What's up guys?
I wanted to make a video for my students about this song called "What A Wonderful World"
by Louis Armstrong.
And it's a great song for learning English especially if you're just a beginner because
it uses very simple vocabulary.
The verbs that it uses are very simple.
They're all present tense.
Most of them are first person verbs.
And it's very easy to understand the words to this song even if you're a beginner.
Now, this song is by a man named Louis Armstrong.
He was very popular for a long time.
And his first name is Louis, It's spelled like Louis, but that's not how you pronounce
it.
It's Louis, Louis Armstrong.
He's mostly known for playing the trumpet, but he also is well known for singing.
And you might notice he has a very unique voice.
First I want to point out some vocabulary that you might not be familiar with if you're
a beginner in English.
The first word is Roses.
Now, roses are a type of flower.
And they look like this.
That's a rose.
The second word is bloom, now this is a verb.
A present tense verb.
And that is what happens when a flower starts off closed and it starts to grow and open
up.
So, before the flowers bloom, they look like this.
And then, after they bloom, they look like this.
The next word I want to point out is Wonderful.
That's Won-der-ful.
Now, this is a pretty common word, so you should definitely be familiar with this.
This just means great or very good.
Blessed is a religious word, and I actually looked up the definition in the dictionary.
And it means holy, fortunate, or divinely favored.
This is not a common word for people to say, but you might hear it a lot in Christmas carols,
or church hymns, or even in the bible when it says, "Blessed are the poor in spirit.",
"Blessed are those who mourn.", "Blessed are the meek."
Sacred is kind of similar to blessed, and it just means Holy or devoted to God.
A rainbow is the big colorful thing you see in the sky after the rain.
So, besides these words, you can probably understand most of the other words in this
song unless you're a complete beginner, in which case you probably don't understand anything
I'm saying right now.
But if there are any other words in this song that you don't understand, that's fine.
Just look them up online.
The phrase, "Trees of green" means the exact same thing as "green trees".
So what he's saying is, "I see green trees, and red roses."
Now, this is a very positive, optimistic song.
So, he looks at the flowers, and he sees them bloom, or grow, and that reminds him of what
a wonderful world it is.
Now, "What" is normally a question word, but in this case it's not asking a question.
It's really making a statement.
When he says, "What a wonderful world" he's really just saying, "The world is wonderful."
That's what he's trying to say here.
And he has a very interesting pronunciation of the word "world" really, when he says it,
it kinda sounds like he's saying "woild".
That's just his accent.
That's how he pronounces the word.
That is not a common way of pronouncing that word, but some people do say it that way,
so just be aware of that.
This is just like the tree part.
"Skies of blue" means the same thing as "blue skies", so he's saying, "I see blue skies
and white clouds."
Once again, this is a very positive, happy song.
So here, Louis is saying that the days are blessed, and the nights are sacred.
So literally the whole day, from morning until night, is happy, positive, blessed, sacred.
He's showing us some very happy feelings here.
So he sees these pretty colors in the rainbow in the sky, very pretty, and he sees the same
colors on the people that are walking by him in the streets.
So he sees people shaking hands, and that is just the thing that you do when you see
someone that you know, and you grab their hand, and you shake them for a few seconds
as a greeting.
And the people say, "How do you do?" which is just a way of saying, "Hello, how are you?"
But that is kind of an old fashioned way of saying that.
People don't really say, "How do you do" anymore.
So here, Louis suggests that when people say, "How do you do?", they're not actually trying
to say, "How do you do?", but rather, it's their own personal way of saying, "I love
you."
This might be the only part of the song that's not completely positive.
Because he says, "I hear babies crying."
But it gets better because after that he talks about how much these babies are going to learn,
And he says, "They'll learn more.
Even more than I know."
And he has this very positive, optimistic outlook on life, that these babies are young
now, but they're going to grow up and be smart and probably be successful and happy, and
everything is gonna turn out great.
So he ends off the song by saying "Ohhh yeahhh.", which really doesn't mean anything.
But I think it kind of adds a nice ending to his very positive feeling.
And that's a very nice happy thought to end on.
So I hope this video helped you learn some vocabulary and learn a little bit about american
culture.
And I just want to encourage you to keep listening to this song, keep reading the words, and
keep learning and memorising, and this should be an easy, fun way of learning English.
So thanks for watching my video.