Learn the English Phrases "wishful thinking" and "to think big"
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In this English lesson, I wanted to help you learn the English phrase, wishful thinking. Wishful thinking is when you think positively about something, but it probably isn't going to go the way you think it will. Here's a great example. If you don't study and you have an English test in a few months, and you just think, ah, I'll just watch YouTube videos and I'll pass that English test, that's probably wishful thinking.

you probably aren't doing enough. You're thinking that you're going to pass the test by just watching YouTube videos, but you should really be practicing your speaking and your writing and your reading and all of that stuff as well. So it might be wishful thinking. So hopefully you understand. It means you think a positive thought about something, but you're probably wrong. The other phrase I wanted to teach you today is to think big.

So sometimes at work, someone will have an idea for a small change and then someone will say, why don't we think big? Instead of doing the small change, why don't we do something even bigger? So an example would be, maybe a teacher says, my classroom is

isn't big enough, so I'm going to remove a couple desks and someone else might say, hey, why don't we think big? Why don't we instead spend millions of dollars and build you a bigger classroom? That's something that doesn't usually happen, but it could. Anyways, to review, wishful thinking is when you hope for something positive, but it probably won't happen. You're just being really, really optimistic. And to think big is to dream bigger than you think.

would to solve maybe a small problem. But hey, let's look at a comment from a previous video. I wasn't gonna talk about the weather today, but it's minus 15 right now, minus 21 with the wind chill. It's about as cold as it gets. This comment is from, let's see here. Gonna get my glove back on. Paper and gloves are a bit of a challenge.

This comment is from Tolick. Thank you for the lesson, Bob. You have really nice boots. I like them. Have a nice day. And I said, I love my boots. I hope they last forever. But alas, I think that is wishful thinking. So yeah, I've had these boots for a while. I really, really like them. They are really, really nice boots. But to think that they might last forever, I think would be wishful thinking. So a positive thought for something that

Most likely won't happen. So Tolick, thank you for that comment. Let me see if I can get this off here. Yeah, I wasn't gonna talk about the weather. So I'll try not to do that at all. So anyways, I had a beautiful family day Monday, yesterday for me, two days ago for you.

I think that is just the best holiday. My kids and I and Jen, we actually went and we played some badminton at the school. We went out to a little cafe afterwards and had a little treat. We spent some time as a family. We watched the TV show Jeopardy. I'm not sure if you know what that show is.

but Jeopardy is a trivia show, a quiz show where they ask questions and then the contestants have to try and answer them. By the way, Jeopardy is probably a great way to learn English if you could find a way to watch that show. So we had supper together. We watched Jeopardy together. It was a fun evening. And it's fun just to have a day where

you decide to spend the day with your family. So I really enjoyed it. Right now though, I'm going to go back inside. It's a little too cold this morning for me and I think I need to go warm up. Thanks for watching. See you in a couple of days with another short English lesson. Bye. Hi, Bob the Canadian here. Thank you for listening to this English podcast lesson. If you would like to support me in the work that I do as an online English teacher, please visit patreon.com slash bobthecanadian.