Learn English Vocabulary: Cleaning your house

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Let's get to work!

Hey everyone, I'm Alex, thanks for clicking and welcome to this lesson on cleaning product

So today, I'm going to take you through different rooms in the house and talk about different

cleaning products, some hygiene products that you can find in the different places around

And in the second part of this video, I will talk about some general all-purpose cleaning

products that you can use in most rooms in your house, or all of them.

So first, let's start off in the bathroom, which is where most of us start off in the

morning after, you know, waking up.

So first, we have - you go to the sink and you wash your hands with some soap.

I didn't have soap with me, so I drew a bar of soap for you guys.

And as you can see, this is a bar of soap, really.

It's beautiful, right?

So, you wash your hands with a bar of soap.

You can also use this right here.

This is hand soap.

I'm not going to put any on my hands right now, but you - this is also called liquid

soap or hand soap.

So, you can use that to wash your hands as well.

I didn't bring this with me today, but you can also use facial soap, specific soap, liquid

soap for your face.

To wash your face in the morning, in the evening or whenever you feel like it.

I really like this, this little leaning thing I've got going here.

Let's keep going with that.

So, facial soap, yeah.

And then, when you're taking a shower or if you're in the bath and you want to wash your

hair, wash your scalp, which is the skin, you know, around your head here, you wash

your hair with shampoo.

And then, to make your hair nice and smooth like a horse, like a horse, like a horse's

mane or a lion's mane, you use conditioner, right?

So, first, shampoo to clean the scalp, clean your hair.

And then to make it nice and smooth, like a horse's mane, you can use conditioner.

If you have dandruff, which is when the skin on your scalp is dry and you have flakes,

right, in your hair?

Like, little, small flakes?

You can use dandruff shampoo as well.

If you want to clean your toilet, right?

You just need toilet bowl cleaner.

I don't have any with me here today.

I do have some all-purpose stuff which is - oh, that's a stain remover, that's something

But basically, you know, you put it around the bowl and it has chemicals and it cleans

your toilet and every other thing that you have that you put in your toilet.

So, there is a toilet bowl plunger.

You can also get a drain plunger.

So, this is what you use when there's something stuck, you know, in the drain in your sink,

in the kitchen, the bathroom, the bathtub or the shower.

And you need to just push it back down.

Maybe it's hair, maybe it's something else.

Or, in your toilet, you can get a toilet bowl plunger as well, to push stuff down.

Next, let's go to the laundry room.

And in the laundry room, when you want to wash your clothes, you start with detergent.

I do not advertise any specific brands in this video.

Well, I guess I am advertising them, but I do not necessarily agree with them.

So, that is laundry detergent, which you use to clean your clothes with in your laundry

Also, with laundry detergent, you can put fabric softener, which makes the clothes nice

and soft, right, along with the detergent.

Once the clothes are washed and you put them from the washing machine into the dryer, okay?

And in the dryer, you can put dryer sheets, which take the static off of the clothes.

So, if you just, you know, just take them out and dry them in the dryer without dryer

sheets, you will take your clothes out and they'll be stuck together with static.

You can just hang your clothes outside as well.

That's what my mom does, and it works perfectly fine, so that's it.

Next, hamper and a laundry basket.

So, I have a laundry basket right here.

Typically, the difference between a hamper and a laundry basket is not that big.

But a hamper you use to put the dirty clothes in.

I guess they do have, like, specialized hampers that are made from different materials that

are fully covered and you can cover the dirty clothes.

But think of a hamper as a basket, sometimes a covered basket, a vertical basket where

you throw your dirty clothes.

And then you use the laundry basket when your clothes are nice and dry and you fold them

and you put them in the laundry basket and put them back in your closet and your drawers.

Let's move over here to the kitchen.

Can you guys see all the words here?

Nothing's blocked?

So, we have dish soap.

What do I have here?

Where's that dish soap?

I knew I had dish soap in here.

Where's the dish soap?

Duh duh duh duh duh... here it is!

So, you have your dish soap, which you use in conjunction with a sponge or a scrub pad

or a soap sponge or a dish sponge.

You can call this any number of things, okay?

Sometimes, I just say "Where's the dish sponge?

Where is the soap sponge?

Where is the scrub pad?

The soap sponge?"

The sponge, okay?

So, this is a sponge.

I have a small one and I have a big one for the larger messes in the house, okay?

So, you have your dish soap and you have your dish sponges here, or scrub pads, soap sponges,

dish sponges, etc.

This is all-purpose.

You can use this in a variety of scenarios, a variety of situations.

You want to be a matador or if you want to wipe down things in your house, get them nice

and clean, you use a cloth or a hand cloth or a towel cloth or a cloth towel; any number

of names, okay?

So, in general, this is a piece of cloth, okay, or a hand cloth.

And finally, we have a hand towel.

This one is very smelly, because it hasn't been washed in a long time, and I'm going

to wash my hands right after I use it.

So, this is a hand towel.

Usually, you keep this in your kitchen when you need to dry your hands very quickly after,

you know, washing the dishes or cleaning something like a piece of fruit or something.

So, that is a hand towel, alright.

And one more that I didn't put up here, but I guess you can use it with all-purpose, typically

found in your kitchen.

This is a roll of paper towels.

So, these are called paper towels.

Some people call them kitchen towels, which I disagree with, because I think paper towel

fits so much better.

Kitchen towel sounds like it could be anything.

This is a kitchen towel.

This is - a cloth, but you could call it a kitchen towel.

Paper towels, just remember that name.

I'm going to go wash my hands because that towel was disgusting, and I'll be right back

with some more all-purpose cleaners.

Ah, fresh like a baby boy born in spring.

Alright, next we have general/all-purpose cleaning products.

So here, we have our good friend the paper towel, or paper towels, plural, that you can

use in many situations.

Spills in the kitchen or in the living room or your gym - jam?

Yeah, if your friend like, you know, eats a jam sandwich and gets some jam on the couch

because they're eating in the living room like an animal.

You can use some paper towels to wash that off.

But you probably need some all-purpose cleaner to help finish the job.

So here, I got this from my mom's house.

I guess some all-purpose cleaners come in a bottle like this, with a cap on top.

But most of them that I've seen usually come in a spray bottle, like this, like I said.

So, this one is an all-purpose bathroom cleaner, but you can get all-purpose cleaners for all

areas of the house.

Some are safer than others and are made with more environmentally friendly ingredients,

whereas some are just loaded with chemicals that will slowly kill us.

That's life, right, every day.

So next, we have window cleaner.

And there is one brand that has really just cornered the market on window cleaners, so

much so that we just call it "Windex".

Say, "Hey, do you have any Windex?" and people understand automatically, you need window

Just like in the movie "My Big Fat Greek Wedding", where the - is it the mother or the grandmother?

I think it's the mother - she just puts Windex on everything.

It's like "Oh, I cut myself!"

"Put some Windex on it."

Let's see if it works.

That's about it, okay.

Next, we have disinfectant.

So, a lot of cleaning products, you know, they claim to be disinfectants.

They kill bacteria and viruses around your kitchen, around your house.

You know, stuff like salmonella or e-coli, so these are different bacteria that you can

kill with disinfectant products.

A natural disinfectant is vinegar, which can kill many types of bacteria.

So, I brought some, you know, some white vinegar from home here.

Usually you can just mix that with some, maybe even some dish soap, and you can clean almost

anything with it, so it's pretty good.

Next, what do we have?

Tissues or Kleenex, yeah.

So, if you have a small spill on a table somewhere, you can just grab a small tissue from the

tissue box, and this is a situation like Windex, where one company has dominated the market

so much that we just call, you know, the product, the tissue, by the corporate name Kleenex.

Does anyone have a Kleenex?

Does anyone have a tissue?

Next, we have vacuum cleaners.

So, you use these, vroom, to clean the floors, the carpets in your home.

In the UK, the brand Hoover, again, has dominated the vacuum cleaner so much that people use

Hoover like a verb in the UK.

So, I need to Hoover the living room.

Or, have you seen the Hoover?

Where is the Hoover?

Where is the vacuum cleaner?

You can have cloth wipes or disinfectant wipes.

Before I mention, you know, this is a cloth.

This can be considered a cloth wipe as well.

Or you also have disinfectant - why did I write "disinfect..." yes, okay, this should

It looks like "disinfect-ant", like you should disinfect an ant because of the space, but

it's one word, one word.

So next, Swiffer.

Another example where this company, Swiffer, created this product and everyone is using

it, or so many people are using it that we just say, "Hey, where's the Swiffer?" or "I

need to use the Swiffer in the living room", okay?

Looks pretty cool.

I have one of these.

I don't use it often.

Normally, I stick to brooms and dustpans.

So, we'll talk about those in a moment.

So, dustpan and broom.

You've got your dustpan right here for dust and other things that are dirty.

And you have your broom.

This one's kind of clean, so I feel okay doing this, although I will wash my hands again

right after this video.

So, you have your broom and your dustpan.

It's kind of cool.

I feel powerful holding this, like I want to clean.

Now the feeling has passed.

I'm just going to... there we go, good.

Okay so, baking soda.

I love baking soda.

I have some - I don't mind saying the brand.

Arm and Hammer baking soda, for that real, real tough smell collecting product.

So, normally, you know, you can do a lot of things with baking soda.

Number one: you can put it in your refrigerator if you want to collect all the bad smells

inside this little box here.

The baking soda attracts terrible smells.

If you have a bad spill on your carpet or if you have a child that pees the bed at night,

you can, you know, put some baking soda on it to absorb and collect liquids and smells.

So, baking soda is amazing.

Next, what do we have?

Rubber gloves, right.

When you are doing all of that cleaning with those terrible chemicals and you don't want

your hands to get red and irritated, you need a pair of rubber gloves.

Now I feel powerful.

I'm going to keep this on.

And what would rubber gloves be without their friends, goggles?

Here, we have some goggles.

I hope they don't reflect too much in the camera.

So, when you are cleaning the bathroom and you're using some really high chemical products,

which is not great for the environment, but what's more important?

Having a clean toilet or clean air?

Don't answer that question, it's a terrible question.

So, rubber gloves, googles, trash cans.

Or you can say, you know, a trash bin or the bin or the most common way I say it is "the

Where's the garbage?

I don't mean, like, the actually dirty stuff that you put in the garbage can or the trash

I literally mean the can, the bin.

So, maybe that's specific to me and a couple of my friends, but I say, "Hey, where's the

garbage?", or, "Where's the bin", or, "Where's the trash can", alright?

I have a brush right here.

Right, so you can use this for many - there's a hair, many hairs - you can use this for

many purposes, many things.

Brushing the floor - well, pretty much the floor, right?

I guess you can use it on top of the kitchen counter as well, or any other area you feel

needs a good scrub or a good brush.

Next, we have a mop and bucket.

So, think of a mop as like a really wet broom.

You can see it in the picture here.

That's right, I'm making the editing team work to put a picture right here.

Mop and the bucket.

Now, you know all these amazing words.

All these very common household cleaning product words.

So, you are ready to go out and clean your room, clean your friend's room, clean your

house, clean your friend's house, help everyone in your neighborhood.

Hopefully, you feel a lot more confident, a lot more comfortable with the vocabulary

we have learned in this video.

And now, you'll be able to understand more when you watch films, when you watch TV shows,

when you hear conversations out in the street or when you even go shopping for these products.

You will know what they're called.

And if you want to test your understanding of a lot of the vocabulary we've covered today,

as always, you can check out the quiz on www.engvid.com . While you're there, please support us and

consider making a financial donation to www.engvid.com . And if you want to support me and check

out what I'm doing, don't forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel.

Click that bell and check me out on Facebook and on Twitter, where you can keep in touch

with me, comment, we can have a little conversation and that's basically it, guys.

Well, I'm going to go clean some stuff.

No...

I don't think I'm going to do that.

I'm going to say I'm going to do it though, because it makes me sound responsible, which

I kind of am but kind of am not.

Until next time, thanks for clicking and stay clean.