Talking About Drinks

Hello and welcome to Real Easy English. In this podcast, we have real conversations in easy English to help you learn. I'm Neil.

And I'm Beth. There's a video version of this podcast on our website. Try it at bbclearningenglish.com.

Hi Beth. How are you?

I'm very well, thank you, Neil. How are you?

I'm very good. I've just had my first coffee of the day.

Me too. Now we're feeling good.

We are feeling good. And we're talking about drinks today.

Yes, we are. We've talked a lot about food on this podcast but today, yeah, we're going to talk about drinks. So, Neil, do you have a lot of hot drinks?

Not a lot, but they are very important to me. So, I really enjoy having my coffee, but I probably only have two a day.

OK. I normally have one coffee a day, in the morning.

So, here's a big question. Do you prefer tea or coffee?

Definitely coffee. So, with tea, like English breakfast tea, black tea with milk – no, I don't like it at all.

You don't like tea?

No!

What's...? What's the matter with you?!

Did you not know that I don't like tea? It's horrible. I have to... If I like tea, it's tea like a fruit tea, or a... Yeah, I'm not very good at being British, apparently.

OK. Well, I think tea is great, but just one. One's fine in the morning, maybe.

OK. But do you prefer tea to coffee?

I think they're really difficult to compare.

Mmm.

I think you can drink more tea without feeling a bit strange. If you drink too much coffee, it can, you know, have an effect on you.

That's true, that's true. What about other hot drinks, like hot chocolate? I love it in the winter when I'm just at home with the fire on, drinking a hot chocolate.

Yeah, that's OK, but I don't have it very often.

No.

No. Actually, sometimes when I have a cold in the winter, I like to slice ginger very thinly.

Yeah.

Put it in a flask with hot water and honey – sometimes lemon as well. And that's a really nice, warming drink.

Yeah, definitely. I do the same thing – like honey and lemon and ginger.

So, we talked about hot drinks, but what about cold drinks? Do you like fizzy drinks?

Not really, to be honest. I mean, I like them, but I don't have them very often at all. So, I used to have a Coke with a Chinese. If I had, like, a really spicy meal, then I would quite enjoy drinking a Coke with it, but I don't really have Chinese very often and I don't really have fizzy drinks often.

No.

What about you?

No, I don't really like fizzy drinks. They're OK. Sometimes they're a bit hard to swallow because they've got so much gas.

That's true. I had a sparkling water yesterday, so if I have the choice between still or sparkling, I might go for a sparkling water. And it feels healthier than having a lemonade or something else fizzy.

Right. I prefer still water.

I think still water's nicer. So, Neil, if you're thirsty, would you rather have water, or something like juice or squash?

If I'm thirsty, I would rather have water, every time. You cannot beat water for when you're thirsty. There's nothing... nothing like it – nothing like that feeling, if you've done some exercise or something, or you're just really thirsty, of drinking a big glass of water.

I completely agree. I think juice is nice for when... with breakfast, sometimes. Like, I might have orange juice. But squash is something very popular in the UK with some families.

Yeah. What's squash?

Squash is very strong, concentrated fruit juice, and you add water to it to get a drink. But if you taste orange squash rather than fresh orange juice, it's... it has more of a fake flavour than a real flavour of orange.

Let's recap the language we've looked at in this episode, starting with prefer. If you prefer something, it means you like it more than something else. For example, I prefer water to juice.

We can also use prefer with would to talk about a specific option. For example, I would prefer to have coffee than tea, and we can use would rather in the same way. So, I would rather have coffee than tea.

Fizzy drinks, like cola or lemonade, have little gassy bubbles in them.

Yes, but if water is fizzy, we call this sparkling water. So, sparkling water has bubbles and the opposite is still. Still water has no bubbles and you can get it from the tap – tap water.

That's it for this episode of Real Easy English, but you can find a free worksheet to download on our website, bbclearningenglish.com.

And we'll be back next week with another episode in easy English. See you then.

Goodbye.