foot four, there we go. Five foot four inches, that's what we say in the US, is somebody who's, I am six three, which is pretty tall. And so if this girl is five foot four, she would be about this tall to come to my shoulder if I was standing. So she'd be, okay, here's the off the screen. So she'd be about here. But anyways, back to the giant fish. This is the giant fish. And we might call it a koi fish. KOI is this type of fish that are typically from Japan or East Asia is what we think about them. And this fish, like I said, is huge. If she's 5'4", this fish has to be 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 feet at least, which is huge. 25 feet is like eight meters, at least. So that's a very big fish. We also see that there's little ripples in the pond, or the pool. These are called the ripples. When you drop something into water, it goes, and then the water kind of spreads out as there's the waves kind of go, and we call those ripples. There's ripples in the water. And it looks to be like there's other like plants here, maybe some rocks and other things that are in the pool besides just the girl and the humongous fish. We also can see that the fish has fins. These are called fins and there's one up here and its tail. This isn't really a fin. We would probably call that its tail or its tail fin, but they do are a little bit different. It's also got its big ol' eyes here. Its eyes have to be like this big if it's just 25 feet. And it even has little whiskers. Whiskers are the things on cats that are out like this, on dogs as well, or there's a couple on this fish. Or on a person, it's when they have like a little bit of hair on their beard or on their mustache, but they're still small, right? If you have a full beard, that's not whiskers. And it's also if you're shaven like I am, but if you have a little bit of hair and they're starting to come out a little bit, we would call them whiskers. Whiskers So yeah That's everything that I have about this image, I guess. Oh, one last fish word. These are scales. Each of these individual little pieces of almost like armor on the fish, these are scales. And they protect the fish, it's their skin. We don't have scales, we just have skin, but they have scales. So now let's move on to the next image. which is a cool picture of what looks to be a skeleton in a dress of some kind on maybe a card. It looks to be almost like a playing card or something like that. And I thought it was a fun little image of sort of just some interesting images, I guess. So we first, we obviously see it's a skeleton. She has long purple hair that's sort of flowing behind her. There's this thing up here in like yellow that's like kaboom, which is sort of exploding and it's got some colors and stuff in it. And there's a house back here, which appears to be on fire. It looks like there's fire coming out of this house, which is interesting. And we even see this kind of messed up skeleton back here, which I don't really know what it's doing. And this skeleton is wearing a dress. She has a green dress on. That's the color of this dress. And there's a red sort of flowing part out behind her. It also says the Hot Mess Express, which I thought was kind of fun and we could talk about. So first, the word express, E-X-P-R-E-S-S, typically has an E. That's kind of hard to read. Let's see, what color is better for reading? Oops, let's go to colors. Maybe black would be easy to read here. Hmm, not really. So red didn't work that well. Blue would be weird, white wasn't great either. Maybe like, so green is on there. Let's try like a nice, maybe this blue, probably not gonna be easy either. Oh yeah, that's okay, express. Okay, anyways, my point is that you do not spell express like this. However, we do it sort of to make the word more fun. So you might have seen before something like Xmas. Right, that stands for Christmas because the X is like a cross. Right, crossmas, Christmas is how we say it. Even though you would spell it C-H-R-I-S-T-M-A-S, Christmas, but we say them the same. Same with express, you can do it like this, or espresso, espresso. You might even see written as X-R-I-S-T-M-A-S. I think that's a brand even, right? And so getting rid of stuff to put an X at the beginning of a word is actually fairly common to make words seem more fun or interesting. And so if you combine that fun version of express with hot mess, we get this sort of fun like thing. This is this is on the hot mess express or something like that. A hot mess, by the way, is a term to talk about a person who might look good or be functioning, but they're actually a mess. Because a mess is when somebody has a lot of problems, they have a lot of issues, they need help, things like that. They're a mess. That person is a mess. My friend Ian, I don't know, I don't know any Ians. My friend Ian, he's a mess. but a hot mess, hot in this case is somebody that's beautiful or attractive, and so the hot mess express is somebody that's a mess, but they're still kind of beautiful at the same time, and then they're on this fun express, right? The hot mess express, da, da, da. I hope that kind of is clear. I know it's a bit of a difficult concept, because it's not a real thing, but whatever. Let's go on to this next image. So this is an image and we're looking down. And so we can see here the trees, this is up, right? This is upwards kind of coming towards us up from the picture. So like, if you're looking at the, yeah, here, this is sort of up in the image, like this direction in what you're seeing, because we're looking down onto the roof. This is all the roof of what looks to be some kind of temple. A temple is where you might go to pray in whatever religion. There's typically specific words for different religions, church, temple, synagogue, but temple can also be used as a general term. So this looks to be a temple and there's some big ol' bunny rabbits on top. Bunny rabbits, big ol' ears. right, here are their humongous ears, and they're looking upwards. They also have whiskers, here's some more whiskers, and we see that the roof is made of what looks to be clay tiles, right, this red color, this is sort of a reddish-orange, typically is clay, clay comes from the ground, and these tiles look to be made of clay. That's not something that's common in the US, but you can find it in other parts of the world, especially like Southeast Asia, or you can find it in parts of Europe as well. They make roofs, or they used to make roofs out of clay tiles. I think they might still do it. But it's a very interesting color. There's also this sort of centerpiece where the entire roof comes together and is kind of looking upwards. And I thought it was a neat image. We also see a bunch of trees, so it looks like this temple is in a forest somewhere. It's in a very natural place, and maybe you have to walk through the forest in order to get to the temple. But it's a temple to some rabbits. So this last image that we have today is a really cool stylistic picture or drawing of a seaside city or seaside town. So I'll zoom in here a little bit so it's a bit bigger. And so it's stylistic, which means that it's drawn or it's painted in an interesting way, right? We don't have lines like this in real life. There's not a black line against stuff. There's not, like it's not a picture, right? You didn't take a picture. Somebody drew this and it looks interesting. We see here is what looks to be the sun, but also the sun is setting, right? This isn't a real picture. And we can see the reflection on the water. And it's also very, it's very orange. We have orange in the sky and the water, and it's very beautiful. On the water, we have a bunch of boats. There's a bunch of fishing boats, what looks like, where you go to fish and then reel in your fish. And we see there's some sort of cliffs here. A cliff is where you can fall, right? There's this rock, and then there's the part of the land. So here is where the town is, then there's a cliff, and then there's the water. And cliffside towns are very beautiful, very colorful usually. And here we have some more tiles on the roofs, just like the last picture. Scrolling down a little bit, we have what looks to be like a walkway or maybe a little small road next to this drop, right? There's sort of, there's a drop there. You can fall down this cliff and hurt yourself. So be careful. But we also have this little Vespa, it looks like, or some kind of moped. You can drive around on your moped in this beautiful seaside town. It also looks to be a little bit older. It has this really nice Mediterranean style. So when I see a picture like this, I think of Greece or more Italy, actually. Italy or maybe Croatia, something like that in that part of the world. But I've never been there, so I can't really say. Plus it's not a real place, it's a fake picture. Anyways, I'm gonna keep this episode of Image Talk a little bit shorter, and we're gonna start to end it now. In this episode, we talked about this kind of fun picture of somebody's things while they're on vacation. We looked at this ginormous fish and a little girl standing next to it. We saw the Hot Mess Express, and we learned a little bit about what a hot mess is. We saw this rabbit temple. And finally, we ended by talking about this stylistic, interesting seaside town. But this is the end of Image Talk. I hope that you enjoyed this video and learned a couple of new words. Write me down in the comments and let me know how it went. Remember, there are transcripts for all videos on benslanguagelab.com. I'll see you in the next episode. Bye-bye.
For email updates, subscribe to my blog via email or RSS feed.