British vs American vs Canadian ENGLISH Differences! (very different!)

hello everyone and welcome back to english with lucy i've got a great video planned for you today we are going to be comparing british english with american english and canadian english and i have two fabulous guests on my channel and i think you might recognize them hey my name is rachel i'm from the us and i have a channel here on youtube where i focus on all things spoken english with an american accent my accent is what i would call a standard american accent i grew up in florida i went to school in the midwest and since then i've lived in boston new york and philadelphia so we have rachel representing the us and representing canada we have bob the canadian well hello lucy and hello rachel and hello to all of lucy's viewers i'm bob the canadian from the youtube channel learn english with bob the canadian where you'll often find me out somewhere on my farm teaching a short english lesson if you haven't met me before my name's lucy i run this channel english with lucy and i am from cambridgeshire in the united kingdom and i speak with a modern rp accent i'd just like to remind you that there's a free pdf that goes with this lesson it's got everything that we're going to talk about today plus a quiz at the end if you'd like to download the free pdf all you've got to do is click on the link in the description box enter your name and your email address you then sign up to my mailing list and the pdf will arrive automatically in your inbox from then on you don't have to subscribe again every week you'll receive all of my lesson pdfs plus all of my news and offers by the way this is a two-part video today we are looking at vocabulary and in the future there will be a part two with pronunciation where we will definitively find out if canadians say a boot or not okay so i have sent bob and rachel a list of pictures and they are going to tell us how they say it where they're from because there are going to be some differences let's get started with this first one this first one is definitely the letter z although as a child we watched the american version of sesame street and they tried to get me to learn it as the letter z but this in canada is definitely the letter z x y zed i would definitely call this letter z interesting for me in the uk in british english it is the letter zed as well i really relate to bob on that one because we used to watch loads of tv shows and cartoons that were produced in the us and they always used to say z as well and i remember finding it quite confusing but yeah xyz over here okay let's take a look at this next one what would they call this so this is definitely a bill in canadian english when you're at a restaurant and when you're done eating you ask your server if you can have the bill the check is the most common but i would also call this the bill in the uk this is always the bill and funny story i worked as a waitress when i was a teenager and someone once said to me but i misread their lips and i thought they said can i have some milk and i brought them a glass of milk and they were just so confused okay on to the third what would you call this and remember that you can write in the comments section below what you would call these as well if you say something different so we call these either running shoes or runners in canadian english if you're going to go out for a walk or a run you put on your running shoes or you put on your runners there are lots of different terms i might use for this tennis shoes or running shoes even though they might not specifically be for tennis or running also sneakers interesting we don't use any of those words in the uk we understand them sneakers running shoes tennis shoes but i would say that running shoes would be specifically for running in general we call these shoes trainers trainers okay on to the next a long time ago in canadian english we called this a chesterfield but now we just call it a couch sometimes we might say sofa but usually when we see something like this we say i'm gonna go sit on the couch i would call this either a couch or a sofa funny okay so we would hardly ever call this a couch that sounds very american and canadian to me we would almost always call this a sofa or sometimes a seti a chesterfield to me seems like an old-fashioned leather sofa it's a specific design we do have a lot of americanisms in british english and we would say a couch potato not a sofa potato that doesn't work if someone's lazy they're a couch potato so we have adopted that okay on to the next one the one dollar coin in canada has a loonie on it that's a bird that lives in northern canada so we decided we would just call this the looney then when we decided to have a two dollar coin we thought we would call it a toonie because it's worth two dollars and it rhymes with looney slang for one dollar a buck i love the looney and then the toonie i think that's absolutely hilarious yeah i've heard of buck before so we don't have dollars in the uk we have pounds and our slang term for one pound is a quid and we haven't thought of a cool name for two we call it two quit one quid two quid another thing to note is when we have five pounds or five quid we'll call it a fiver and for ten a tenner in canada we would call this pop i think it's the second half of the word sodapop i think my american cousins use the first part of the word i think they call it soda but we just call it pot actually in the u.s we use either soda or pop depending on the region i personally use soda interesting okay so there are definitely some clear similarities between those two unsurprisingly uh in the uk it's very different you will find some people i think more up north saying pop um but in general we call it fizzy drinks which doesn't sound as cool now the word soda to us is quite confusing because a soda for us is fizzy water so i remember going over to the us and i was offered a soda and i thought oh i'm boring no i'll have something more interesting like a coke please okay on to the next one in canada we use the metric system so we measure distance in kilometers but that seems like a really big word so sometimes we just say clicks if you ask someone how do i get to niagara falls they might say oh it's about 40 clicks from here sometimes it's spelled with a c sometimes with a k i would call that one kilometer but of course in the u.s we're much more familiar with miles so we're quite boring here we would just call it a kilometer but sometimes when we're running or doing sport we would just shorten that down to k so i love running and i like to run 5k and 10k five kilometers 10 kilometers i've never heard of click before that's quite cool for driving we do still tend to use miles our speed is in miles per hour how weird is that i go running in kilometers but i drive in miles we need to sort that out all right let's talk about this one this is what i actually celebrated uh this weekend that's just gone past in canadian english we would call this either a stag and dough or a jack and jill it's a party that a couple has about a month or two before their actual wedding where they just invite friends and family over just to have a good time to celebrate the fact that they're getting married that would be a bachelor party for a man a bachelorette party for a woman ah it's completely different in the uk we say hendu a do is a party or a stag do now it's more common for them to be more than one night people like to go away for weekends but if it's just one night you can say hen night or stag night as well also it's not so common to celebrate them together as bob explained but it is becoming more more common and we put stag and hen together and we call it a sten hag didn't sound so good [Laughter] ah okay this next one is an interesting one and i kind of just put it in for bob let's see what he says canadians often add the word a to the end of a sentence to turn it into a question so i can't really explain how it works but i'll give you a few examples i could say it's a nice day out here eh or i could say it's getting hot out here eh or if it was getting a bit windy i could say it's getting windy out here eh all of those would be examples of how canadians use the word a a common question tag in the us would be right yes i just wanted to hear bob say a i know it's a common stereotype that um well there's two that i've heard of canada that they say aboot in british english we do use a sometimes a a or isn't it or doesn't it we do say a lot it's hot isn't it sometimes we can shorten this down to in it it's hot in it oh my god in it doesn't it can go to done it it hurts done it i've heard them say write a lot in american english that's definitely creeping into british english because we just consume so much american media so canada is a pretty big country and in different parts i think they have different words for this we call them smokes in some parts of canada they might call them darts but most people i think just call them cigarettes i don't smoke so i'm not super familiar here but i would say cigarettes or for shorter or for slang ciggies or smokes so smokes sounds very very like american gangster film to me in british english cigarettes or sigis we also use the word which if you use it to describe a person it's a really offensive word but it's a common slang term for cigarettes okay on to the next what do you call this so these are what we call freezies you buy them in the store and they're not frozen when you come home you put them in the freezer and in a couple days they're frozen and then on a hot day kids can take them out snip the end off with a pair of scissors and eat it to cool off i'd call this a popsicle okay so yeah we're definitely cool in british english this a popsicle um but we would also call it a lolly any kind of frozen treat that isn't creamy we'd call a lolly if it's creamy it's an ice cream so in canada we would call this homo milk or whole milk homo is short for homogenized i think they mix the milk and the cream together so it won't separate anymore so this in canada would be either homo milk or whole milk that would be whole milk ah okay so if someone asked me for homo milk i would not know what they're talking about i would understand whole milk but in the uk we tend to call it full fat milk or full cream milk anything with the fat removed is skimmed or semi-skimmed which is half and half also i forgot to ask bob if it's true that his milk comes in bags i've heard that in canada milk comes in bags okay next one what are they going to call this so we would call this either a parking garage or a parkade when you go to see a show in a city like toronto you park your car in a parking garage or in a parkade i would call this a parking garage for me this is a multi-storey car park we do have a habit of over complicating things yeah um one thing i've noticed is that in the us they call it a parking lot we always call this a car park and if it has multiple levels it's a multi-story car park i would definitely understand parking garage or garage as we would call it but if someone said parkade i would think that might be like a mix between a park and an arcade which sounds so fun and i would be so bitterly disappointed when i get there and it's a multi-story car park all right on to the next one what do you call this so we would call this a washroom in canada i still remember one of my first visits to the u.s when i asked someone if i could use their washroom and they looked at me funny because i think they call it a bathroom there but in canada this is definitely a washroom i would call this a bathroom or we would also say restroom interesting in british english we'd understand washroom and restroom and bathroom of course but we tend to call it the loo or just simply the toilet bathroom to me implies that it has a bath and a shower so a public bathroom well i don't want to have a shower or a bath in a public bath you will often see toilets or public restrooms in the uk marked with wc this is short for water closet but no one ever says water closet we always say the loo or the toilets where are the toilets where's the toilet some of my friends from across the pond have said that they find saying the word toilet directly quite vulgar and i do understand that but it's just so ingrained into our everyday speech right let's take a look at this next one what do they say we would call this either a fire hall or a fire station the fire hall is the place where you would find firefighters and fire trucks and if there's a fire the alarm goes off and they jump in their trucks and they go to put out the fire so we would call it a fire hall or a fire station fire station but also fire house interesting for us this is just a fire station we never ever say fire hall or what was the other one firehouse no we never say that fire station actually i've just thought there's a bar in london called the chilton firehouse which is meant to be very nice actually it is very nice i've been there and yeah i never even thought twice about that maybe we do say firehouse every now and again all right on to the next one what do they say for this in canada we often refer to electricity as hydro sometimes there's a storm and the hydro goes out the poles along the road are called hydro pools so i think this is because a lot of our electricity comes from hydroelectric power plants but in canada you call electricity hydro we call that electricity interesting because if you said the hydra wasn't working i would presume that was your water supply in british english we call this electricity the electric we also say the power so we have a power cut or the power's gone out or energy you know my energy bill's gone up so much this is because we use lots of different sources as gas in many houses oil is what we use here it depends if you're on the mains supply or not okay what do they call this so we would call this either brown bread or whole wheat bread it's more common for me as an older canadian to call it brown bread i think for my kids they would call this whole wheat bread but definitely when i was growing up we had white bread and we had brown bread i would call that whole wheat bread i'm definitely seeing more similarities between canadian english and british english than american english and british english we also call this brown bread uh multi-grain and whole wheat is also creeping in but in general we have brown bread white bread okay what do they say for this one sometimes when you're at a restaurant you get a little bit of food on your mouth and you use a serviette to wipe it off so this is what we in canada would call a serviette that's a paper napkin ah interesting in british english we use both serviette and napkin for me a serviette seems like a kind of cheaper white one that's disposable and a napkin is either decorated or made of material right let's see what they say for this one we call a case of beer with 24 bottles in it a 2-4 in canada do you get it there's 24 bottles of beer in it 2-4 so we call a case of beer with 24 bottles of beer in it a 2-4 we would call that a case of beer in british english we would call this a 24 pack if someone asked me for a 2-4 i don't know i don't think i'd know what they're talking about but i like that that's very efficient right that is it for today's video thank you so much to bob and rachel for their fantastic explanations and for generously participating in this video i've left all of their information down below in the description box you can also click on the link there to get your free pdf for today's lesson don't forget to connect with me on all of my social media i've got my instagram and i've got my website englishwithlucy.co.uk where i've got a really cool pronunciation tool you can click on all the phonemes and hear how words are pronounced in british english e no air if you're looking for more listening practice and to expand your vocabulary then i also have my vlogging channel where i document my life here on a farm in the english countryside all of the vlogs are fully subtitled for your convenience so you can pick up lots of vocab and improve your listening i will see you soon for another lesson [Music] [Music] you

Channel: English with Lucy

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Id: ZI5btv2VFvk

Length: 18min 59sec (1139 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 11 2021