Want to understand English people and their culture better? In this listening and culture lesson, I’ll talk you through some of the things you might not already know about life in England. For example, I’ll explain to you why some English people wear paper red flowers in the month of November. I’ll explain some of the things you may have observed, but don’t quite understand if you are new to English culture – such as some of the weird adverts you may have seen on television with talking meerkats in them. There are lots of topics to cover in this lesson: holidays, life events, the big brother state, culture, and more. Join me and learn more about life in England, while improving your listening comprehension at the same time. See how well you understood the lesson by taking the quiz at https://www.engvid.com/34-things-you-dont-know-about-english-culture/
Like this lesson? We have so many videos about English life and culture. Check them out now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fVRZhHam98&list=PLs_glF4TIn5YtEqu0I-8URDr8GT0JyYnI
TRANSCRIPT
Hi, everyone. In this lesson I’ve got many, many things about English culture that you may have seen but you don’t understand, so I’m going to break them down and summarise these things that, if you’re not from here, from an outsider’s perspective might be: „Oh, that’s different” – something you don’t understand yet. All of these topics could in themselves be English lessons on their own, so if you’re particularly interested in a topic, what you could do is go and research it for yourself after this lesson.
So let’s start with… This lesson is broken down into topics, the groups, the different things about English culture. We’ll start with charity. In England you may see people walking around wearing red poppies. „Poppy” is like a red flower – it’s made from paper, and you see this around the time of November because on November the 11th there is a special day to commemorate-which means, like, remember-the people that died fighting in World War I, and all the wars after that. So this is a charity event to raise money for the survivors of those wars, and to remember the horrors of war. So people walk around with the poppies on, and on television if you’re watching around that time of year, in particularly… In particular on the BBC, people will be wearing their red poppies. So, if you didn’t know what the red poppy was about, that’s what it’s for.
Next we have charity fun runs. A lot of people are very into running and saving money for charity at the same time. So, sometimes they wear a fancy dress costume; sometimes they run in a costume which is really, really hard to wear or heavy or difficult in some way. So, the people that go in these races, before they all race, they’ll go around asking everyone you know: „Can you sponsor me? Can you give me some money for my run?”
Next we’ve got Red Nose Day. Red Nose Day is a charity television event where on the BBC they raise money for the charities they support. Some of there… Some of them are in the UK, and some of them are global charities. And their theme… the thing they mainly are famous for is getting people to wear red noses on that day when it happens. And now you’ll more likely see in particular chain shops, big shops that have a partnership with Red Nose Day, you’ll see you can buy t-shirts of Red Nose Day. So, when you buy something in that shop, money goes to Red Nose Day. They get all famous people involved doing silly things, and it’s just one day on television where they try to have fun and raise money for their charities.
It’s quite similar to Children in Need in terms of… This is another charity event. In terms of how they do it – get the celebrities in, make some comedy with the celebrities. But Children in Need is raising money for children’s charities; and instead of the Red Nose Day thing, they have Pudsey Bear and that’s their mascot; their… The thing that represents them is their bear, and they… People also watching at home can raise money themselves with their friends and families, and people at school perhaps by baking cakes, having a clothes… An old clothing sale, something like that. People will get involved with these events and give their money to charity.
The next topic I want to look at is advertising. When you go to a different country and you watch the television and you see the adverts, some of the adverts stick in your mind and you think: „That’s weird” or „What’s that about?” So, here are a few of those kinds of adverts. We have number five, which is: „Compare the Meerkat”. „Compare the Meerkat” has been… They’ve been doing it… I don’t… I’m just going to guess, here, maybe 10 years. It’s an insurance company, and at some point they decided to use meerkat animals to sell their insurance, and it was really popular and everybody loved it, and thought it was cute and funny. And now it’s kind of confusing that they are still an insurance company […]
