Learning English Podcast - February 07, 2025
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Welcome to Learning English, a daily 30-minute program from the Voice of America. I'm Katie Weaver. And I'm Mario Ritter, Jr. This program is designed for English learners, so we speak a little slower and we use words and phrases especially written for people learning English.

Coming up on the show, Ask a Teacher and Everyday Grammar. We close with an American story, The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe. But first... This Sunday, February 9th, is not a holiday in the United States, but it might seem like one to Americans.

Many will be attending parties to watch Super Bowl 59. The Super Bowl is the championship game of professional American football. The National Football League, or NFL, has 32 teams mainly based in large cities across the U.S. The first professional league was formed in 1920.

when representatives of four teams met in Canton, Ohio. The group first called itself the American Professional Football Association, but changed the name two years later to the National Football League.

In 1960, Texas businessman Lamar Hunt pushed the effort to create the American Football League, or AFL. The two leagues competed with each other to sign top football players from universities around the country.

In 1965, established NFL players began negotiating to play for the competing league. So officials of the two leagues decided to work together. This agreement established a championship game between the two leagues.

It was officially called the AFL-NFL World Championship Game, but became known as the Super Bowl. The first Super Bowl was played in 1967 in Los Angeles, California. The Green Bay Packers defeated the Kansas City Chiefs. It was not a very exciting game.

Many of the seats in the Sports Center were empty. That changed with the Super Bowl played two years later. Experts say the public finally accepted the new league when the New York Jets defeated the Baltimore Colts.

After that game, in 1969, officials of the two leagues decided to create a new National Football League. They divided the teams into two competing conferences, the American Conference, or AFC, and the National Conference, NFC.

Each year, the conference champions play in the Super Bowl. Today, the Super Bowl is a major sporting event. Tens of thousands of people will be watching the game Sunday at the Superdome in New Orleans, Louisiana. Tens of millions of other people around the world will be watching Super Bowl 59.

They will be watching to see if the AFC Kansas City Chiefs or the NFC Philadelphia Eagles become the champions of American football. Both teams have had success in the big game. The Eagles are one-time NFL champions. They defeated the New England Patriots in Super Bowl LII.

This Sunday will be the team's fifth NFL championship game appearance. The Kansas City Chiefs have played for the championship six times. They have won four times, including the last two Super Bowls.

The Chiefs are the first team in NFL history to have a chance to win a third Super Bowl in a row. English has many patterns. Basic grammatical patterns can explain the structure of around 95% of sentences in English, says Martha Cohn, a grammar expert. Learning and mastering these patterns

can help you improve your writing and speaking skills. We have discussed three common patterns in previous Everyday Grammar stories. Today, we will explore another common pattern, the intransitive verb pattern. To start you thinking about intransitive verbs, consider this passage:

It is from the poem The Human Family by famous writer and poet Maya Angelou. We love and lose in China. We weep on England's moors and laugh and moan in Guinea and thrive on Spanish shores.

By the end of this story, you will be able to recognize and understand the intransitive verb pattern that Angelou uses many times in the stanza. The intransitive verb pattern is unusual. It is unusual because, unlike other verb patterns, the predicate requires only the verb.

Common intransitive verbs include action verbs: go, come, walk, cry, or laugh, for example. In these verbs, the subject's action is not applied to an object. In other words, most intransitive verbs can end sentences. They do not need nouns or adjectives to their right.

The lines from the classic American song "Just Friends" give an example of the intransitive verb pattern in its most basic form. However, sentences with just the subject and intransitive verb are not very common in writing or speaking.

Usually, the sentence has more information, an adverbial structure. Adverbials are words or phrases that give information about time, place, manner, or reason. Adverbials answer questions like how often, where, why, when. The two most common adverbial structures you will find

are adverbs and prepositional phrases. Adverbs such as suddenly, quickly, here, soon, or sometimes modify a verb. Prepositional phrases are groups of words that begin with a preposition and are followed by an object, usually a noun phrase. Common prepositions include in,

on, at, between, above, and below. Adverbs and prepositional phrases often follow intransitive verbs. Think back to the basic intransitive verb pattern. Subject + intransitive verb. It is grammatically correct to say a simple sentence like this: We laughed.

or subject plus intransitive verb. You can put more information into the sentence by adding an adverb. We laughed loudly, or subject plus intransitive verb plus adverb. Or you could give even more information by adding a prepositional phrase. We laughed at the man's silly jokes.

or subject + intransitive verb + prepositional phrase. In intransitive verb patterns, adverbs or prepositional phrases are often referred to as optional. In other words, a sentence is still grammatical without them. You, as the speaker or writer, choose how much information you want to include in the sentence.

Now, think back to the stanza of Maya Angelou's poem: We love and lose in China, We weep on England's moors, And laugh and moan in Guinea, And thrive on Spanish shores. You can see that every single line uses an intransitive verb paired with a prepositional phrase. Consider the first line:

we love and lose in China. The subject is we, and two intransitive verbs, love and lose, are paired with the prepositional phrase in China. The two verbs are joined by a conjunction, and. We love and lose in China, or subject plus intransitive verb

plus conjunction plus optional subject plus intransitive verb plus prepositional phrase. The second line follows the basic intransitive verb pattern, but it has an optional prepositional phrase. We weep on England's moors or subject plus intransitive verb plus prepositional phrase.

the second two lines follow the same patterns as the first two lines this series of patterns is an example of parallelism which you can read about in an earlier everyday grammar story to practice using the intransitive verb pattern try writing four lines of poetry in the style of angelou's poem

Post your writing in the comments section of this story or on our Facebook page. Remember, you should not use Angelou's exact words. Rather, you should choose your own noun phrases, intransitive verbs, and prepositional phrases. Just put your own words into the pattern we discussed today.

Learning this pattern and other patterns discussed in previous grammar stories will not only help you study the writing of great authors, these patterns will help you write and speak in your own clear, concise sentences too. I'm Jill Robbins. And I'm John Russell. This week on Ask a Teacher...

We answer a question from Ramatulai in Senegal. Here is Ramatulai's question: Dear teacher, Thank you and all the VOA Learning English team for their great work. My question is: What is the difference between "regarding" and "regardless"?

Thank you for your comments, Ramatulai, and I am happy to answer your question. Both words are very useful in speaking and writing. That's because the words give us a quick way to connect to other ideas. "Regarding" simply means what someone is talking or writing about. Consider the following two examples:

We have all the information we need about the project. We have all the information we need regarding the project. The word "regarding" in the second example means the same thing as the preposition "about" in the first example. We generally use the word "about" more than "regarding."

However, it is more common to use regarding in formal speech than in informal communication. Also, the expression in regard to means the same thing as regarding. Here are some examples. In regard to the price, I think it was too expensive. In regard to what you said, I don't think we know all the facts yet.

Note that we use a noun, noun phrase, or noun clause after the expression "in regard to." Also, you will sometimes hear native speakers say "in regards to" instead of "in regard to." Here is something you may find interesting when we compare the expression "in regard to"

and the verb "regard." The verb "regard" is a somewhat formal way to say "look at." So, just as we can direct someone's attention to something by having them look at it, the expression "in regard to" directs us to something we are talking about.

The word "regardless" expresses the idea that one or more things do not affect the current situation or what we want to express now When you look at the word, you will see that it ends with the suffix "-less" This suffix means the same thing as the word "without"

So, regardless means "without regard to." Consider the following examples: Regardless of religion, all people want happiness. All people want happiness regardless of religion. Notice that you can use the word "regardless" either before or after the sentence or phrase it modifies.

For our readers and listeners, what are your questions about American English? Regardless of your level of English, we want to hear from you. Send us an email at learningenglish at voanews.com. And please let us know where you are from, too. And that's Ask a Teacher. I'm Andrew Smith. ♪

The Fall of the House of Usher, Part 2 Roderick Usher, whom I had known as a boy, was now ill and had asked me to come to help him. When I arrived, I felt something strange and fearful about the great old stone house, about the lake in front of it, and about Usher himself. He appeared...

"'Not like a human being, but like a spirit that had come back from beyond the grave. "'It was an illness,' he said, from which he would surely die. "'He called his sickness fear. "'I have,' he said, "'no fear of pain, but only the fear of its result, of terror.'

"'I feel that the time will soon arrive when I must lose my life "'and my mind and my soul together in some last battle with that horrible enemy. "'Fear! I learned also, but slowly and through broken words with doubtful meaning, "'another strange fact about the condition of Usher's mind. "'He had certain sick fears about the house in which he lived.'

"'and he had not stepped out of it for many years. "'He felt that the house, with its grey walls "'and the quiet lake around it, "'had somehow through the long years "'gotten a strong hold on his spirit. "'He said, however, that much of the gloom "'which lay so heavily on him "'was probably caused by something more plainly to be seen, "'by the long-continued illness, indeed the coming death,'

of a dearly loved sister his only company for many years except for himself she was the last member of his family on earth when she dies he said with a sadness which i can never forget when she dies i will be the last of the old old family the house of ussher while he spoke the lady madeline for so she was called

"'passed slowly through a distant part of the room, "'and without seeing that I was there, went on. "'I looked at her with a complete and wondering surprise, "'and with some fear, "'and yet I found I could not explain to myself such feelings. "'My eyes followed her. "'When she came to a door and it closed behind her, "'my eyes turned to the face of her brother. "'But he had put his face in his hands.'

and i could see only that the thin fingers through which his tears were flowing were whiter than ever before the illness of the lady madeline had long been beyond the help of her doctors she seemed to care about nothing slowly her body had grown thin and often for a short period she would fall into a sleep like the sleep of the dead so far she had not been forced to stay in bed

"'But by the evening of the day I arrived at the house. "'The power of her destroyer, as her brother told me that night, "'was too strong for her. "'I learned that my one sight of her would probably be the last I would have, "'that the lady, at least while living, would be seen by me no more. "'For several days following her name was not spoken by either Usher or myself.'

and during this period i was busy with efforts to lift my friend out of his sadness and gloom we painted and read together or listened as if in a dream to the wild music he played and so as a warmer and more loving friendship grew between us i saw more clearly the uselessness of all attempts to bring happiness to a mind from which only darkness came

"'spreading upon all objects in the world its never-ending gloom. "'I shall always remember the hours I spent with the master of the House of Usher, "'yet I would fail in any attempt to give an idea "'of the true character of the things we did together. "'There was a strange light over everything. "'The paintings which he made made me tremble, though I know not why.'

"'to tell of them is beyond the power of written words. "'If ever a man painted an idea, that man was Roderick Usher. "'For me at least, there came out of his pictures "'a sense of fear and wonder. "'One of these pictures may be told, although weakly in words. "'It showed the inside of a room where the dead might be placed, "'with low walls, white and plain.'

"'It seemed to be very deep under the earth. "'There was no door, no window, and no light or fire burned, "'yet a river of light flowed through it, "'filling it with a horrible ghastly brightness. "'I have spoken of that sickly condition of the senses "'which made most music painful for Usher to hear. "'The notes he could listen to with pleasure were very few. "'It was this fact, perhaps.'

that made the music he played so different from most music but the wild beauty of his playing could not be explained the words of one of his songs called the haunted palace i have easily remembered in it i thought i saw and for the first time that ussher knew very well that his mind was weakening this song told of a great house

where a king lived a palace in a green valley where all was light and color and beauty and the air was sweet in the palace were two bright windows through which people in the happy valley could hear music and could see smiling ghosts spirits moving around the king the palace door was of the richest material

in red and white through it came other spirits whose only duty was to sing in their beautiful voices about how wise their king was but a dark change came the song continued and now those who enter the valley see through the windows in a red light shapes that move to broken music while through the door now colorless a ghastly river of ghosts laughing

"'No longer smiling, rushes out forever. "'Our talk of this song led to another strange idea in Usher's mind. "'He believed that plants could feel and think, "'and not only plants, but rocks and water as well. "'He believed that the grey stones of his house "'and the small plants growing on the stones and the decaying trees "'had a power over him that made him what he was.'

"'Our books, the books which for years had fed the sick man's mind, "'were, as might be supposed, of the same wild character. "'Some of these books Usher sat and studied for hours. "'His chief delight was found in reading one very old book, "'ridden for some forgotten church, "'telling of the watch over the dead. "'At last, one evening, he told me that the Lady Madeline—'

was alive no more he said he was going to keep her body for a time in one of the many vaults inside the walls of the building the worldly reason he gave for this was one with which i felt i had to agree he had decided to do this because of the nature of her illness because of the strange interest and questions of her doctors and because of the great distance to the graveyard where members of his family

"'were placed in the earth. "'We too carried her body to its resting-place. "'The vault in which we placed it was small and dark. "'In ages past it must have seen strange and bloody scenes. "'It lay deep below that part of the building where I myself slept. "'The thick door was of iron, "'and because of its great weight made a loud, hard sound "'when it was opened and closed.'

as we placed the lady madeleine in this room of horror i saw for the first time the great lightness between brother and sister and ussher told me then that they were twins they had been born on the same day for that reason the understanding between them had always been great and the tie that held them together very strong we looked down at the dead face one last time

and I was filled with wonder. As she lay there, the Lady Madeline looked not dead, but asleep, still soft and warm, though to the touch, cold as the stones around us. And that's our show for today. But join us again tomorrow to keep learning English on The Voice of America. I'm Katie Weaver.