Hey there, this is Teacher Ola Podcast episode 102. Learn English With The Weeknd & Ariana Grande ‘Save Your Tears’
My name’s Ola and I am an online English teacher, I teach through one to one classes and I want you to know I believe you can eliminate your language blockade. I’ve overcome a massive blockade myself and I know how to do it. This podcast is for you if you’re an English learner who wants to speak English with more confidence and get rid of speaking barriers. You’ll boost your vocabulary, brush up your grammar, and improve your pronunciation. Go to my website for full transcripts and worksheets to each episode. Happy learning!
Hello again! I hope you’re doing great! I hope you know the song we’re going to talk about today. If not, go over to youtube and have a listen before we start. The plan for today’s episode goes like this:
First we’ll learn some song facts, next we’ll go through all the lyrics. Line by line, you will repeat each line out loud, as you always do. Nothing changes. Why would we change things which work so well? Ok, after that we will discuss some vocabulary elements. We’ll have a look at one or two grammar points and we will learn a bunch of collocations as well as idioms. Stay with me till the very end because, you know the drill. We’ll practice speaking out loud. I have 22 sentences for you to repeat out loud. Awesome! One more thing before we jump in. Please help me, help me grow this podcast, help me reach more people. How to do it? Very simple, tell someone. Who could benefit from the podcast which is focused on developing speaking skills in English? Family member? Friend? Neighbour? Colleague? Please let them know about TOP.
The track starts, and the melody automatically takes you back to the ’80s. Some even noticed similarities between the song’s opening beat and ’80s hit “Words (Don’t Come Easy)”.
Some of the lyrics even share similar themes. The song is filled with the feeling of regret after a break up. He laments running away and leaving his partner behind, instead of offering them an explanation for his actions. There are several clues that The Weeknd is referencing his relationship with Bella Hadid. During the first and second verses he recalls an encounter with an ex in a club. I saw you dancing in a crowded room. Ten days after their final breakup, The Weeknd showed up at the Los Angeles club Catch One. According to reports, Hadid was already there, having a good time. However, when The Weeknd arrived, she immediately left. The video. I cannot omit that. Well, it’s very symbolic, really deep and worth watching. If you haven’t seen it yet, definitely do it.
Time to move on, let’s look at the lyrics. Shall we? Listen and repeat.
I saw you dancing in a crowded room
You look so happy when I’m not with you
But then you saw me, caught you by surprise
A single teardrop falling from your eye
Saw – I saw you dancing. I saw you. Make sure you pronounce the verb properly. ‘Saw’ is the past form of ‘see’ and is pronounced with the long vowel sound /ɔː/. It’s not /səʊ/. ‘Sew’ is in fact another verb. It’s spelled differently: s-e-w and it means: to use a needle and thread to make stitches in cloth. Also: to make, repair or attach something using a needle and thread. There’s yet another verb pronounced /səʊ/ and spelled: s-o-w which means: to plant or spread seeds in or on the ground. Sow, s-o-w also means: to introduce or spread feelings or ideas, especially ones that cause trouble. To sow doubt in somebody’s mind. To sow confusion. There’s one more homophone, that is a word that sounds exactly the same way but is spelled differently and carries different meaning and that is: a sow s-o-w – a female pig. So! (another homophone) If you are not confident with your pronunciation, I’ve made a few episodes with pronunciation practice, so find them and learn. Well, there’s a particular episode I’d like you to find and it’s number 49: Pronunciation Tip: Baltic, Napal, Arkansas. It’s all about this /ɔː/ sound that has started this discussion. I saw you dancing. Saw.
Crowded room – crowded – having a lot of people or too many people. Not ‘crowdy’, not just ‘crowd’, but ‘crowded’. Crowded room. Beaches in Poland can get really crowded in summer.
Look so happy – Here I’d like you to remember that adjectives describe nouns, for example: this flower is beautiful. Whereas adverbs describe verbs and adjectives, for example: she dances beautifully. Once again: This flower is beautiful. She dances beautifully. Ok. Now. You look so happy. Look is a verb, but we describe it with an adjective not a verb. Shouldn’t it be You look so happily? Well, no, because we use an adjective after a linking verb. This can be tricky as some verbs can be used as both normal verbs and as linking verbs. There’s a simple tip you can use when you are not sure whether what you’re dealing with is an adjective or an adverb. Listen. If it is possible to replace the verb in question with the verb ‘to be’, I mean in the correct form, then it’s a linking verb and you need an adjective. But beware, the sense of the sentence cannot change, so the meaning of the sentence cannot change drastically. If it’s impossible, you have to use an adverb. Let’s test it. You look so happy.
Is this correct? Well, let’s replace the verb look with the verb ‘be’ in the correct form, so You are so happy. It fits! Ok, so that means ‘look’ in this sentence acts as a linking verb and what we need is an adjective, happy. Let’s see a different sentence. You dance happy. Is this correct? Let’s replace ‘dance’ with ‘to be’: You are happy. You are happy is fine, but it doesn’t fit here. I don’t mean that. I mean you dance happily. ‘Dance’ in this case is not a linking verb, it doesn’t give me any information about the doer, about you, only about the way you dance. Now I’m thinking we definitely need a whole ‘brush up your grammar’ episode to dive deeper. For now, I think this is enough. If it’s still not clear let me know.
Teardrop – An episode without an idiom cannot exist and this is the perfect moment to bring you some nice idioms with the word ‘tear’. The first one is crocodile tears. If someone sheds or cries crocodile tears they pretend to be sad. They are not sad at all. In Polish the same phrase exists and is used in the same situations. Hysterical display of sorrow. False weeping. Insincere sadness.
Next idiom: blood sweat and tears. This one means very hard work, a lot of effort and suffering. I poured my blood, sweat, and tears into this company.
The last idiom with ‘tears’: it’ll end in tears. It’ll end in tears. Something is doomed to fail and cause a lot of heartache to everyone involved. I’ll all end in tears. You are warning somebody that what they’re doing will have an unhappy or unpleasant result. It will all end in tears for you again I’m sure.
Let’s come back to repeating the lyrics out loud. Next four lines, here we go:
I don’t know why I run away
I’ll make you cry when I run away
Take me back ’cause I wanna stay
Save your tears for another day
I’ll make you cry – to make somebody cry, to cause somebody to cry to be sad, upset. Don’t make people cry. Or, make them cry.
Take me back – to take someone back. If you decide to take someone back, you accept someone back into your life. You make a decision to resume a romantic relationship. Is she really going to take him back? After all this time? This phrasal verb has other meanings. I encourage you to become a detective, a language detective and loop this up in a goo monolingual dictionary. Use the Oxford Learners Dictionary for example.
‘Couse – with apostrophe before ‘c’ means because. Other synonyms to because include: since, for, as considering.
Wanna – I wanna stay – we’ve talked about this before, especially in episodes explaining song lyrics. Wanna is ‘want to’ used in informal speech. I wanna go, I don’t wanna stay. I don’t want to stay. I don’t wanna stay.
Save. Save your tears – so here we’re gonna first look at the word in the meaning employed in this song but we’ll also look at other interesting, useful meanings and one or four idioms, ok?
Save your tears. Keep them for the future or for somebody else. You can save your strength, save some food for later. We’ll eat some now and save some for tomorrow. Avoid wasting your tears. Save water, save energy, save time. Recycling waste saves energy. But tears are bad, right? The mean sadness, sorrow, bad place, ok. That’s ok, because to save means also to avoid doing something unpleasant or to make someone able to avoid doing something unpleasant. Examples. Thanks for saving me a trip. Imagine you need some documents you left in your family house, and it’s far away. So, your family member on his or her way to your city grabs those documents for you. You don’t have to travel there anymore, so he or she saves you a trip. Imagine you’re sightseeing and wanna visit some tourist attraction but the queue is ridiculously long and puts you off going there. You should have bought tickets online that would have saved you time and energy. Ok, so that’s the meaning of ‘save your tears’, but there are other ways of looking at this verb. Let’s see.
To save somebody means to keep them alive and healthy. Keep someone or something safe (safe with ‘f’ is an adjective, not a verb. So, safe trip, safe place, ‘f’) so, to keep someone or something safe from death, harm. To save somebody’s life, to save marriage, to save jobs, to save the planet, to save species. Thanks for doing that. You saved my life.
Talking about money, to save means to keep money instead of spending it. Yes, money is singular. Money is important, money is. Where is my money? Money makes money. Money. No /ɔː/ sound no /eɪ/ sound, just /ˈmʌni/. We save money in order to do something. We save money for something, you can say I’m saving up for a trip somewhere. He saved up some money and made plans to travel.
What about computers? We use the verb ‘save’ everyday to make a computer keep data by making a copy someplace, some location, some folder we choose. The data can be saved to disk. /ˈdeɪtə/ or /ˈdɑːtə/. Both correct.
Finally idioms, but just two. The first is to save your breath and the other one to save the day. Let’s start with ‘to save your breath’. Use it to tell somebody that it is not worth wasting time and effort saying something because it will not change anything. No use saying those things. Save your breath, she’ll never change her mind.
‘To save the day’ means to prevent some terrible consequences, a failure or defeat even though it was certain to happen. To make a bad situation end successfully. When I lost all hope, my sister came to save the day.
Now let’s listen to and repeat Ariana’s part, here we go:
Met you once under a Pisces moon
I kept my distance ’cause I know that you
Don’t like when I’m with nobody else
I couldn’t help it, I put you through hell
Met you once – met you, met you. Do you hear that? It’s not ‘met you’ but ‘met you’. Why is that? This is called assimilation, it’s ione the sound at the end of one word wants to become similar to the first sound of the next word. /t/ sound wants to be similar to the /j/ sound. Met you. Please tune in to episode 57 and learn more about this and how to connect words in speech. Episode 57: Pronunciation Tip: Meet You Did You. Assimilation.
In this very song we have more examples of this assimilation. That you. ’cause I know that you. That you. It’s like in ‘Winnie the Pooh’, who was sneezing and his sneezes were heard in the whole 100 Acre wood, but Piglet heard something else. He hears: Is that you? Is that you? However, Pooh was juzt sneezing: achoo, achoo. So, in this song we also hear ‘put you’. ‘I put you through hell’. Put you.
Pisces – Pisces Moon. Pisces is the 12th sign of the zodiac, the FishesIt’s also a person born when the sun is in this sign, that is between 20 February and 20 March. Do you know any Pisces? Are you Pisces? What’s your Star Sign? Check and let me know in the comments! I’m so into astrology! I’m Aries by the way.
I couldn’t help it – when someone says “I can’t help it,” or “I can’t help doing it,” it’s a way of saying that they don’t want to do a particular thing because they know it’s not good, but they can’t stop themselves from doing it. It feels irresistable or unavoidable. I just had to push the button, I couldn’t help it. She didn’t mean to but had to put him through hell. And that leads us to:
I put you through hell – to put somebody through something. To make somebody experience something very difficult or unpleasant. To put someone through hell. You’ve put me through a lot recently. The second meaning is to connect somebody by phone. Could you put me through to the manager, please?
Two more lines, listen and repeat:
I realize that it’s much too late
And you deserve someone better
To deserve – and here I picked two idioms for you: to deserve a medal and to get what you deserve. To deserve a medal for starters. Use it when you admire somebody for having done something exceptional, difficult, or unpleasant. Wow, you really deserve a medal.
To get what you deserve. This one is used to say that you think that someone who gets bad things, has earned them. He did wrong, and he got what he deserved.
This is it, when it comes to lyrics. Time to put these all phrases into practice. Please listen and repeat useful sentences. You can grab your notebook now and jot down whatever you’re hearing. So this can be our dication. Later, when you download the worksheet and practice translating the same sentences you’ll check yourself. Brilliant, let’s do this.
I don’t want to sow any doubt in your mind.
Beaches in Poland can get really crowded in summer.
She dances beautifully.
The sight of Ana shedding crocodile tears made me sick.
I poured my blood, sweat, and tears into this company.
It will all end in tears for you again i’m sure
Is she really going to take him back? After all this time?
I don’t wanna stay.
We’ll eat some now and save some for tomorrow.
Recycling waste saves energy.
Thanks for doing that. You saved my life.
He saved up some money and made plans to travel.
The data can be saved to disk.
Save your breath, she’ll never change her mind.
Thanks for saving me a trip.
Save your breath, she’ll never change her mind.
When I lost all hope, my sister came to save the day.
I just had to push the button, I couldn’t help it.
You’ve put me through a lot recently.
Could you put me through to the manager, please?
Wow, you really deserve a medal.
He did wrong, and he got what he deserved.
Brilliant work! That was something! Good for you, you managed to stay till now. As you already know, that’s not the end of your work for this week. What’s left is the worksheet. Very important! Go to your inbox and grab the worksheet.
If you’re not a member download it from teacherola.com/102. Being a member of TOPeople is free and beneficial because every week I send an email with exclusive content along with a fresh worksheet.
Now I think we should have a list of all the phrases and idioms we’ve learned today:
Saw
Crowded room
Look so happy
When I’m not with you
Teardrop
Blood, sweat and tears
It’ll end in tears
I’ll make you cry
Take me back
‘Couse
Wanna
Save
Save a trip
Save your breath
Save the day
Met you once
Pisces
I couldn’t help it
I put you through hell
To deserve
To deserve a medal
To get what you deserve
Marvelous! Thank you very very much for being here, for doing all the work. That’s It! That’s all I have. I hope you liked the episode, if you did, as always, please leave your rating in iTunes if you can.
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Be here next, same time, same place we’ll talk about vocabulary. We’ll look at 10 interesting summer idioms. Thanks for listening, take care. Happy learning. Stay fearless and say it out loud. Bye-bye!