Top ten American English Idioms and Phrases | Improve your English Vocabulary with New Expressions

American English Idioms are a fun way to explain different situations and circumstances in the English language. For new and experienced ESL speakers, idioms can sometimes be hard to understand. ------------------- • Idiom Activity for ESL or EFL Students : https://youtu.be/m_1SWRQSWHg ------------------- • Check out my blog if you want to find more information about American English Idioms https://eslspeaking.org/american-english-idioms/ Check out my 365 American English Idioms book: https://amzn.to/3bCR2Yv -------------------- https://www.facebook.com/eslspeaking https://www.pinterest.ca/eslspeaking/ https://www.instagram.com/jackie.bolen/ https://www.tiktok.com/@englishwithjackie?lang=en #esl #learningenglishwithjackie #englishidioms ------------------------------------------------------- Even more Ideas for the TEFL Classroom: https://eslspeaking.org/ -------------------------------------------------------- Transcript for Idioms in American English: Let's talk about my top 10 English idioms. If you want to sound professional, use these idioms. People will think, oh wow they speak English very well! My first idiom is a dime a dozen. This means something that is very common. So the car that I have here in Vancouver is a Toyota Corolla. They are a dime a dozen. That means a million people in Vancouver have Toyota Corollas. You can see them everywhere if you go to a shopping mall. I almost think half the cars in the parking lot are this one car. So that is a dime a dozen. My second idiom is bite the bullet. That means you just do something that you don't want to do. For example, if you have people coming over to your house for dinner and your house is very dirty, you have to clean your house. Let's just bite the bullet. Let's just clean the house right now. That means you do it. You get it over with and it's finished. My third idiom is break a leg. You don't actually want someone to break their leg. It means, good luck. You can say this to someone who's an actor or an actress, in most cases. Number four is cutting corners. Or, cut corners. This is when you do something to save time or money but you don't do a quality job. For example, if someone is painting the inside of your house and they do it very, very quickly, too quickly but they did a terrible job, they were cutting corners. A My next idiom is get out of hand. Get out of hand means, it gets crazy, out of control, or something like that. Maybe someone is having a big house party. There are more and more and more people, more and more alcohol. It gets out of hand and finally, the neighbours call the police. My next idiom is hang in there. It means you can overcome it. Stay strong. You got it. So if someone is studying for a very difficult test, maybe they're sad, they're tired, they're not happy, they don't want to study. You can say, hang in there. It's almost done. My next idiom is, miss the boat. So miss the boat, it means you've done something too late or you haven't really understood something. For example, maybe there was a stock. A stock is a share from a company that went very, very low and you should have bought that stock when it was very low. It was on sale. However, the price went up. It's high now. So you've missed the boat. You've missed your chance to buy that thing at a very low price. It's too late now. The next one is the last straw. That means the last thing. You have no more patience, you are finished. So for example, if you have kids and they are fighting, fighting, fighting, fighting. It's summer vacation. All kids fight with their brothers and sisters on summer vacation I think and you've been very patient, and very kind and they are fighting and then they break your cell phone. You might start yelling at them. That was the last straw. You have no more patience and you are finished. Okay, the next one is under the weather. Under the weather means feeling sick or not well. You could say, I have a bit of a cold and I'm feeling under the weather. My final idiom is bent out of shape. Bent out of shape is not actually bending something. Bent out of shape means you feel like a bit grumpy, a bit angry, a bit unhappy about something. For example, if you're at work and your boss tells you that you didn't do a good job on this project, you might feel a bit bent out of shape. You're a little bit angry. A little bit grumpy. Timestamp: 0:00 Intro 0:15 A dime a dozen 0:38 Bite the bullet 1:01 Break a leg 1:15 Cutting corners 1:36 Get out of hand 1:57 Hand in there 2:14 Miss the boat 2:49 The last straw 3:20 Under the weather 3:30 Bent out of shape 3:53 Conclusion Tags: American English Idioms, American English Idioms and phrases, American English phrases, top ten tips, top ten, how to speak english, idioms, phrases, english idioms, english phrases, american english, canadian english, learning american english, learning english quick, common phrases, common english phrases, common english idioms,