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Welcome to our Daily English Listening Practice with this week’s series:

Family Vocabulary

Your close or immediate family are the ones you spend the most time with, we’ll show you how to chat casually using this English Family Vocabulary with your friends so you feel comfortable talking about your own and asking others about theirs!

Please listen to the audio files for explanations.
Transcripts unavailable.

Notes from the Audio Files

Your Folks

• Catch up: Talk to someone after a long time apart
• Endearing: Loving, caring
• You know them personally: You have met them, or you are close to them
• Hasn’t been doing really well: He has been in poor health
• How has your dad been: How is your father’s health?
• Dip into the conversation: Start or talk about something casually or lightly
• Without using “health”: outside of a common cold or headache, health is a sensitive subject and is very personal, especially in older people
• “How’s your dad doing?”: How is your father’s health?
• At the weekend: UK

How to use it:
“Do you wanna catch up tomorrow afternoon?” “Actually I can’t, I told my folks that we’d go out for lunch and spend some quality family time together.”
“It was nice to visit home again and see my folks. I hadn’t been home in a couple of months.”

Look Alike / Look Like Someone

• Looks/Physical features
• Get mixed up: Get confused
• My dad and I look alike: My dad and I look similar
• I look like my dad: My dad and I look similar
• I don’t look anything like my sister: We don’t look similar
• We all look alike: We all look similar
• I’ve got my dad’s nose: My nose and my father’s nose are similar
• Passed down: Given to – genetically
• Two people look alike: Two people look similar
• Someone looks like someone else: For example: “She looks like her mother.”
• She looks like me: object pronoun
  

How to use it:
“They look so much alike, but if you get to know them they’re really nothing alike!” (They look similar, but they don’t have similar personalities.)
“He looks so much like his father, it’s almost scary!”

Take After Someone

• Personality Traits
• Take after my (family member): I am similar in personality to my ______
• Stubborn: Someone who doesn’t change their mind easily
• Level-headed: Calm, rational, doesn’t get very emotional
• Taking after someone more and more: becoming more and more similar
• Get that from my dad: learned that personality trait from my dad
  

How to use it:
“I’d like to say that I take after my dad, because he’s the down-to-earth one, but I think that sometimes I’m much more like my mom.”
“Even though she’s only a few months old, people are saying she already takes after her father because she loves food!”

Age-Gap

• Grew up in another generation, it feels like: it seems like we grew up in a different generation, although we didn’t
• 10 years apart: 10 years of age between two people
• In his 40s: between 40 and 49
• Means less and less: It doesn’t matter
• In your teen’s: During your teenage years
  

How to use it:
“Normally, the age-gap doesn’t really bother me, he’s only 12 years older than me, but then I think, when I was 10, he was graduating from college, and that’s a little weird.”
“When you reach your thirties or forties, the age-gap doesn’t mean that much anymore.”

Adopted / Biological Parents

• A friend of mine’s mother: My friend’s mother
• Biological father: Genetically related father
• Adopted father: A father who legally adopts a child
• He legally adopted her: he followed the legal paperwork to adopt a child
• Stepfather: the man married to your mom/dad who is not your biological father
• Step-mom: the woman who is married to your dad/mom who is not your biological mom
• A Family unit: A close family – A strongly connected family group
• Adopt someone as your own: treating a child as if they were your biological child

How to use it:
“She wasn’t surprised when her parents told her they weren’t her biological parents, since she’s done a lot of research on her own. It doesn’t change anything, they raised her and adopted her into the family.”
“I never actually knew my biological parents, and I don’t really know if I want to.”

How are your folks doing? Do you look more like your mom or your dad? Let us know if anything else doesn’t make sense, and we’ll try to fix it right away!

Thanks,

Kat and Mark