Full video

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Welcome to Real Easy English from BBC Learning English. I'm Beth.

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And I'm Neil. In this podcast, we have a real conversation in easy English.

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If you want to read along, you can visit our website. BBC Learning English dot com.

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— Hi, Neil. — Hi, Beth. How are you?

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I'm very good, thank you. How are you?

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— I'm pretty good, yes. — Good, good.

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What are we talking about today?

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Well, today we are talking about food.

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In particular, we'll talk about our favourite foods

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and how often we eat them.

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What an amazing topic. I have so much to say about food.

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But you said how often.

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What do we mean by how often we eat something?

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Mm, good question!

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'How often' means 'how many times' we eat our favourite food.

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So we might eat them every week, every day, or if we really like a food,

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we might eat it for breakfast, lunch and dinner — every meal!

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So, Neil, what is your favourite food?

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Well, that's a really difficult question,

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but I really like fish.

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Ah, me too!

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I was gonna say that, but actually, I really love seafood.

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So, I think I’d say any kind of dish with seafood in it,

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I absolutely love.

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So, how often do you eat seafood, Beth?

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Well, not very often, actually.

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I have it when I go on holiday and I have it in restaurants sometimes,

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but I don't really cook seafood at home.

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What about you? How often do you have fish?

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Oh, probably a few times a week.

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— Really? — Maybe, yeah.

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Yeah. We eat a lot of fish.

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We sometimes have fish at home. I normally have it once or twice a week.

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Right.

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But I never have seafood at home, actually.

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Yeah, OK. So what is your least favourite food?

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Ooh, I absolutely hate baked beans!

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You hate baked beans!?

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I think they're disgusting!

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I can't even...

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The smell of them even makes me feel a bit sick.

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Oh, OK.

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So we've talked about the foods that we really like

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and the foods that we don't like.

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But in a general week, what do you normally cook?

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Often, we'll eat Indian curries,

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but also Italian pasta dishes or Spanish dishes

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and then sometimes more traditional British roast dinner kind of thing.

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Yeah.

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I think, generally, we have the same at home.

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Like, we eat a lot of food from different countries.

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But I have to say I usually cook quite a lot of pasta

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and quite a lot of rice at home in general,

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just because they cook really quickly!

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So, Beth. You generally eat rice and pasta dishes.

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What does that mean, 'generally'?

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Well, we use 'generally' and 'usually' and 'normally'

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for habits or things that we do a lot.

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So, for example, if I generally cook pasta or rice,

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that means maybe five times out of the seven in a week, I would say.

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OK, so that’s most of the time.

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If we use 'sometimes' we mean that we'd do it less than 'generally'.

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Yeah, sometimes might be two or three times a week.

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I guess it depends on what you're talking about.

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But for example, with me, I sometimes cook fish.

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Like I said I have it maybe twice a week.

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So I would say that’s sometimes.

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Beth, you said that you hate baked beans.

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So do you ever eat baked beans?

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Never. No, I can't stand them.

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So I never, ever have baked beans.

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Well, 'never' is something that we don't do.

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We just don't ever do it.

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I can’t believe you don't like baked beans.

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Beans on toast is a classic!

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It is. But, no. Not for me.

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Let's quickly recap the vocabulary we learnt during the conversation.

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We learnt 'often' which means 'we do something a lot'.

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And we learnt 'how often',

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which we use to ask someone 'how many times they do something'.

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'Usually', 'normally', and 'generally',

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which are all ways to talk about 'things we do a lot'.

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'Sometimes', which we can use

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to talk about 'things we do, but not always or often'.

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And 'never' to talk about 'things we don't do', like eat beans, Beth.

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Yes, just like I never eat baked beans. Urgh, horrible!

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Thanks for listening to Real Easy English. Visit our website for

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more activities and courses to help you with your English. BBC Learning English dot com.

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Next week, we'll talk about our friends.

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See you then. Goodbye!

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Bye!