Full video

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Hello and welcome to Real Easy English,

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the podcast where we have real conversations in easy English

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to help you learn.

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I'm Georgie.

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And I'm Neil.

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And you can watch a video version of this podcast and get a free worksheet

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at bbclearningenglish.com.

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Hi, Neil. How are you?

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Hi, Georgie. Yeah, I'm very good.

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I'm excited.

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Why?

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I'm going to a birthday party.

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Whose birthday party?

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My sister's.

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Your sister.

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Well, that's funny, because today we are talking about brothers and sisters,

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or siblings.

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Yeah. Do you have any siblings, Georgie?

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I do. I have one sister.

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She is younger, but she is taller and more mature and more sensible than I am.

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How about you?

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Exactly the same.

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Yes, I have a younger sister, but she's a bit more grown-up than me.

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A better version of you?

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Yeah, definitely.

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Are you similar?

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Well, are there any similarities between you and your sister?

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Well, I mean, physically we don't look similar, but some people say we do.

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I can't really see it.

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But I think some aspects of our personality are similar.

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We like some of the same things.

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It's, you know... it's good when we meet, but we don't meet very often.

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How often?

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Every few months.

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Yeah?

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Yeah.

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Because, you know, she lives in a different city

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and has her family and life's busy.

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Yeah. I'm lucky because my sister lives in London,

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so we are able to see each other quite regularly.

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So, Georgie, are you close to your sister?

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Yes. I would say that we are close.

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Growing up, we weren't so close, I would say.

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Although I think she disagrees.

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But since we went travelling together, we became closer,

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because we had this kind of special experience together.

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We were very far away from home.

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We had to do lots of difficult things, you know, organising.

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We were,

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yeah, together against the world

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so we became close.

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How about you? Are you close with your sister?

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I think when we're together, we get on well.

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But then we can go a long period of time where we don't really talk,

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and that's... and that's OK.

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It's life.

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So you have a sister and you get on well.

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But do you wish that you had more siblings.

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Yes, I wish I had a brother.

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It might sound strange,

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but I've always wanted to know what a boy in my family would look like.

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Yeah, it might change the dynamic a little bit, though. What about you?

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Yeah, when I was younger, I thought it would be nice to have a brother.

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An older brother to kind of show you the way.

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Yeah?

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Because probably, you know,

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as the older sibling, you're kind of... you get to do everything first,

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and that's sometimes good and sometimes bad.

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But it's funny because the stereotype of older siblings is usually

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that they are more responsible and sensible because they had, you know,

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the more rules growing up.

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And then when the younger sibling comes, they have less rules, or fewer rules.

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But I think that my sister is the more serious and better behaved one.

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Let's recap the vocabulary we heard in the conversation.

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We had 'siblings', which means brothers and sisters.

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We heard 'similar', which means almost, but not exactly the same.

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We had 'get on with', which means to have a good relationship with someone.

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For example, I get on well with my sister.

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We heard the adjective 'close'.

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If two people are close, they like each other and they talk to each other often.

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And that's it for this episode of Real Easy English.

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You can find a worksheet on our website and lots more episodes

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to help you practise – bbclearningenglish.com.

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See you then.

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Goodbye!