Family, Home and Daily Routine: Your First 100 Words

These are the words that come up first in almost every conversation, class and exam at A1. Learn them as small groups, not as one long list.

Family

• Parents: mother / mum, father / dad
• Children: son, daughter, child (plural: children)
• Same generation: brother, sister
• Wider: grandmother, grandfather, aunt, uncle, cousin
• Partners: husband, wife, partner

I have one brother and two sisters. My parents live in Turin.

Careful: people is the plural of person, and children of child — neither adds -s.

Describing the family you have

• I'm an only child. (no brothers or sisters)
• I'm married / single / divorced.
• my older brother · my younger sister (not "more old")
• step- for a new parent's family: stepmother, stepbrother
• -in-law for your partner's family: mother-in-law, brother-in-law

Note grandparents covers both, and my parents' house needs the apostrophe after the s.

Rooms and things at home

Room	Things in it
kitchen	fridge, cooker, table
bedroom	bed, wardrobe, lamp
bathroom	shower, mirror, towel
living room	sofa, TV, window

There is a sofa in the living room.

Two words for where you live: a house stands on its own, a flat (US: apartment) is inside a larger building. Other useful ones: upstairs, downstairs, garden, balcony, front door, stairs, ground floor.

A daily routine

The verbs of an ordinary day, in order — all of them present simple when you describe a normal day:

wake up → get up → have a shower → get dressed → have breakfast → go to work / go to school → have lunch → come home → have dinner → go to bed

Two patterns worth noticing:

• have covers meals and washing: have breakfast, have lunch, have a shower. Not make breakfast when you mean eating it.
• get up and wake up are different: you wake up (open your eyes), then get up (leave the bed).

A few more that fill out a real day: brush my teeth, get ready, catch the bus, do my homework, watch TV, tidy up, do the washing-up, take the dog out, fall asleep.

Have, do or make?

Three verbs cover most household actions, and English assigns them by habit rather than logic:

have	do	make
a shower, breakfast, a break	the washing-up, the shopping, homework	the bed, dinner, a cup of tea, a mess

Note the pair: you make dinner (cook it) and then have dinner (eat it).

Saying when

• every day / every morning
• at seven o'clock — with clock times
• in the morning / afternoon / evening
• at night (not in the night)

I get up at half past six in the morning every day.

Add first, then, after that and you can order a whole day: First I have a shower, then I have breakfast.

Learn these as phrases, not words. Have a shower, catch the bus, go to bed — none of them is predictable from the individual words, and all of them come out wrong if you translate the verb on its own. Store the whole chunk.

Putting it together

I live in a small flat with my sister. There are two bedrooms and a kitchen. I wake up at seven, have a shower, and go to work at eight.

Family + home + routine + times: four groups, one paragraph you can now produce.

Meeting someone new

A: Do you live near here?

B: Quite near — I share a flat with my sister. Do you have any brothers or sisters?

A: No, I'm an only child. What time do you start work?

B: Nine, but I get up at six. I like a slow morning.

Family, home, routine and times — the same four groups, in a real conversation.

Test yourself

The quiz below checks the plurals, the have pattern and the time prepositions.