Welcome to the Listening Time podcast. I’m Conner from polyglossa.com, and you’re listening to Episode 8 of the Listening Time podcast.

If this is your first time listening, welcome! I’m glad you’re here. This podcast is for English learners who need to improve their listening skills. If you’re learning English now, and you can understand a lot of English, and you can understand me right now as I’m speaking, but you can’t quite understand native speakers when they speak really fast at normal speed, and when they’re talking to each other… if you have trouble understanding in those situations, then this podcast is perfect for you. Because here on the Listening Time podcast, I speak naturally, I say all of the normal words and phrases that I would normally say in my real life, but I say them a little bit more slowly, and a little bit more clearly than I normally would.

So I’m speaking naturally, I don’t have a script, I’m not reading anything, I’m speaking as the words come to my mind, but I’m speaking a little bit more slowly and a little bit more clearly than native speakers usually do. So, this podcast is designed to help you reach the level of English where you can understand normal podcasts made by English speakers for English speakers. So, this podcast is designed to help you reach that level. So on each episode, I talk about different topics. They’re usually pretty random, but hopefully they’re interesting for you.

And in this episode, I’m going to talk about garage sales, and I’m going to talk about American football. Two interesting topics… random, of course, but interesting. And, of course, remember that the transcript is available with each episode. So, if you want to see the… the words that I’m saying to help you understand better, you can access that transcript in the Details part of each episode. So maybe you listen the first time without reading the transcript, and then you want to read the transcript the second time you listen, so that you can pick up all those new words and phrases that you didn’t understand the first time. So that’s a good tool for you. And of course, remember to sign up for our one dollar Listening Practice Seminars at polyglossa.com to improve your listening. And if you can, please write a short review of this podcast and give it a rating if your podcast player allows you to do that, so that other people can find this podcast more easily. Alright, let’s get started.

Okay, so firstly, we’re going to talk about garage sales. If you don’t know what a garage sale is, this is an event where someone sells old items that they don’t use anymore, and they sell these items in their garage or their driveway. So, the word “driveway” refers to the area of concrete, cement, outside of your garage where you can park your car sometimes in front of your house. So, that’s your driveway. And then the garage is the part that’s inside, right, you can close the garage door. So, at garage sales, people sell items from their garage… or out of their garage, or from their driveway. So, other people come to their house, and they come onto their driveway or into their garage, and they look at the items that are for sale, and they can buy those items. It’s usually through cash, so people pay you cash for these items. “Cash” just refers to dollars, right, coins, bills… not credit cards, right. So they pay you in cash for items that you’re selling. That’s a garage sale.

And this is an interesting topic for many students of mine in different countries, because as far as I know, from what they’ve told me, garage sales aren’t really popular in other countries. They’re actually nonexistent in most countries, right. Garage sales are a uniquely American phenomenon, right. In America, we have a lot of garage sales, but in other countries, most people have never seen one in their whole life. So it’s definitely an American phenomenon. So what do people sell at garage sales in the US? A lot of things, really. People might sell clothes, they might sell household appliances like toasters or blenders or things you use in the kitchen… appliances like that. Or they might sell old furniture: some old chairs or tables or things like that. Or maybe toys, you know, clothes, a lot of things. Really, anything that they want to sell. Even old TVs, electronics, all kinds of things.

So, why do Americans love garage sales so much? Well, it’s something that’s deeply engrained into suburban life. When I say the word “engrained”, I’m saying that it has a deep place in our culture, right, it’s something that every American knows well, if they lived in the suburbs or close to the residential areas of cities at some point. Right. I grew up in the suburbs… in houses, not apartments. And our houses and our neighbors’ houses all had garages, and driveways, and front yards. The word “yard” refers to the area in front of your house and behind your house. In America, we have front yards, and back yards, and side yards. And usually, the back yard is the biggest of the yards, and it often has grass or maybe even a swimming pool, and other things like a patio, bushes, a garden, things like that. We call this a yard, and in this case, a backyard. The front yard is the area in front of the house where you driveway is, and people usually have grass and other things.

So, if you live in a house in the US, you usually have a front yard, and so because you have a front yard, you have space for people to come and shop if you have a garage sale, right. In other countries, houses might not have this space in front of their house… it’s just the street, right. So people might not have the space to sell items there and customers don’t have any space to look and browse through those items. The word “browse” just means to look through a collection. So if I’m in a store, and the worker asks me if I’m looking for something in particular, I could just say “No, I’m just browsing… I’m just browsing around”. It means that I’m just looking through their collection of items, right. So, Americans love garage sales because they’re useful to help you get rid of old items, and they’re useful for customers because you can often find very good deals, which means that you can find good prices on items because the owner just wants to get rid of it. They want to throw it out or sell it for very cheap, so often times, you can buy pretty useful things for very little money.

So, Americans see garage sales as very useful. And it’s also a fun activity for people to engage in. I remember that when I was young, my family had garage sales and it was fun for me as a kid to sell my old toys and playing cards and things like that. I got really excited about earning money from other kids who wanted to buy my toys, and it was an exciting experience as a kid. But, it’s also exciting to go shop at other people’s garage sales. So, with my family, when we would buy driving around on a Saturday or something, and when we would see a sign that said Garage Sale, we would definitely go. We would follow the sign, and we would go to that garage sale and take a look around.

So, many people do this. They’re already driving, and they’re going to go somewhere else, but when they see a sign that says Garage Sale, they get excited, and they decide to go to the sale. And my family did that a lot when I was younger. Maybe this doesn’t sound that exciting for you if you’re not American, and maybe you’re thinking, “I still don’t get why Americans like these garage sales so much”. And maybe it’s just something cultural, maybe it’s just something that we’ve always done and we like doing and there’s really not a lot of reasons why we like it so much, but we’re just comfortable with this type of selling and buying from other people, and we like to look around and see what kind of… or what kinds of cool things people are selling. So, the owner might think it’s not useful or practical for them, so they want to sell it. But I might think it’s really cool, and I might really like it, so I can buy it from them. It’s a pretty cool thing in my opinion.

Americans usually don’t have any problem with buying second-hand items. A “second-hand item” just means an item that someone else has already used. That’s a second-hand item. So, a lot of Americans like buying used things, second-hand items. But I know that in other countries, people might not like this as much. They might not trust the item, or they might think it’s a little weird to buy items that are used… that other people have already used. I don’t have any problem buying second-hand items; I actually like doing this because it saves me money. So, in America you see many thrift stores. A “thrift store” is a store where they sell used items… usually used clothes. And these are really popular in the US. And I’ve bought a lot of clothes from thrift stores because I don’t really care so much about fashion, and I just want cheap, usable clothes. So, I used to buy clothes from thrift stores pretty often when I needed to buy new clothes.

Alright, let’s move on to our next subject, which is American football, okay. So I know a lot of people are interested in this subject because it’s a very big part of American culture, of course. So, our main league… our football league is called the NFL, the National Football League, and it was founded in 1920… so about 100 years ago. And there are 32 teams in the NFL, and each team has a very big following. When I say the word “following”, I mean that the team has a lot of supporters, a lot of fans, right. So, football is not the oldest sport in America. Baseball is definitely much older than football, but nowadays, football is definitely the most popular sport amongst Americans. Many Americans watch football: men, women, children, grandparents, people of all ages and walks of life. They watch football. When I say the phrase “walks of life”, I’m referring to different varieties of people. So, we say “people from all walks of life” like football. This means that many different types of people, different varieties of people like football.

So, I’ll just quickly go over the general rules; I definitely won’t go into detail because that would take all day for me to explain the rules to you. That’s okay, let’s just talk about the general rules. There are two teams that play against each other in each game, of course. And the goal, the objective of the game is to score more points than your opponent. And there are different types of scores or scoring that are worth different amounts of points. So, sometimes you can score 6 points, or 3 points, or 2 points, or 1 point. There are different ways to score. And so of course, you want to score more points than the other team. And for each team, there is a certain amount of players that play on offense, and then there are players that play on defense, and there are players that play on special teams, as we call it.

So there are three different groups of players. So usually, if you’re a player on a football team, you only play offense or you only play defense, and a lot of these players can also play on special teams as well. But usually, players do not play on offense and defense. That’s very rare in football. So, it’s a little bit complicated, because in most other sports, people play offense and defense, right. But in the NFL, in football, you have designated players that are only playing on offense or defense. So it’s not like other sports.

So, of course you want to win as many games as possible throughout the season, and if you perform well during the season, you can go to the playoffs. The “playoffs” refers to the competition that happens at the end of the regular season, where teams compete with each other to try to go the championship, or in this case, the Super Bowl, and become the champion of the NFL. So you might’ve watched the Super Bowl before. It’s a very very popular event, and many millions of people watch it around the world.

So, why is American football so popular in America? Well, Americans tend to like a lot of action when they watch sports. So, many Americans don’t appreciate soccer, for example, because in soccer, you don’t have very high scores. You don’t usually see many many goals each game, so some Americans might find this a little boring. I don’t. I actually like soccer, but I’m not in the majority. Most Americans are not that interested in soccer. But with football, there’s a lot of action that happens throughout the game… not only scoring, but also hits, right. People hit each other very hard and tackle each other. When we say the word “tackle”, we’re talking about the action when one player takes another player and throws him on the ground. That is a tackle in football. So, Americans like all this actions, and these hits and tackles and all of that.

So, it’s very popular and it’s very commercialized today. You’ve probably seen, during the Super Bowl, that there are some really interesting commercials, some funny commercials that run during the Super Bowl because many people associate the Super Bowl with advertising and commercials, and they’re interesting in seeing these funny commercials. I don’t like this, but other people do. So… don’t ask me why it’s like this… I don’t know. But this is how the sport is. Lastly, I just want to mention a little bit about high school football and college football. The NFL isn’t the only type of football that Americans like. High school football is very popular in America. So if you’re in high school, it’s very common to go to the football games from your school. So your school has a football team, and they play against other schools’ teams, and you can go watch them on Friday nights, usually. It’s a very popular event. If you don’t go to the football games, you’re missing out on a very popular social activity because people go to these football games to socialize and talk with their friends, etc.

And college football is extremely popular in the US. So, some people prefer watching college football rather than watching the NFL even. And people go to college football games and cheer on their school’s football team. When I say the phrase “cheer on” or “to cheer” for someone, I mean that they support them and they hope that that team wins, and they yell and clap and support that team. They “cheer for” or they “cheer that team on”. So, high school football, college football, professional football… we have a lot of football in the US.

Alright, so hopefully these topics were interesting for you. And hopefully this was good for your listening. Hopefully, you understood a lot of what I said, or most of what I said. And if you need more help, remember to access the transcript for this episode, so you can listen again, and this time you can read and understand all those new words and phrases that you didn’t understand the first time. Remember to sign up for our one dollar Listening Practice Seminars at polyglossa.com, and if you can, please give this podcast a rating and a review wherever you’re listening to it. And I hope that you’ll come back for Episode 9 of the Listening Time podcast.