Notting Hill
Actualizado: hace 15 horas
A customer walks into a small travel bookshop. The bookseller tells her that the book she's looking at isn't very good and tries to persuade her to buy another one instead.
Not exactly the usual sales technique.
A few minutes later, he catches someone hiding a book down his trousers. Then he meets the customer again outside, spills a drink all over her and invites her to his house to clean up. Once there, he offers her tea. She says no. Coffee? No. Orange juice? No. Something cold? Still no.
“Do you always say ‘no’ to everything?”
These scenes from Notting Hill are funny because the conversations are full of things we actually do when we speak: we hesitate, change our minds, make offers, reject them, apologise, react to unexpected comments and try to persuade people — sometimes successfully, sometimes very awkwardly.
They also give us plenty of English to work with. What was William doing when Anna entered the shop? What had the shoplifter done before William confronted him? How could the situation have been handled differently? And what would have happened if William hadn't spilled his drink on Anna?
In this B2 review, we'll use those moments to practise tenses, active and passive voice, conditionals, vocabulary and pronunciation (IPA).
And then we'll take the language beyond the film.
Because knowing how to form a conditional is useful. Knowing how to use one when someone says “No, I'm not interested” and you want them to reconsider is much more interesting.
