This entry is part of a series about shopping. More shopping all week! This entry is available as a Adobe Acrobat file for printing or use in a class. This entry includes a listening exercises. You can dowload the MP3 or play it using the button below. (MP3)

I like to shop online, but how safe is it? A lot of my students would never pay for anything over the Internet, because they’re worried that someone might be able to intercept their credit card or bank information and take all their money.

I don’t have much money to take, so I never really worried about it. To me, being able to buy books in English on Amazon—when there isn’t a single book store in Dresden that has them—is definitely worth the risk. After all, what good is money if you can’t find the things you want to buy?

Even my mother—who I think is the most old-fashioned person in the world—is starting to shop more and more online. She says that the stores near her house just don’t have the things she wants to get, and so she has to shop online.

But, what happens if someone does get your credit card number? Is it possible for someone to take all your money? What about privacy? Are you worried that the government or your neighbors will know where and how you spend your money?

How safe do you think it is to shop online?

This entry is part of a series about fitness. Get ready to sweat this week! This entry is available as a Adobe Acrobat file for printing or use in a class. This entry includes a listening exercises. You can dowload the MP3 or play it using the button below. (MP3)

I grew up in the U.S., and now I live in Germany. In the two countries, I feel like sports and fitness are looked at differently.

I think everyone knows—unfortunately—the stereotype of the fat American. And, my experience in the U.S. was that some people were very fit, they were crazy about their fitness, and other people didn’t try to be fit at all. In Germany, on the other hand, I feel like most people try at least to be ‘normally’ fit. There are a few people who are crazy about their fitness, and a few people who don’t try at all.

So, in the U.S., it seems like people are at one extreme or the other, and in Germany most people are in the middle.

But with sports, it’s the different. Most Americans I know love to play a sport when they have time, if they’re good at it or not. After all, an American would say, it’s all about having fun. The Germans I know, however, either don’t play a sport. . . or they train to be as good at it as they can be.

To me, it’s interesting that two related things—sports and fitness—can seem to be opposites in the two countries that I think I know well. How are sports and fitness seen in your country? Are they important? Do many people—and I mean adults, not just kids—play sports in your country?

This entry is part of a series about older workers. We’ll defy stereotypes all week! This entry is available as a Adobe Acrobat file for printing or use in a class. This entry includes a listening exercises. You can dowload the MP3 or play it using the button below. (MP3)

I teach English to a lot of people who think they are old. Some are grandparents, others have children as old as I am. And every one of them is able to learn English.

So, I was surprised to learn that most of them think they will never be able to find another job. In Germany, they tell me, companies don’t hire people who are over forty-five or fifty years old, and so, my students would never even consider looking for another job.

The logic, they tell me, is that companies think older workers have two problems: first, their training is out-of-date and they’re difficult to train. Second, because they’re older and will retire soon, it’s not worth the company’s time and money to train them.

The ideal job candidate, my students tell me, is twenty years old and has thirty years of experience.

What do you think? How easily can an older worker find work in your country? If you had a company, would you hire older workers? Why, or why not?

This entry is part of a series about renewable energy. It’ll be a renewable week! This entry is available as a Adobe Acrobat file for printing or use in a class. This entry includes a listening exercises. You can dowload the MP3 or play it using the button below. (MP3)

If you own a car, you need to put gas—short for ‘gasoline’—in it. That gas is made from oil, which we pump out of the ground. Oil is a finite resource, that means, there is a certain amount of oil in the ground—I don’t think anybody knows how much that is—and one day, it will run out. ‘Finite’ is a word that means ‘limited.’

Your time is finite, so I’ll move on to the next piece of vocabulary.

Now, more oil is pumped out of the ground every year. But, because oil is a finite resource, we can’t pump more oil every year forever. When we start getting less oil every year, people say we will reach what is called ‘Peak Oil.’ Peak oil is the term for the moment when we go from always getting more oil out of the ground to always getting less oil out of the ground.

It’s fair to say that, when we reach peak oil, a lot of things in our life will change.

What do you think will change in your life? Do you think we will reach peak oil in your lifetime? Are you doing anything to make sure you can live independent of oil?

This the first entry in a series about job hunting.  We’ll be talking about resumes (C.V.s) this week.  The other entries in this series are: (Idiom) A Needle in a Haystack Formatting Your Resume Resume Tricks This entry is available as a Adobe Acrobat file for printing or use in a class. This entry includes a listening exercises. You can dowload the MP3 or play it using the button below. (MP3)

Looking for a job isn’t easy. At least, getting a job isn’t easy. There are a lot of Internet search engines to help you, but they only help you find jobs, not get them. A bit part of getting a job is how you present yourself to the company you’re interested in.

The first step in presenting yourself to the company is your ‘application.’ Your application can be an email, very often it’s a paper letter, but it’s always written. In the application you tell the company that you’re interested in the job, and you tell the company why you are the right person for the job.

Applications will change from one job to the next, but the vocabulary stays the same. When you send a company your application, you apply for the job. And that makes you a job applicant or a job candidate. The company will look through the applications to decide which candidates to invite to a interview, and then they will (or, should) give the job to the best applicant for the job. In other words, they will hire the best applicant.

That’s a short version of the process that’s common in the U.S. and in Germany. Is it also common in your country, or do you use a different system? Do you think that companies usually hire the best applicants for a job, or do you think that they make their decisions differently?

This is an entry in a series about the military. It’ll be a week in uniform!  The other entries in this series are: Gung-Ho Vocabulary Military Phrases Idiots in the American Army? This entry is available as a Adobe Acrobat file for printing or use in a class. This entry includes a listening exercises. You can dowload the MP3 or play it using the button below. (MP3)

My Grandfather was in the American Army. My father was in the American Army. My brothers were in the American Army, and, yes, I was in the American Army.

I hated the Army. Many people do. Now, though, it’s years later and I think the Army was a good experience for me. Some people think that sending a ‘trouble’ kid (that’s a nice way of saying a ‘bad kid’) to the military is a good way to ‘make a man out of him.’ (And that’s a nice way to say: the military will teach him to do what he’s told, and to behave.) I don’t know if that’s true.

For me, the Army was good in two ways. First, even when I hated it, I liked knowing that I was doing a lot of the same things that my grandfather had done. When I was little, my grandfather was a hero of mine, and I liked the connection to him.

Second, as a bookworm, I wasn’t a very ‘active’ person before I joined the Army. But, in the Army, I learned to push myself in a way that only athletes do. And, even more, I learned to work as a part of a team, and to do difficult jobs, even if I didn’t want to.

Later, in college or in my first jobs, it was good for me to have been in the Army. Where I had to get up at five in the morning in the Army, an ‘early’ class in college was at eight. And the jobs that I had as a student were difficult and frustrating jobs, but they only went for eight hours.

From my Army experience, I knew that I had ‘what it takes’ to do these things that other people thought were so hard. And from that knowledge, I got a kind of self-confidence that I’m still very thankful for.

This is the first entry in a series about poker. The other topics in this series are: Card Vocabulary Poker Idioms Bluffing The Importance of Bluffing This entry is available as a Adobe Acrobat file for printing or use in a class. This entry includes a listening exercises. You can dowload the MP3 or play it using the button below. (MP3)

This week we’re going to be talking about poker, and poker in American English. But the reason we’re talking about poker is a little bit unusual. We’re talking about poker because I don’t like TV.

You can say TV irks me, or bothers me, or TV is my pet peeve. But, the fact of the matter is, I don’t like it, and I don’t like to be in the same room as a TV that’s turned on. Not watching TV means finding something else to do in the evenings. When I was single, it was easy: I read books or visited friends. Now that I’m married, though, my wife likes it best—and so do I—if we do something together. It’s really hard to read books together.

So, we’ve started playing more games. We play all kinds of games and, when we can, we play with other people. That’s how I started playing poker.

Do you think that playing games is a better way to spend time than watching TV? Do you think I’m crazy to try not to watch TV? If you didn’t watch TV, what would you do with your time?

This is the first entry in the series on pet peeves. We’ll be talking about things we don’t like all week! This entry is available as a Adobe Acrobat file for printing or use in a class. This entry includes a listening exercises. You can dowload the MP3 or play it using the button below. (MP3)

For me, it’s what I call ‘vocabulary inflation.’

‘Vocabulary inflation’ is my own word for making things sound bigger and better—or smaller and worse—than they really are. If my friend Peter says “I love Harry Potter,” I want to ask him how his girlfriend feels about his love for Harry Potter.

You and I, we’re intelligent, rational people who know that normal people can’t love the character in a book or movie. But, people still say it, because it’s easier than saying “I really enjoy reading the Harry Potter books.” And, if I ever did ask Peter what his girlfriend thought, he’d say “Toby, you know what I mean.”

I’m an English teacher. I like people to use the right words, and to use them correctly. But, I also know that when they don’t, it’s harmless. It doesn’t hurt me, it just turns on internal teacher in me. It’s a pet peeve of mine.

A ‘pet peeve’ is a term that we use to describe something that we don’t like. It’s a good term to know if you’re learning English, because when you say something is a ‘pet peeve,’ you’re admitting that the thing you don’t like really isn’t a problem. . . it just doesn’t fit you somehow.

Anything can be a pet peeve: the jokes your English teacher makes (you like my jokes, though, right?) or the way your boss ends every sentence with ‘okay?’

What’s your pet peeve?

This is an entry in the series on “Job Benefits.” This week we’re talking about the positive side of our jobs. This entry is available as a Adobe Acrobat file for printing or use in a class. This entry includes a listening exercises. You can dowload the MP3 or play it using the button below. (MP3)

The word ‘benefit’ has a couple of synonyms in English. In normal American conversation, we talk about the ‘upside’ of something, meaning the positive side. A benefit can also be a ‘positive effect,’ like in this sentence: “a benefit of laughter is that it can help you reduce stress.”

When we talk about benefits, we often use the preposition ‘of,’ like I did in the sentence above. Or in this sentence: “a benefit of learning English is that I can understand Billy Joel songs.”

Obviously, the positive side, or the positive effect of your job is—for most of us—the money. Talking about a job, though, the one thing your benefits can’t be is money. In ‘work English,’ benefits refer to all the things you get from your job that aren’t money.

Is there a positive side to your job that isn’t money? Does your employer pay for something for you—from a car to English lessons—so that you don’t have to pay for it yourself?

Teaching English in Germany isn’t a ‘job with benefits’ in the American sense—we’ll talk about what that means tomorrow—but it does have a lot of benefits: because I have (mostly) great students, I feel very connected to the city that I live in. They tell me what’s happening, they have different opinions on local problems, and they teach me about their own jobs. In fact, I think I must learn as much from them as I teach to them. I think that’s a very clear benefit.

Before we talk about the ‘American’ meaning of benefits, what are some of the positive things you can say about your job? What are the benefits of doing what you do? What are the benefits of owning a car? Of not owning a car?

Here’s a question people have been asking me: what are some benefits of having children?

I’m interested to hear what you think! Let me know!

This entry is available as a Adobe Acrobat file for printing or use in a class. This entry includes a listening exercises. You can dowload the MP3 or play it using the button below. (MP3)

I’m pleased to announce the birth of Leonhardt Tobias, on August fourth, this year. Leon—we’ve decided to call him that, even though I like the idea of calling him TobyTwo—was born weighing 8.75 pounds, and was 20.86 inches long. If you’re the kind of person who thinks in metric, that’s 3.97 kilograms and 53 centimeters.

I can’t tell you how much I love the little guy—I even think it’s great when he cries—but I can tell you that I’ve changed my first diaper. (I wasn’t wearing the diaper, Leon was.) And I even impressed the midwife with my diaper changing skills. The midwife is the woman who helped out during the delivery—the ‘normal’ word for the birth—and afterward.

It was both an unusually long and a very fast delivery. My poor wife had an induced labor. Or, in other words, the doctors gave her drugs to make her body want to have the baby right away. But she was in labor—that’s the word for the work of having a baby—for over a day and had a lot of pain behind her when the doctors said that Leon had too much stress and they’d have to get him out by C-Section.

A C-Section is the name of the operation in which a doctor actually cuts open a woman—in this case, my poor wife—to remove the baby. My wife’s C-Section went really well and I got to hold Leon when he was only minutes old. But, because a C-Section is serious surgery, my wife will be in the hospital longer, so she can recover from her operation. ‘Recover’ is a word that means the same as ‘get better,’ or ‘get back to normal.’

I think it’s great that my wife can recover in the hospital. She has experts there to talk to her about all the different things we’re learning about Leon. And she has other women around her, and they compare experiences and babies. (“Her little girl was crying all night, so it’s no problem if my little boy cried, too.”)

For me, though, well. . . I’m a little bit lonely here at home when I know that my whole family is somewhere else! The apartment sure seems empty without them!