“My friend has got ALS but he’s the happiest guy on earth!”
That’s what I’ve heard from a student of mine. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), is a specific disease (=illness) which causes the death of neurons controlling voluntary muscles. It’s a degenerative disease.
So it came up the need to learn how to talk about illnesses.
Find below two good videos to introduce you to this matter. Listen carefully and make notes of what you hear.
Hallelujah! What a beautiful word! The song, originally written and sung by Leonard Cohen in 1984, has been performed by so many artists in various languages. But this cover by Jeff Buckley, an American singer, songwriter and guitarist, is a very special one!
“And even though it all went wrong, I’ll stand right here before the Lord of song, with nothing on my tongue but ‘Hallelujah’.”
It’s, as I say, a desire to affirm my faith in life, not in some formal religious way but with enthusiasm, with emotion…It’s a rather joyous song. I wanted to write something in the tradition of the hallelujah choruses but from a different point of view…It’s the notion that there is no perfection—that this is a broken world and we live with broken hearts and broken lives but still that is no alibi for anything.
On the contrary, you have to stand up and say hallelujah under those circumstances.
~ Leonard Cohen
Listen to it and work on the lyrics here! You’ll love to sing along with this tune!
https://www.elephantjournal.com/2010/06/the-top-10-most-popular-hallelujah-renditions-on-youtube/
At the other day, when a student and I were working together, there was this need to introduce him to the expression: “It doesn’t matter”. Then, he showed me this song. It’s a cute, catchy song and I loved it! Listen to it! Have fun and work on it here!
Important! Song lyrics will ignore the rules of standard grammar and should never be used as a guide. The songwriter may pick a non-standard form so that it matches the rhythm of the song better, so that it rhymes better, because it is more evocative of a place or time, because it is in, or emulating a dialect, to be provocative or rebellious, and so on.
So “It doesn’t matter!” is correct.
We have been working with the following questions lately: What’s the weather like? and What’s Croatia like?. This is a popular way for you to tell somebody about that thing or person.
And these questions with the word “like” often confuse students. This video explains that.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and here we have lots of gorgeous images put together into this nice video! Listen carefully and notice how the words are combined, and how the superlatives are used to describe this place full of life, a place that lift your spirits sky high!