Speaker 1: Here's a fun fact in twenty ten. I started Happy
English in twoenty ten. That sounds pretty accurate, right, And
saying the date or the year is certainly correct. But
that's not always how native speakers talk in everyday conversation.
We're often much more casual and even imprecise when we
talk about the past. And that's what I want to
introduce to you today, some very informal ways native speakers
talk about the past casually in English.
Speaker 2: Welcome to another Happy English podcast, coming to you from
New York City, and here's your English teacher, Michael.
Speaker 1: All right, thank you, John, and thanks everyone. It's Michael
here from Happy English and I help people speak English better.
And this is Happy English Podcast, Episode nine seventy eight.
Casually talking about the past in English. If you want
to sound more informal and natural when you talk about
the past, you're in the right place. We're going to
look at six commonly used casual phrases that you can
use to talk about the past, starting with back then.
We use the phrase back then when we're comparing the
past to the present, like if you're talking about technology
with a friend and how different things are now. You
can say things like back then, the only thing we
could do with a phone was make a call. Or
if you're comparing the weather nowadays to the past, you
might say something like, back then, we had a lot
more snow in the winter. Her back then doesn't mean
a specific date or year. Back then just means that
period in the past, based on the context of the conversation.
In casual conversation, it's not always necessary to speak so
precisely about time, as long as the context is understood.
A similar phrase is back in the day. Back in
the day has the nuance of when I was young,
and so it often sounds more nostalgic or emotional, like
I remember back in the day when I wanted to
listen to new music, I used to go to the
music store to buy record albums. By the way, if
you don't know what a music store or a record
album is, haha, welcome to my generation gap. And you
know what, back in the day, once we got the
record home, we would spend hours looking at the artwork
and reading all of the lyrics and the liner notes. Yeah,
records came with a lot of reading material back in
the day. You'll often hear back in the day when
people are remembering the good old days, or when they're
comparing how things used to be with how things are now.
Here too, Back in the day doesn't mean one exact time.
It just means some particular earlier period in my life. Now,
let's look at the phrase at the time. We use
at the time when we're talking about how things felt
or what you thought during a past situation. Like I
started this podcast in twenty fourteen. At the time, I
had no idea that I'd be doing this for over
ten years. Wow. Time flies. I just had a blog
to teach English at the time, so I thought putting
my voice out there might be a good way to
help people learn English. And that's interesting because at the
time podcasts were just voice and now they've become videos too.
We often use at the time when looking back and reflecting,
especially when our opinion or the situation has changed. The
next one is a long time ago. A long time
ago is very flexible and common when talking about something
that happened in the past, and it feels like way
in the past, Like I learned how to drive a
long time ago, or I started playing the guitar a
long time ago. It could be five years ago, twenty
years ago. The exact time doesn't matter in casual conversation,
It's not always important to be precise about time, and
that brings us to the next part of this English lesson.
Let's move on to more casual and slightly exaggerated expressions.
English speakers, and in particular in American English, we love
to use exaggeration. It makes stories more fun and natural,
like when the train is very crowded, someone might say, oh, man,
there were a million people on the train this morning,
or when talking about a hot day, oh my gosh,
it's a thousand degrees outside. This kind of colorful exaggeration
also makes its way into conversations about time, like the
phrase ages ago. Technically, an age means a particular time
period in history, like the Ice Age or the age
of dinosaurs. In casual conversation, the phrase ages ago means
a long time ago, but it sounds casual and friendly,
like my friend David I met him ages ago back
when we worked together at a language school in Japan.
By the way, if you studied English at geos in
Sendai ages ago and remember me and David from then,
let me know ages ago. It's not literally a historical period.
It just feels like it was sometime in the past,
far away from now. The last phrase for today is
a million years ago. If you hear someone say that
something happened a million years ago, and that person is
not talking about dinosaurs, it's a casual and fun way
to mean this happened such a long time ago that
it feels like a million years ago. This is pure exaggeration,
and we use it for what I call comical emphasis.
Like the other day, one of my friends asked me
about the original Star Wars movie and I was like, wow,
I saw that movie a million years ago. Or I
asked one of my students when she started studying English
and she said, oh my, that was like a million
years ago. No one thinks you really mean a million
years It just means so long ago that it feels
distant now. And yes, Americans use this kind of exaggeration
all the time in casual conversation. So there you have it.
Sometimes you need to precisely say when something happened. I
started teaching English in nineteen ninety four, But in everyday
casual conversation it's perfectly fine to talk about the past
using the phrases from this lesson, especially when something happened
in the past and it feels like that was a
million years ago. Storytelling and reminiscing about the past can
happen in a colorful, casual way like this, And keep
in mind the best way to remember English like this
and any other word or phrase in English, is to
take that word or phrase, write it in a sentence
that's true for you or true in your world, and
then memorize your sentences. Hey, thanks for listening, and remember
learning another language is not easy, but it's not impossible,
and I'm here to help you on your journey.
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English by leaving us a review. Get English, Get Happy,
Happy English.