【完整版讲义音频】

Hello everyone, this is Alison from HJ English.
This Episode will be discussing your work on the phrase "keep my fingers crossed".

You had some great ideas, so I wanted to share some of the best examples. They include:
"I don't know if I'll get the scholarship, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed."
"I don't know if I'll find a good boyfriend, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed."
"We must keep our fingers crossed that the weather will stay nice for tomorrow."

First, let's talk about topics. "Keeping your fingers crossed" can be used when talking about specific events, your performance on a specific task, or a specific outcome of a situation. Basically, we keep our fingers crossed for very specific things. For example, it would be very confusing if I said "I'm moving to a new city, and I'm keeping my fingers crossed," because you don't know what I'm keeping my fingers crossed for. Instead, it makes sense to say, "I'm moving to a new city and keeping my fingers crossed that I can find a nice apartment".
Inappropriate topics, or things you should not use the phrase for, include things like death, serious illnesses and other "life-and-death" situations.

Many of you brought up an interesting question, and that is the difference between faith and luck.
Keeping your fingers crossed is a way of giving yourself good luck. However, luck is very different from faith in the West. Faith can either be about believing in God or believing in oneself. If you have faith in God, it means you believe he will answer your prayer. If you have faith in yourself, it means you believe you have the skills you need to succeed. When you use the phrase "crossing my fingers", it means that you may have the skills, but you believe you still need a little luck. So a person wanting a little luck has less confidence than someone who has faith in themselves. I hope that makes sense.

Finally, the sentence about crossing your fingers for nice weather tomorrow is a good example of how we can also cross our fingers for things that we can't control, like the weather. Another good example is the sentence:
"He did a lousy job in the college entrance exam and didn't know whether he would get admitted. But he'd been keeping his fingers crossed."
The person in the sentence already completed the exam, so now he has no control over his score.
So we can cross our fingers for things that we can control and things that we can't control.

I hope that gives you a better understanding of the phrase. Now see if you can use it today!