If you Know these 20 Words your English is Excellent

Are you an advanced English speaker? Let's find out. In today's lesson, I have 20 words for you that you definitely know if you're an advanced speaker.

But even if you're not, you'll learn a lot of great English words and phrases from this video. And stop learning from boring textbooks or boring English lectures and start learning real life English with me. Visit englishwithka.

com to sign up for my membership. Now, let's get started with the lesson. I'm going to teach you some nouns and some verbs that will really be necessary to know if you're an advanced speaker.

Let's get started. The first word here I want you to try to think of before I even tell you. So, if you need to say that you have a question, but is a formal question that has been submitted, what word would you use?

I would use an inquiry. An inquiry. >> An inquiry.

>> An inquiry. >> So, if you have an inquiry, it's usually a formal question. You can inquire, which means formally the verb to ask a question or to further try to request more information.

So typically if someone submits an inquiry, it's a very formal way to say that they have asked for more information. If you run a business, you might have to respond to an inquiry if there is a customer or a potential client asking for some more information. That's really mainly where we would use this formal word, but it's very good to know.

So this next word is really interesting because it's a bit formal but it also can be used in everyday English as well. So the word is recollection. Recollection.

Refresh your recollection. When we use recollection we are talking about somebody's memory. So the way that they remember something or just the act of remembering.

Sometimes in a legal court case you will hear someone say I don't recall. This means I cannot remember it. Sometimes if you are talking with someone and they said, "Oh, you told me that would be okay yesterday.

" But you don't remember saying that, a really common phrase that we use with this word in English is, "I have no recollection of that conversation. I have no recollection at all. " This means like, "I can't remember it.

" And it also implies that you think the person is making it up because they're saying like, "I I spoke with you about it. Either you just, you know, forgot it or you're just saying it didn't happen if I don't recall it. I have no recollection.

" So we can use different words with recollection here. We can say I have a really vivid recollection of something or you can say I have a really faint recollection of something. Meaning it's very either clear or not so clear.

Obviously this word is a bit more formal than memory. So it's used in really legal and more formal context. Let's see if you're using this next English word correctly.

The word is compromised. >> I'm compromised. You're compromised.

So you can either use compromise as a noun or you can use compromise as a verb. If you call something a compromise, it means that people have settled by kind of meeting in the middle of what their demands are. That is the compromise.

Or if you say I have to compromise, it means you have to come to an agreement. You have to agree to give up something or agree to give the person something in order to get them to agree as well. When both people agree, but you know, they're both giving up a little bit of what they wanted, we call that a compromise or we call it compromising.

Oftentimes, if you are in sales or you're trying to buy something and you're kind of going back and forth on the price, when you meet in the middle, you say, "We compromised on the price. " And also, another really common phrase with compromise is to say, "We reached a compromise. " Meaning, you reached an agreement or a deal that worked for both parties.

Do you know what it means when someone says that there are serious repercussions for something? >> No repercussions whatsoever. >> This word is formal, but I would say this is used totally in everyday English.

It's a really common word. If you say that there are repercussions for something, you are talking about the negative consequences of an action. When people are young, they don't think that their actions are going to have big repercussions.

But oftentimes they do because it's such an important time in your life to get work experience, to save money, to find the right person that you want to spend your life with. If you don't do these things or you don't do them correctly, you'll have big repercussions in the future. You won't have any savings to buy a house.

you won't have married the right person and maybe you get divorced or maybe you will have regret um only working hard and not focusing on your family at all. So these things even though they're small decisions they have big negative repercussions if you make mistakes here. So when we say repercussions it's always a negative thing that happens.

So a couple of common ways that we use this phrase is we say there are severe repercussions. So that means really really bad consequences or really bad outcomes here. Or we might say there are long-term repercussions.

This means it's something bad that's going to affect you for a long time as a result of your decision or your action. There are a lot of different ways that we can use the word reinforce. >> Sometimes reinforce our behavior.

>> When we say that we want to reinforce something, we're going to strengthen it or support it. Let's give a few examples because like I said, this word can be used in a lot of different ways. So right now I am reinforcing this English word to you.

That means even though you maybe already know it, I'm trying to strengthen your understanding of this word and how to use it. So reinforce learning or reinforce understanding are two really common ways to use this word. Of course, when we're actually building something like a structure, a house, a barn, a shed, whatever it might be, and we want it to stand strong, we might use extra nails to reinforce the wood.

With my children, I'm always trying to reinforce healthy habits. So, when my kids brush their teeth on their own or they choose healthy food, I'm always trying to reward them and say, "Good job. " Because I'm trying to reinforce or strengthen those habits.

To overwhelm someone or something >> overwhelming. Mhm. >> So if you are overwhelming someone or something, you are going to have a strong effect on them.

You're kind of overloading them, they feel like it's too much. So in your own life, if you have too much going on, you have too many things to do. Often for me, housework really kind of starts to overwhelm me.

You know, the lawn has to be mowed, the dishes have to be done, the laundry has to be done. All those things sometimes feel overwhelming when you don't have a lot of time. Sometimes if you have a computer or a machine that has been worked too hard, maybe you are downloading tons of files onto your computer or you're trying to print tons of files on your printer, the machine will become overwhelmed and it will stop working.

It just means it has too many things to do and it's overloaded. Basically, another common way that we use this word overwhelm is you can say, "I have overwhelming emotions. " If something very tragic happens, you might feel like so much sadness.

It's just overwhelming your body. You feel like you need to shut down. So, not only does overwhelm mean that you are busy, but it just means you're really stressed, too.

A really good way to say that something has a flaw or a weakness is to say that it has a shortcoming. >> For my shortcomings, >> I noticed that native speakers use this word a lot more than English learners because it's just a really nice natural way to say that something is a weakness. It's like, h, I just have that as a shortcoming.

It's my weakness. So, it's kind of a polite way to say a weakness or a flaw. Maybe your team at work has failed a project.

A nicer way to say it is, well, we had some shortcomings on this project that we need to work on. This means you had some weaknesses, you had some failures again, but it's a nice way to say it. A really great word to use in business or academic settings or really just in general English.

This word is really versatile is the word consensus. >> Agreed. >> See consensus.

>> If you use the word consensus, it means a general agreement among a group of people. In a business setting, maybe you're in a meeting and everyone is trying to make a decision and everyone kind of starts to agree. You can say it sounds like we are going to reach a consensus here.

To reach a consensus to to have an agreement to start to agree on something. Another really common way this word is used is we have a scientific consensus. So it's when a lot of different scientists agree that something is pretty much a fact because of the evidence.

So scientific consensus that we have is that gravity is real. This next word is really useful for giving compliments. You can use this word to describe something that is a large serious or difficult task or project.

So if you want to compliment someone's ambition and hard work, you'd say this was a big undertaking, an undertaking. >> It's a tremendous undertaking. >> So it means that they are, you know, being challenged, but they were willing to take on something really challenging and work hard at it.

Often times when people are building a house, it's a big undertaking because they have so many things to think about how they want to design the house, how the house will be built, and whatever it might be. So, in a business or workplace, if something takes a lot of planning or time, you're going to say it's a big undertaking or it's a difficult undertaking. It just means that it's a project that is going to be very difficult and very serious.

In life, we have these big moments that kind of mark an achievement. In English, we often use the word milestone to describe these moments. >> What a milestone.

So for babies, we say that they have important developmental milestones. Like crawling is a milestone, walking is a milestone, saying mama, saying dad. These are all milestones.

So they're just achievements or stages that kind of mark progress. In business, you might have milestones that are marked by how much money you're making or how many clients that you have. In life, our milestones might be, you know, I got married, I had my first child, I graduated from college.

These are all milestones. It's important that when you reach an important milestone that you celebrate the milestone. You celebrate that stage of life.

Let's move on to some phrasal verbs. Now, I have 10 advanced ones that you can test yourself with. The first one is to clamp down on something.

Clamp down on something. >> What you got to clamp down on? >> Do you know what this means?

I often think of a dog biting a mailman. They clamp down on the mailman. hopefully not on their skin, maybe on their shirt, and they won't let go.

So, we can think of a physical clamp for clamping down on something. Or if you're clamping down on something, you can say that you're getting strict about it. So, the government is clamping down on crime.

Another phrase here that's pretty much the same that I more commonly say is they're cracking down on crime. So clamp down on crime or crack down on crime. It just means they're getting more strict and they're actually trying to prosecute people rather than not taking any action at all.

You might have a friend in life that tends to dwell on negative things. >> Why dwell on these negative things? >> This phrasal verb dwell on, it's really commonly used to say that someone is thinking or talking too much about one thing.

And when we say we're dwelling on something, it usually means it's something negative. So maybe your friend will say like, "Ah, it's what I said earlier was so embarrassing. Everyone probably thought it was so stupid.

" And in your head, maybe it wasn't that big of a deal. So you can say, "You're really just dwelling on it. Don't think about it.

It's not that important. Like, it's not that big of a deal. Don't dwell on it.

" This means don't think about it too much. A really good phrase with this phrasal verb is to dwell on the past. Don't dwell on the past.

This means stop thinking about all the negative things that happened in the past or maybe you're thinking about, you know, something that happened in the past that was bad. You should move on to thinking about the future. Don't dwell on the past.

If you're watching this video and you're a really advanced English speaker, you might just be brushing up on your vocabulary. Browsing up on your history. This phrasal verb to brush up on something, it means to review something or to try to improve a skill that you've had in the past.

Maybe you were a dancer when you were a child and into your teenage years and you haven't done it for a long time, but you start to brush up on your skills. This means you start to practice dancing a little bit again. Or if you used to speak a language really frequently, but you haven't used it for a while, you might say, "Oh, I need to brush up on my English or I need to brush up on my Spanish.

" This just means you need to start using it and again, review it in order to get back to the skill level you were before. Another way that we use this phrasal verb is before a test. Often times, if you want to just quickly review your notes or quickly review your learning materials, you'll say, "Let me just brush up on a few things before I take the test.

" This means review them quickly. It never fails when I go out in public and I really need to shower or, you know, I haven't gotten that much sleep or I'm wearing my sweatpants. It's just the day I don't want to be seen by someone I know.

I bump into someone I know. >> You bumped into me. >> So this phrasal verb to bump into someone.

It means to meet someone unexpectedly. You are not expecting to see this person. So if you go to, let's say, the grocery store and you see your boss from work there, you probably didn't want to see your boss or you probably just weren't expecting it.

and you might say, "Oh, what a what a surprise to bump into you here. " So, we use this phrasal verb bump in to mean to see someone or meet someone unexpectedly, typically in a place that we would not normally see that person. And bumping into someone, it doesn't always have to be negative.

That's just my example here. You could say, "Oh, what a surprise. I'm so happy to bump into you.

I've been meaning to call you or I've been meaning to text you. " So, you're happy to meet the person, even if it's unexpectedly. In life, it's really important to map out your goals.

>> I mapped out. >> The phrasal verb to map out just means to plan something step by step. So, if you have a goal to someday move to a new country and buy a house there, and you might need to write down your goals step by step in order to get to that big goal.

So, you'll have to map it out. It's kind of like mapping out a land or a geographic location, but you're just me mapping out the different things that you need to do. You're planning when you use this phrasal verb.

I'm really into mapping out a travel itinerary when I go places, even if it's just a short road trip because I like to know, you know, where are the places that we're going to eat, where are we going to stay, I like to have all the addresses listed in my mapped out itinerary. So that means I have everything listed step by step of what we're going to do. A really good phrase for everyday English and business English is to zero in on something.

>> Kids, zero in on the reflection on the screen. >> When we say we're going to zero in on something, it means we're going to focus closely on just one thing or one specific aspect of something. So, if you're in a business meeting and everyone's talking about things that you can improve on and then someone says, "Well, what we really need to do is we need to make sure that we're making a lot of different calls to our customers or whatever it might be.

" Your boss might say, "Yeah, let's zero in on that. That seems like it could be a good solution. " So, that means even though everyone's bringing up different things, let's focus on his solution.

Let's zero in on it. You can also use this phrase to zero in on something. To say that someone stopped paying attention to everything else.

You could say, "My boss, he didn't really care about what everyone was saying. He really just zeroed in on one person's ideas. " Let's talk about what it means to phase out something.

You phase it out. Yeah. Phase the accent.

>> So, when you phase out something, you're gradually removing it. A lot of times, styles will phase out. So people used to always wear skinny jeans and we're slowly seeing that phase out and people are wearing baggier jeans now.

So that means people are starting to remove this style from their wardrobe, mainly women. A lot of places in the United States are trying to phase out plastic bags. So they're gradually trying to remove them by either making it like illegal to give them out for free or making it so you have to buy them.

So, they're trying to phase out the use of them, meaning they're gradually trying to stop using them. If you're into sports, you'll definitely want to know this next phrasal verb to root for. >> I'm rooting for you.

>> When you root for someone or something like a team, you are trying to support them or cheer for them. So, you root for a football team or you root for a political candidate. It means you're supporting them or cheering for them.

Or if someone is, you know, about to take an important test, you can give them a word of encouragement by saying, "I'm really rooting for you. I hope you do well. " This phrasal verb to root for someone, it's really great for motivation for sports or just for encouragement.

So when I think of the phrase to boil down to something >> boils down to this, >> you are talking about being reduced to the main reason or the simplest explanation. You can think of this like when you boil down a soup, it gradually gets rid of the water. The water gradually evaporates and it's kind of the main part of the soup.

So, when you're boiling down an idea or boiling down a conversation, you're kind of getting to the summary or the main idea. So, if you're trying to figure out why something isn't working, maybe you're trying to save money and every month you're going over your budget, you're not saving any money. You might talk to someone and say, "I just can't save any money.

" And the person might say, "Well, it all boils down to having a strict budget. " And this person is just trying to say, you know, the main thing that you can do to solve your problem here is to have a strict budget and stay with your budget. How much you want to spend.

So, when you're having a debate or an argument or you're just trying to summarize something, this phrase, it all boils down to something is really important. It means you're just trying to summarize the main point. The phrasal verb to stick with something.

>> Stick with it. >> It means to continue doing something consistently. If you are with me in this video, you have stuck with me until the end.

This means you've watched all the way. You haven't quit. Or you might say, "I really want to stick with this new workout routine.

" Meaning, you want to consistently do it because either you're trying to get into good shape or you're trying to lose weight or maybe you want to stick with a marathon training plan so that you can run a marathon. It just means that you're not going to give up and you're going to continually do this thing or keep up with the plan. Thanks again for sticking with me till the end of this lesson.

My name's Kayla. Make sure to visit Englishwithkayla. com where I can teach you more English there.

And if you're in the mood, make sure to check out another English lesson that will be on screen here. It will be helpful to keep learning more vocabulary with me. I'll see you guys in the next lesson.

And goodbye.