Levels of Happiness

Hello and welcome to the Gold Forest English Podcast. My name is Jordan. And today I want to talk about some adjectives.

Adjectives are describing words. Things like like hot and cold, happy and sad. They're the words that describe maybe how we feel or describe an event describe something. In particular today, I want to talk about different levels of adjectives, how the same adjective can be made stronger or weaker, can be more extreme, can be bigger.

Let's take a look at the idea of happiness. So happy. It's a very common adjective. I feel happy. But there are different levels of happiness. If we go from happy, it's a good feeling. We are enjoying. If we go up from happy, we might be really happy or very happy. There is a specific word we could use. We could use the word delighted. Delighted, delighted, same meaning as really happy or very happy. Above delighted is ecstatic. Ecstatic is extremely happy. It's our very high happiness word. Ecstatic. She was astatic with her test results.. She passed everything and got a good score, so she felt astatic. So that's our top word, ecstatic. If we go all the way to the bottom, our very bottom word, extremely unhappy, we could use words like miserable or depressed. He was depressed because he failed all his tests. Extremely unhappy, miserable, and depressed.

So those are our two extreme sides of the adjective scale, the adjective ladder. Talking about happiness at the very top, we've got ecstatic. very, very, very happy. At the bottom we've got miserable and depressed, very, very, very unhappy. In the middle, we've got our word happy, which is a good feeling. If we go below happy, so just a little bit happy, we're feeling content, content. You are quite happy. It's nice, it's good, you are content. Below content is where we've got our very so so words, like fine or OK. It's not good, it's not bad, it's OK. It's fine. It's so- so.

Below those words, we've got our words of sad, unhappy, or we could say that we're feeling down. She was feeling down because her best friend was sick. And then below down and sad, we've got the word miserable and depressed, which I talked about before - extremely unhappy.

So if we go from the very top to the very bottom, we've got our words ecstatic, delighted, happy, content, OK, sad, miserable. We've got all these words to talk about our feelings of happiness.

I am from England, and something that is quite common in the UK is people use specific phrases like not bad, which means pretty good. So somebody might ask, How are you feeling today? And another person could answer, Oh, I'm not bad.
So not bad is a very common phrase, which means pretty good or quite good.

Another common phrase that many people use in England is can't complain. can't complain. Which means, I'm okay. Everything is okay. I'm fine. A person might ask, How are you feeling today? And the other person could reply, Can't complain. These two phrases, not bad and can't complain, are very common for UK English, British English. They do sound a little bit negative, but the meaning is quite positive.

As you know, English has lots of adjectives, and today I've talked about just a few words that connect with happiness. There are, of course, many other adjectives, and many of these adjectives have different levels, different strengths. So on goldforestacademy.com, on the website, there is a blog post which talks about these happiness adjectives, some temperature adjectives, like hot and cold, pleasant, icy, chilly, some different temperature adjectives for discussing the weather, and some adjectives connected with tiredness about feeling tired or awake. On this blog post, I talk about the different adjectives and some example sentences and questions and how you can use them in natural ways, using clear and native English. So if you're interested in learning some more adjectives, I suggest that you go and check out the website. That's on the blogpost on goldforestacademy.com.

All right. Well, I hope that today's podcast was helpful for you and I hope you will join me in the next episode. Thank you very much. Goodbye.