By Robby
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Fluent English can ONLY be acquired by learning IDIOMATIC EXPRESSIONS – and that’s why I’m going to highlight them for you in RED!
Video Transcript Below:
Hi guys, hello boys and girls and hello my dear foreign English speakers. That’s me, obviously Robby from EnglishHarmony.com and you are very welcome back to my video blog! Now, today I decided to record a video dedicated to a particular English idiomatic expression, namely “to take something for granted”.
And the reason why I decided to record this particular video is because I got a comment on my blog recently. To be more specific it’s only 6 minutes old, right? And here is what it says. As a matter of fact, it was published on another English idiomatic expression page, The Big Picture and the commentator says this is an incredible video, really got the meaning very quickly and here’s the request: Robby, can you make a video for this idiomatic expression “to take something for granted”? Thank you.
And guess what? You’re lucky, my friend, tonight I’m in a good mood so I decided hey, why not? You know what I mean. And as a matter of fact, I wanted to record a video anyway so I was like okay, I’ll do a video about this particular idiomatic expression.
So if you are interested in finding out how to use this particular one and what kind of situations it can be used in, please bear with me for a few more moments. Did you hear how I kind of started stumbling upon words?
Bear with me for a few mo – mo – mo more moments or something like that? It’s all part of the English Harmony philosophy, my friends. Even if you make a little mistake, even if you stumble upon words a little bit it doesn’t matter. Just keep pushing on, you know what I mean? Keep pushing the envelope and keep speaking with yourself because that is the surefire way to English fluency.
Now, welcome back. So here is the first scenario, right? And before that I actually have to give you a little history. One morning I was driving to work on the highway and all of a sudden there was a massive traffic pileup and I was like “What’s going on?” Normally just after 6 o’clock in the morning there’s very little traffic, you know what I mean?
It’s moving very well. All of a sudden there’s a massive pileup and then there were emergency vehicles driving by, then I realized that there must have been an accident further down the road. And true enough, after a couple miles I witnessed a terrible accident scene. Somebody had crashed into the ditch and there were some trees as well and that car had plowed down the trees and they must have done it at a great speed, you know.
That made me realize that oftentimes we take our lives for granted. We go about our daily business, we just wake up in the morning, go to bed at night and obviously just because we’ve been doing so throughout our entire lives we just think that that’s given, you know, nobody can take it away from us. But in reality it’s quite the opposite, my friends. In a split second, in a car on the road at a high speed can change your life and as a matter of fact, it can take away your life.
So never take your life for granted. Always stay cautious and think twice before you do something, right? So that was the first scenario, right? You should never take your life for granted. Which means that you never should take it as given, as something that can ever be taken away from you. Because it can, you know? It can.
Now, the next kind of scenario is say for instance your friends or your family members, we take people for granted which means that we don’t really appreciate that they are in our lives. Oftentimes we are a bit grumpy towards our partners or our children or our friends even. We don’t really think about how grateful we should be that those people are in our lives in the first place, right?
So now as you can clearly see the meaning of the expression “to take something for granted” starts revealing itself. Basically it means that you shouldn’t take it as something that is always going to be there. You have to appreciate it, right?
And the last example is going to be about for example the safety of our lives. You know, we live in certain conditions, in different countries the economy is better and in other countries it’s worse or whatever but for the most part we live in safety.
We can walk out on the street and we can rest assured that we’re not going to get killed. But for some people on this planet it’s not the case. Where there’s war happening people are just getting shot and killed in their homes or getting bombed and people are dying every day of the week.
Therefore we should not take our country’s safety for granted. We just assume that nothing can happen, that law and order is always going to be there but it’s sometimes very fragile. We don’t really realize what larger forces are at play and how quickly the situation can change.
Just think about Syria where there’s war happening now at the moment. A few years ago that was a country where people went about their daily business, they lived normal lives and all of a sudden their lives changed 360 degrees. There’s thousands upon thousands of people being killed, it’s crazy.
So never take your country’s safety situation for granted. Don’t. And basically appreciate. Don’t complain about stuff, you know. Oftentimes we complain about like really, really irrelevant stuff like – and it’s actually called first world problems, you know? There might be some potholes on the road or whatever and we start complaining about the local council that looks after the roads or whatever but just think about how irrelevant it is.
And it’s a weird phenomenon, the better our lives are, the higher our standards, the higher our expectations and we start taking everything for granted, that that’s the way it has to be, that that’s the way it’s going to be forever and it’s going to get better and better and better. But the history has shown us on multiple occasions that our lives can change within a heartbeat.
So never take anything for granted, appreciate your situation that you’re in every day of the week, be grateful to the God and stay safe, right? So that’s the message today, don’t take anything for granted and appreciate everything.
So I hope that now you’ve got the gist of how this expression can be used and what it means but obviously if you have any more questions in relation to this particular idiomatic expression, feel free to publish them in the comment section below my friends. Chat to you soon. Bye-bye!
Robby
P.S. Would you like to find out why I’m highlighting some of the text in red? Read this article and you’ll learn why it’s so important to learn idiomatic expressions and how it will help you to improve your spoken English!
P.S.S. Are you serious about your spoken English improvement? Check out my English Harmony System HERE!
P.S. Are you serious about your spoken English improvement? Check out the English Harmony System HERE!