Showing Appreciation

Hello and welcome to today's episode of the Gold Forest English podcast. My name is Jordan and today I want to talk about showing appreciation.

So in English, one of our most common words, one of the most important words in English is thank you. We in England in England so in British English, the word thank you is used a lot. um many non-native speakers, sometimes they get confused or surprised because British people will use the word thank you in situations which do not seem that important. So in in some languages, for example, in Russian, in a situation like being at a dinner table. So you're at a dinner table and you want some salt for your food. You may ask somebody to pass the salt and in Russian it would be quite strange to say thank you for this because it was a small action. It was not a difficult action for somebody to give the salt to you, but in British English we would say thank you.

So the word thank you is used a lot more than you might expect for big things and small things British people we love to say thank you. but that's not the only way of showing appreciation. We have some - we have many phrases for showing appreciation and thanking people, so let's have a little look at a couple of them today.

A first phrase is quite formal. It's used in formal situations, maybe professional business situations, or maybe just being polite. The phrase we use is go above and beyond. So we say things like “thank you for going above and beyond”, or “he went above and beyond with his work,” it’s showing praise and positive feedback, um this is particularly common in job situations, customer service or team work and things like that. To go above and beyond, this is a very polite and strong phrase which is a bit formal to show appreciation to show exceptional effort, additional work, more than expected. Go above and beyond of course, went above and beyond in the past tense. “She went above and beyond.”

A slightly more flexible phrase which can be used in everyday conversation or professional conversation, um is go out of your way. Go out of your way. It sounds like it might be a bad thing, like similar to “go away”, but to say that somebody goes out of his way or her way is to show that they are making special effort to help somebody else, so we would say something like “Thank you for going out of your way yesterday you really helped me a lot.” “Thank you for going out of your way.” So this is a it's a more neutral phrase we can use it for any any kind of situation, casual or professional. “He goes out of his way often - he's very helpful.”

And finally, a more casual phrase which is common for friends and family, close colleagues, informal conversation, this phrase is step up. “Step up” is a much more informal conversational phrase, to step up it means to take responsibility or to take action when it's needed, even if it's not your job. So, for example, um a child that decides to help their parent with housework, even if the parent has not asked them to do it, the parent might say “Thank you for stepping up and helping me.” “Thank you for stepping up and helping me” So step up is a bit more casual, it's more appropriate for friends and family um to take action even when it's not necessary is step up. “I have to step up often with my friends because they are very lazy and I need to make things happen so if we are organizing an event, like going on holiday together, I often need to step up and do the planning and the organization of the holiday.”

So we have those three phrases that could be replacements for a simple thank you, but the important thing is that they are all giving praise, giving positive feedback, showing appreciation, and this is a very important thing in British English, whether it's for small tasks or large tasks it's very important to thank people and to show your appreciation.

Okay. Well, thank you for listening. I hope this little podcast has helped you with some ideas of how to show appreciation and remember that I've got a full blog post on the website GoldForestAcademy.com and that blog post covers several more phrases as well as explaining how to use them, so be sure to check out the blog post on the website if you are interested in this topic.

All right well, thank you for listening and I hope you are having a nice day and I will see you in the next episode. Goodbye.