Good morning, good afternoon and good evening! Welcome to Smashing English! Before we start
this video, be sure to subscribe because I make new videos all the time and I don't want you to
miss any! So with that said, let's get on with the video! Today we are going to be learning English
from the lyrics of Adele's new song: Easy on Me. And I wanted to use Adele's song in this video
but because of copyright I can't use any of the music. So I thought, I'll sing it myself! I know
I am nothing compared to the real Adele, but I thought at least we can have some of the music
in this video. So that's why you are hearing my voice and not the lovely Adele. So we are
going to look through the lyrics of this song and see what we can take out to help us improve our
English. If you want to listen to it, I will put the full cover of Easy on Me that me and Bez did
at the end of this video, if you want to watch it. If not, that's absolutely fine! Let's get started.
Okay so let's start with 'there ain't', she says 'there ain't no gold in this river',
Ain't is a very very informal word you will see that means 'isn't', so there isn't any gold
in this river. But rather than saying 'there isn't any', a lot of people say 'there ain't no',
but I wouldn't use it in any formal essays, in any exams or a job interviewm or anything like
that. But if you're just talking to your friends in conversation you can definitely replace 'isn't
any' with 'ain't no' or 'aren't any', you can turn into 'ain't no'. I don't really hear this
in speech, I hear it more in songs and raps and music and things like that. It's very American,
it's a very American way of speaking so if you are trying to go towards a British accent, an
RP accent, try not to say things like 'ain't no', makes you sound very American. But if your accent
sounds American already, you can definitely get away with saying 'ain't no', go for it, do what
you want. And then Adele uses a lovely metaphor, she's talking about finding gold in the river,
not an actual river, she's probably talking about the river of her relationship, lovely metaphor.
And then she references washing her hands, now I'm sure this is just an extended part of the
metaphor of the river of her relationship that she's involved in, she's washing her hands with.
But we also have an idiom, 'to wash your hands of something', so when you wash your hands of
something, you refuse to accept responsibility for it or you you ignore something, you
refuse to acknowledge something. I wash my hands of him, you know? I've tried to help that man,
I've tried to help him get a job, I've tried to help him improve his life but he's not listening
to my advice, I wash my hands of him, so I'm done, I'm, I can't, I can't be responsible for this man
anymore, I've tried my best, I'm stopping. So it could be a reference to that, she might be saying
that she's washing her hands of the relationship, she's tried her hardest to improve this
relationship to make it work and now she washes the hands of it, she's done, she can't do anymore.
And then she continues this lovely water metaphor by saying 'I know there is hope in these waters
but I can't bring myself to swim when I am drowning in this silence, baby let me in,'
so you'll notice that she says 'these waters' rather than 'this water', that's because water
can sometimes be countable, we sometimes refer to
a vast amount of water as waters. You might say, you know, I'm lost in the waters or, you know, the
the sailor traveled across many waters. You knowm you can count it in some contexts. It's
not very common to talk about water in that way, I think if Adele was speaking in conversation she
would probably say 'this water' but it sounds almost more poetic to say 'these waters', it
feels more grand and bigger. And then she said she can't bring herself to swim, that's something that
we say a lot, when we can't bring ourselves to do something, you can't find the effort.
So, you know, I know that I should be happy but I just can't bring myself to smile, I just can't,
I can't find it, I can't get the energy to do it, I can't find the effort to do this.
And I can't bring myself to do it because she's drowning in the silence and we often,
in English, we can use the word drowning not in the literal sense of 'I'm in water' drowning,
but in the sense of feeling overwhelmed and feeling like something is is, um, pulling you
under, you know? So you might hear someone is drowning in work, I'm drowning in work,
I've got so much work, I'm drowning in sadness, I don't know. If anything that feels like it's
coming on top of you, we can say that we're drowning in it. Now let's talk about the chorus:
Now, when I first heard the Adele recording of this,
this chorus annoyed me a little bit because she says this: 'Go
Heasy Hon me baby,'
Heasy Hon me. So don't copy that! Don't say go heezy hon me. I teach a lot of Italian students
in my work and something about the Italian language, one of the things that a lot of my
Italian students say is they will put a 'H' in front of vowels, like this.
So they might say go Heasy Hon me. Don't do it! We want to link it with a 'W' go weasy Yon me.
That's how we would say it, if I was talking to you, I'd say 'go Weasy Yon me,' Go Weasy Yon me.
Never, never, never, never put a 'H' in front of a vowel if there's no 'H' there, okay?
Don't do it. Don't. And obviously now we come to the title of the song, 'go easy on me,' This is
a very common idiom, a very common phrase that someone might say to you if they're just asking
you to be patient with them. Don't, don't be angry with me for taking my time, go easy on me, have
patience.
Okay now we're into the second verse, and she says again 'there ain't', there ain't no room instead
of there isn't any room, so there you go, she said it again! There ain't no room for things to change
when we are both so deeply stuck in our ways. To be stuck in your ways means you are stubborn,
you have your way of thinking and you are not going to change. So if you are stuck in your ways,
you are not going to change how you think, how you live, how you act how you react, that is you now
for the rest of your life. And then she says 'you can't deny how hard I've tried, I changed who I
was to put you both first', when you put someone first, you prioritise them, you you focus on them
rather than you, I'm putting you first. But now I give up, lovely phrasal verb, so you can either
say give up or give in, they mean the same thing. They mean to just stop trying, to stop with your
effort, I give up, I give in. Okay, then she does the chorus again and now we're into the bridge.
'I had good intentions,' and intention is the noun, something that you plan to do in the future
but we can also intend on doing something, which is the verb. 'I intend to fix this company,
I intend to make this company the best company the world's ever seen!' And the highest hopes,
if you have high hopes it means exactly what it sounds like, your hopes, your dreams are very
high, you're hoping for the best. We often talk about hopes in terms of height rather than width,
we wouldn't really say big hopes, you might hear that but not really. More commonly we say
high hopes, or you might hear the phrase 'I don't want to get my hopes up,' If you
had a job interview and you thought it went really well, you liked the boss, you liked the company,
you might say to someone: 'Yep, I thought it went well but I don't want to get my hopes up,
just in case I don't get it, I don't want to be disappointed so I'm not going to get my hopes up,'
And then it's the chorus again, see? Easy peasy. I am a firm believer that songs and lyrics can be a
great way to learn English. honestly fabulous. So if you have an English song that you enjoy,
find the lyrics, work through them, take a pen, see if you can circle the bits that are new,
circle the words that you don't know, find a dictionary, find the meanings of all of them and
get to a point where you understand absolutely every single lyric in that song and then if you
can learn the song, beautiful ,you've got all that vocabulary, all those sentences, all those
phrases in your head and you can listen to some nice music, too. Thank you so much for watching,
if you enjoyed this video please give it a like! If you want an online English lesson, one-to-one
with me or Bez, the link for that is down below. And if you want to support this channel you can
also find a way to do that down below. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time,
tata!