Homophones – more examples
Just sharing a very recent example of homophones, it’s to do with a flavour of ice cream – toasted flour, harina tostada. This is a popular flavour of ice-cream for many Chileans. Hope you enjoy today’s short and sweet episode :)
Transcriptions
Hola guys, you are listening to episode number 65, numero sesenta y cinco.
Hola amigos, how’s it going? My name is Milena from www.englishmadesimple.net, welcome to today’s Short and Sweet episode. Hope you are having a great week so far.
Are you ready for a quick English boost? Excellent! Well that is exactly what English Made Simple is about, helping you improve your English in each and every episode.
So, are you ready to rock n roll? Let’s get started, shall we?
An interesting thing happened today, I was speaking with a few friends of mine about different flavours of ice-cream and what their favourite flavour was. And one of my friends said their favourite flavour was Toasted “flower”! And I went like what, you put a flower in your ice cream and you toast it? What do you mean flower? Can you actually eat a flower? Is this really possible?
And my friend said yes it’s delicious, have you never tried toasted flower before? Uhm, like nooo, because I am pretty sure you are not supposed to cook flowers, it could be bad for you.
Do you mean a flower, as in un flor in Spanish? Is that what you mean?
And then my friend said Noooo Milena not that flower. You dumbo. I meant flour for cooking, you dumb dumb! Flour is the main ingredient in baking, especially when you bake bread.
Oooooh right, you mean flour which means Harina in Spanish. Alright I got it now, it’s meant for cooking. Of course!
So guys, this is another example of homophones, remember, we learnt this in the last episode, homophones is the name given to words that sound the same, pronounced the same way, but they have different meanings!
So this example was actually – flour and a flower! Harina, flour, used for baking, it is spelt as F L O U R and Flower, a flower, or un flor in Spanish is spelt as F L O W E R or another to remember FLOWER is.. If you know,”bouquet of flowers” – bouquet is a French word meaning a bunch of flowers, in Spanish it would be ramo de flores. It is normally used at weddings when a bride throws a bouquet of flowers to all the single girls at her wedding ceremony. Yup. I think you got it now.
So, listen carefully now, here is a tip for you amigos.
Normally we don’t use articles ’A’ or ‘THE’ in English, before uncountable nouns. What are non-countables nouns? Well we covered this in episode #23 Many vs Much. Just quickly countable nouns [are] nouns we can count on our fingers, dedos, so say, 1 finger, 2 fingers, 1 flower, 2 flowers. Non-countable nouns are nouns that we cannot really count using our fingers so we can’t say, 1 water, 2 waters, 1 sugar, 2 sugars.
In this case we would use something called UNIT OF MEASURE. For example, 1 liter of water, or 2 liters of water or we can say 1 kilo of sugar, 2 kilos of sugar or 2 or 3 grams of sugar.
Right, you get my drift? Excellent! Easy peasy japanesy!
If you would like to learn more about non-countable and countable nouns then I suggest for you to go back and listen to episode number 23.
And that’s it for today muchachos y machachas! You’ve done really well! This episode was meant to give you a quick boost of English. Boost, I am using boost, boost is just another word to say, uplift or encouragement to help you improve your English.
Hope you enjoyed today’s episode of English Made Simple! Until we meet again! Happy holidays everybody! Hasta la proxima!