Hello students, this is Shayna, your teacher at EspressoEnglish.net and today you’re going to learn two phrases for keeping a positive attitude. The first one is “look on the bright side.” When you tell somebody to look on the bright side, it means you’re telling them to find the good aspect in what seems like a bad situation.
For example, let’s say you have a friend who’s taking English class, and your friend is very upset because they gave a presentation in class and it was full of mistakes that the teacher corrected. So your friend is feeling sad about his mistakes in English and you can tell him, “Hey, look on the bright side, at least you learned a lot through the teachers corrections.”
So it seems like a bad situation; he made lots of mistakes in his presentation… but you’re encouraging him to see the good side of it – the fact that he can learn from those mistakes and not make them again.
The other phrase is “a blessing in disguise.” If something is a blessing in disguise, it means it’s something that seemed bad but actually turned out to be good, even if the good wasn’t obvious at first.
Imagine that you lose your job. This seems like a very bad situation; being unemployed. But then imagine, with your free time you begin to write and then you launch a new career as a successful writer. So later, you can say, “Losing my job was a blessing in disguise because it enabled me to start writing and later become a famous writer.”
So, those are our two phrases for keeping a positive attitude. Look on the bright side – to tell somebody to find the good aspect in a bad situation; and a blessing in disguise, which we usually use for looking back on something in the past that seemed bad at the time but later turned out to be very good, even if that good wasn’t very obvious at first.
I hope you’ll keep a positive attitude about your English and I hope you’ll join me tomorrow to learn more spoken English phrases for everyday life. See you next time!
You’ll learn hundreds of conversational English expressions in this course:
