In this mini episode, you will learn the common adjective “brand-new.”
Episode 416 of the Everybody ESL podcast is a mini episode that teaches you the common adjective “brand-new.” Send your questions about English and your comments and suggestions to EverybodyESL@gmail.com. (And let me know if you’d like to record the introduction to a future episode.)
Intro
“Hello! This is Juhee, from South Korea. You are listening to Everybody ESL.”
Welcome to episode 416 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 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 am going to teach you a very common adjective. The adjective is brand-new. Brand-new.
That’s spelled b-r-a-n-d, hyphen, n-e-w. Brand-new.
What does it mean to describe something as brand-new? Brand-new means “completely new” or “very new” or “recently developed.” We use brand-new to talk about products or to talk about ideas or organizations, businesses . . . Things like that.
We can even use brand-new when we talk about people, if we are trying to describe somebody who is very new at some job or very new at being some kind of person. For instance, we could talk about a brand-new high school graduate. That would mean somebody who graduated from high school very recently, someone who just graduated from high school. That person is a brand-new high school graduate.
Let me give you a couple of other examples of situations where people might use the adjective brand-new.
One person might say to someone else, “Look at my phone. My phone is brand-new.” That could mean three different things that are all related to each other. They all have to do with something being new.
It could mean this is a new model of phone. This model of phone just recently became available. It was only recently when people could first buy it. It is a new model of phone. Or it could mean “This phone is new to me. I just recently bought it. I have not owned this phone for very long.” And it could also mean “Nobody else has owned this phone before. I bought this phone when it was new.”
With all of those meanings, the idea is kind of the same. We use brand-new to mean all of those things—to describe something that is very new in some way.
We can also describe things like organizations as brand-new. Somebody could say something like this: “Why don’t you come to the tennis club with me? It’s brand-new.” And that means this tennis club only started very recently, so it is still a new organization. It’s a new club.
Brand-new means “very new” or “completely new.”
One other thing I need to mention about this adjective is this: Even though we spell it b-r-a-n-d, hyphen, n-e-w, when we pronounce it, we often do not pronounce that D sound.
So, usually when people say this word in a normal, natural conversation, it sounds like this: [bran-new]. [Bran-new]. You cannot hear a D in that pronunciation. [Bran-new]. I think maybe it’s only when people are speaking especially slowly and clearly that you will hear [brand-new] with that D sound. [Brand-new]. Usually you will hear [bran-new].
And that is brand-new, a very common and useful adjective that I think you should know.
Outro
This is the end of episode 416 of Everybody ESL. Remember: if you have any questions about English, or if you have comments for me, or if you would like to record an introduction that I can play at the beginning of future episodes—the same way Juhee recorded the introduction you heard at the beginning of this episode—send an email to EverybodyESL@gmail.com. I’ll be back soon with a new episode. And until then, keep going, keep practicing, and keep learning. I’ll see you soon. Goodbye!