I'm Vanessa from SpeakEnglishWithVanessa.com.

Are you ready to expand your vocabulary?

Let's get started.

Do you want to improve your vocabulary?

Do you want to have fun?

Do you want to see my house?

If you answered yes, yes, and yes, then today you're in luck because I want to help you

understand and use over 40 essential household words, expressions, and phrasal verbs.

We're gonna go around to each of the rooms in my house and I'm gonna show you wants there

and maybe what's not there but what maybe is typically there in other American households

so that you can use those words.

Because in a video that I recently made called How To Learn English At Home, I mentioned

that you can look around you and ask questions about your surroundings.

"What's that?

What's in that box?

Who is that?"

Well, the way that you can do this is if you have the vocabulary to explain those things.

So I hope that today you'll be able to expand your vocabulary even if you are an advanced

English speaker, I'm sure that you're going to use some useful expressions and you'll

realize this is what native speakers really use in real life instead of what they use

in textbooks.

So I challenge you, after this lesson, try to go around your house and name things.

You could even write down a label and put it around if your family members don't mind.

This is a great way to expand your vocabulary.

So pay attention, make some notes, and let's get started.

Welcome to my kitchen.

I'm gonna just go around the room, and in fact, I'm gonna go around the kitchen, the

living room, the office, the bathroom, and the bedroom.

And we're gonna go step-by-step through the different things that I see.

I'm gonna name them.

If they need any explanation, I'll try to explain them.

And I hope that it will be helpful to you as you expand your vocabulary.

All right.

Let's start with the fridge.

Here's the fridge, or you can say refrigerator if you want to be extra intense.

But we often just say fridge, pretty simple.

On the top, you have the freezer.

And my freezer's on top, sometimes freezers are on the bottom, or sometimes it's split

down the middle and there's a freezer on one side and a refrigerator, or fridge, on the

other side.

Mine's just on the bottom.

You can see I have a lot of magnets and pictures on my fridge.

It's pretty typically.

I have some magnets that some YouTube subscribers sent me, some pictures, some magnets that

we've picked up as we've traveled.

But this is pretty typical that you'll see, some personal mementos on the fridge.

Here, we have our dining room table.

In the U.S., typically people will have a dining room or maybe their kitchen will be

a little bit bigger than mine because we live in an apartment.

It's from the 1920s, so actually my apartment and my house is quite different than what

you would typically see if you visited someone's house in the U.S. but a lot of the items are

the same.

So if there's any differences from typical houses in the U.S., I'll try to explain that

to you as well.

But here, we have the table.

Pretty simple.

I bet you learned that in your, maybe, first class in English class.

We have chairs, we usually call these kitchen chairs or if you have a separate dining room,

you can call them dining room chairs.

Because we have a one-year-old, you're gonna see a lot of different items around our house

that are for our one-year-old.

So here, we have his highchair.

His high chair attaches to the kitchen chair so it's a little bit different than a standalone

highchair, that would be just a separate chair.

But we don't have much room in our kitchen, so we have a portable highchair that attaches

to a chair.

Next, let's move on to this table which is where we cut things and prepare our food.

Here, you can see a fruit tray, you might call it different things depending on what

region of the U.S. you're from.

At the moment, we only have two tangerines on the fruit tray.

Typically, we have more.

But we also have a coaster.

This is where you put your cups or your mugs, usually hot or cold things to keep the table

safe.

We also have a coffee grinder for grinding beans.

And a sippy cup for our baby.

And let's move along over here.

On this side, we have our cheese grater.

This is with a T, even though it sounds like a D. Grater, it's a cheese grater.

Our knives.

We have some measuring cups in the U.S., we use cups and tablespoons, and teaspoons to

measure things.

A lot of people have these in plastic, but ours are cute little cats.

And here, we have some condiments that we often use when we're cooking, so we have them

close by and handy.

Oh, we just have honey, some balsamic, some chopsticks, some salt, some olive oil, and

of course, you can see my plants, which are not doing too well.

I don't have a green thumb, as they say.

Our plants often die.

So they don't have a good future looking ahead of them.

This is our oven where we cook and bake things.

Typically, we call the top the stove top or the stove.

And there's four burners on this stove top.

And we have some knobs for turning on the stove.

Inside is the oven.

Often, I'll just say the oven to mean the full stove, or this full device.

But you can kind of use them interchangeably.

Some people are sticklers about that kind of thing.

Sticklers means picky, picky about those kind of terms.

But, we often say oven, stove for this general device.

But technically, the top is the stove and inside is the oven.

I have some pots and pans here.

There's more under the counter.

Here, I have my glass lid because inside I'm making some butternut squash for lunch a little

bit later.

And my cutting board, I have a couple other cutting boards, but this one is my favorite,

so it stays close by and handy.

On this side of the kitchen are the oven mitts and our spice rack.

Typically, people will say spice rack or spice cabinet is their inside a cabinet.

We have, technically, it's a shelf, but we call it the spice rack because all of the

spices are there.

I also have some tea and some cookbooks and some miscellaneous things on that shelf as

well.

So this is something that's pretty different from typical houses in the U.S., we have a

sink, most places have a sink with a facet, we have the strainer, or colander, usually

a strainer for straining pasta or other things that we're washing.

But, we didn't have a dishwasher until about one month ago and it's because this is an

old apartment, as I mentioned it's from the 1920s, so there's not air conditioning, not

regular heating, no dishwasher, no washer or dryer for our clothes.

But we decided to buy a, you can see here, table top dishwasher.

This is not typical in houses in the U.S., but it's the same idea.

Typically, they're under the counter and it's kind of part of the furniture.

But you can open the dishwasher and see the dish rack.

Here, we have some clean dishes and apparently toys that needed to be cleaned too.

So we have the dosh rack and you put your dishes in the dish rack.

And up here, I have a small dish rack just for more fragile things like these mugs or

these glasses.

But you can hand dry things and put them in the rack as well.

So, that's just depending on what you have in your house.

If you have a dishwasher, or if you need to hand wash things and then put them in the

drying rack or in the rack.

Above the dishwasher, we have a cabinet where we keep put dry goods.

So you can see we have some spices, some popcorn, things for baking, there's some pasta, some

kind of leftover, dry goods that we put in there to keep.

A lot of people will have what you call a pantry.

And a pantry is kind of like a closet where you keep dry goods, but our apartment is pretty

small, it's old, we don't have a pantry.

So, we just have a cabinet.

Beside the dishwasher, we have a toaster oven.

And a lot of people will also have a microwave.

In fact, I'd say 99% of Americans have a microwave.

We just don't have it because we don't have a lot of space, this is an old apartment,

like I mentioned.

So there's a couple key elements.

There's one more key element that you'll not see in our house that I'll mention a little

bit later.

But, we have a toaster oven, a lot of people will have a regular toaster and it will just

have slots.

So, we call this the toaster because it's the only one we have.

But if you have a toaster with slots and a toaster oven, you probably need to be a little

more specific and just say, "Put it in the toaster oven," or, "I put it in the toaster

oven," just so people know which one it's in.

We have a paper towel rack, this is the paper towel rack, the metal piece.

And here are some paper towels for cleaning up things.

And we also have a water kettle, a hot water kettle for heating up water.

So this is kind of like our little drink station.

I have tea things, Dan has some coffee things, we have some dish washing soap.

This is where all of those kind of extra kitchen things happen.

And finally, it's a little bit awkward for me to show you with the camera because it's

a little bit high up so I have to hold the camera myself, but here we have our dishes.

So we have big plates, little plates, you might come across some specific words for

different sizes of plates.

But in reality, we just say big plates, little plates.

We have some wine glasses, some regular glasses, tall glasses, short glasses, and bowls.

A lot of people have different sizes of bowls or different functions for different bowls.

But, we keep it simple, bowls.

Up on top, as well, we have some mugs you can see.

We have a lot of mugs because I feel like choosing the right mug for that moment is

an important part of drinking a hot drink.

I have to have the right mug.

Do I want the mug with birds on it?

Do I want the mug with a rainbow on it?

It just depends.

And it kind of lends the experience, a richer feeling, I don't know if you feel the same

way about the mug that you drink your coffee or your tea out of, but I feel like the mug

is important to me.

All right, let's go to the next room.

When you first come into our house we have a shoe rack where we line up our shoes.

And this is typical in some American houses, but in a lot of American houses, people keep

their shoes on.

For us, we lived in Korea for a couple years, so we got used to taking off our shoes.

And we have a sign on the door that says, "Please take off your shoes, we will appreciate

it."

But, a lot of our friends have never actually looked at the sign.

And we don't tell them, "Hey, take off your shoes."

We're pretty relaxed when it comes to guests.

But for ourselves, we always take off our shoes.

If we need to run into the house for something quickly, then it's not a big deal.

But, we have a shoe rack so that we can easily take off our shoes and put them away when

we come in our house.

Welcome to our living room.

There is one thing I'm gonna mention about our living room, maybe a couple things, but

specifically one thing that you're not gonna see in our living room that's pretty typical,

and that's just a TV.

You could say television, but we often just say TV.

Why don't we have a TV?

Well, it was a conscious decision to not have a TV.

First of all, because I'm not a big fan of different TV shows and it's just not that

enjoyable for me.

But also, I feel like I don't wanna just have it on and always be watching.

Anyway, we can talk about that another time.

But, I want to let you know that it's pretty typical to see a TV in American households

in their living room of you could say family room.

Some people say main room, some people say den, kind of like a lion's den.

This is like a cave, but people say den.

I don't know if that's a southern word, but some of my friends in the south say that.