English Expression – To Take Things For Granted
In this episode, I introduce you to a common English expression, To take things for granted. I also give you some examples. Enjoy! :)
Transcription
Hola amigos, welcome to episode #49 of English Made Simple.
Hello, hello, how are you guys? Welcome! What’s up?
Welcome to my regular and irregular listeners (haha sorry that was such a bad joke, I thought it was quite clever actually) regular and irregular, get it? And welcome to my new listeners as well.
Thanks for joining me amigos. This is Milena from www.englishmadesimple.net.
In today’s Short and Sweet episode I want to explain a common English expression, and guess what, native speakers use this one a lot. As a matter of fact, I used it in my last episode. Guilty! And you’ve probably heard it before!
So I’d like to explain what it is!
So, in the previous episode, #48 I mentioned how we take some irregular verbs for granted. More specifically, I mentioned that we take verbs such as To do, To Be and To have, we know these words, we take them for granted. We know them very well, we know how to conjugate them and now we use them often that we start to take them for granted. We don’t think of them as irregular verbs and we don’t think of them as being hard or difficult anymore. And that’s because we use them so often, we are just used to them.
So what I would like to say, is the more you practice irregular verbs the quicker you’ll get used to them. It will become like a second nature to you. Oops that’s another expression. It’s going to become a second nature to you. You won’t struggle any more. It’s going to be easy for you.
You can take things for granted and you can also take people for granted as well. What this means, when you take something for granted or someone for granted, you underestimate the value of that person or thing. In other words, to expect someone or something to always be available, always be there for you.
To translate this in Spanish, a similar saying exists in Spanish which is
darlo por hecho, darlo por sentado, asumir.
That’s what Take for granted means.
And also, huevon inteligente has a definition…he is back!
According to Weon Inteligente, to take something for granted is, also means,
to believe something to be the truth without even thinking about it, you just think it’s the truth, you don’t question it.
Easy peasy? Easy peasy lemon squeezy?
Here are some examples, some things we “take for granted” are food, water, shelter. Shelter is another word for accommodation. We should be grateful to have these things in our lives but we take them for granted.
I, for example, take my car for granted. I use it every day, but if it broke down all of a suddenly, unexpectedly, something went wrong, I would be like Oh crap What now. Then I would be like, Damn! I should have taken a better care of my car, I didn’t look after it, I didn’t take it to the service regularly. I don’t wash it, don’t clean it, you know, I take it for granted, it just take me from A to B.
And another thing when you take someone for granted, and we are all kind of guilty of this, we take our family members for granted, and we take friends for granted as well. We just know that this person will always be there for you no matter what.
So this is another expression for you to practise, taking things for granted. Just before we finish, let me ask you this question: What do you take for granted?
Do you take your phone for granted for example? Imagine if you had left your phone at home this morning, for example, you wouldn’t have been able to listen to English Made Simple, and that would’ve been a disaster, a catastrophe!haha
Alright guys, thank you for joining me, see you next time! Bye!