This mini episode teaches you the useful idiom “to turn out.”
Episode 237 of the Everybody ESL podcast is a mini episode that teaches you the useful idiom “to turn out.” Send your questions about English and your suggestions for future episodes to EverybodyESL@gmail.com! (And let me know if you’d like to record the introduction to a future episode.)
Intro
“Hi! This is So Yeong from Busan, in Korea. You are listening to informative Everybody ESL.”
Welcome to episode 237 of Everybody ESL, the podcast for everybody who wants to improve their English, practice their English, or just learn more English. My name is Ben, and I have a mini episode for you today, where I am going to teach you about one English topic. You can subscribe to the Everybody ESL podcast at Apple podcasts, on the Stitcher app, and wherever you find your podcasts. If you like Everybody ESL, leave it a good review so other people can find out about it too. And if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions for me, please send an email to everybodyESL@gmail.com. Okay! Let’s get on with this mini episode.
The episode
In this episode, I want to teach you a very common and very useful expression. And that expression is “to turn out.” To turn out. That’s turn: t-u-r-n, out: o-u-t. To turn out.
What does this idiom mean? “To turn out” means “to have a certain conclusion, to end in a certain way” or maybe “to be a certain way.”
That doesn’t sound very clear, but I think it will be more clear when I give you an example of a sentence that uses the idiom “turn out.”
Let’s say your friend had a date last night. Your friend went out on a date. And the next day, you say to your friend, “How did your date turn out?” How did your date turn out? What somebody would mean if they asked that question is “What was the conclusion of your date? What did you think about your date when it was over? How did your date go?”
“How did it turn out?” means all of these things. It means “What was the conclusion of the date?” Or “What did you think about the date when it was over?” Or “What did you think about the date?” How did it turn out? What was it like? How did it go?”
There is another construction that uses “turn out” that I think might be even more common.
And this construction goes like this: “It turned out that,” and then a full sentence follows. “It turned out that… something.”
What does this mean? It’s very similar to that first example that I gave you that used “turn out.” In this case, we use it when we are talking about a conclusion that we have reached—something that we have concluded or realized or discovered.
Again, you can see that in this use of “turn out,” we are talking about the way things end or conclude, or what we think about them when they are over. Or what we have learned about them when they are over.
Let me give you an example of this construction that uses “turn out”: “It turned out that I am not good at making sushi.” It turned out that I am not good at making sushi. What does this mean?
Here is the situation that I think of when I hear that sentence: I think of somebody who was trying to make sushi. And after trying to make sushi, they learned, or they discovered, or they concluded that they were not good at making sushi.
And so they say, “It turned out that I am not good at making sushi.” In other words, “This was the result of trying to make sushi. And here is what I learned after I tried to make sushi. This was my conclusion. This was my discovery. Here is how the situation ended.”
Those two examples of the idiom “to turn out” can give you an idea of how we use this expression. It really is very common and very useful. And I think it is an idiom you should know.
Outro
And that’s the end of episode 237 of Everybody ESL. Remember: if you have any questions about English, or if you have comments or suggestions about the podcast, or if you would like to record an introduction that I can use at the beginning of future episodes—the same way So Yeong recorded the introduction you heard at the beginning of this episode—send an email to everybodyESL@gmail.com. I’ll be back soon with another episode, and until then, keep going, keep practicing, and keep learning. Goodbye! I’ll see you soon.