Want to study this episode as a lesson on LingQ? Give it a try!

Mark: Hi everyone.

Here we are again for EnglishLingQ.

Mark here with Steve.

Steve: Hello there. Hello everyone.

Mark: We thought today we would maybe talk a little bit about the U.S.

Open tennis that’s been on.

Steve: Well, I know.

Mark: Well, I pointed out to you yesterday that incident with Serena Williams where she was berating the line judge.

I guess nobody knows exactly what she said or maybe they do, but, at any rate, she basically got penalized out of the match.

I mean it was over essentially anyway, which is probably why she was yelling at the line person in the first place.

Steve: Well, I mean I guess it’s a little bit intimidating when you’ve got someone like Serena Williams, who’s a big star; obviously, a very powerful figure in the tennis world.

Mark: Right.

Steve: You’re a lowly line judge.

Mark: Right.

Steve: You call her, you know, to the best of your ability.

Mark: Because that’s your job to do that.

Steve: That’s your job.

She comes over and not only wags a finger at you, waves her racket at you.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: That would be…I mean if this was just some junior tennis player you wouldn’t worry.

Mark: Right.

Steve: But I think that’s a bit unfair on Serena’s part.

Mark: Especially in the tennis world where that’s just not done.

Steve: Right.

Mark: I mean there may be a bit of arguing, but you’re certainly not…

Steve: Although you were saying that Federer was also heard to speak a profanity.

I mean the problem is that these tennis players are multimillionaires and these line judges or umpires probably don’t make very much money.

And so the tennis players think that they should be in charge and what right has the judge to rule one way or the other, you know?

Mark: I don’t know if that’s necessarily the issue.

I mean I guess, presumably, they think the umpire made the wrong call.

Steve: Right.

Mark: I mean it’s not just in tennis. That happens in every sport.

Steve: I know.

Mark: I mean in hockey the players yell at the referees all the time.

Steve: Right, but part of that’s accepted there.

It’s kind of part of…

Mark: That’s what I mean, it’s more acceptable.

Steve: Yeah.

Mark: Now, of course, they can’t threaten the referee.

Steve: Right.

Mark: I mean at a certain point the ref will kick them out of the game.

Steve: I mean in hockey, if a hockey player waved… Like Serena Williams, now we know Serena Williams, even though she is very big and strong looking, she’s actually quite a mild personality, apparently.

Mark: Right.

Steve: So, I mean the little line judge was in no danger.

Mark: No.

Steve: But in hockey if a player were to wave his stick in a menacing way…

Mark: Oh, he’d be in big trouble.

Steve: He’d be in big trouble.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: Now she waved her tennis racket at this judge.

Mark: Oh, I know. I mean no matter what she said, just her actions alone.

Steve: Right.

Mark: I mean that was ridiculous.

Steve: Right.

Mark: You can’t threaten an umpire like that.

Steve: Right.

Mark: I mean supposedly she said, ‘Call that again and I’ll shove this ball down your throat’ or words to that effect.

Steve: Which, of course, she didn’t mean, but a line judge doesn’t know that.

Mark: Right. Well, yeah, you can’t.

I mean even in hockey guys might complain, ‘I didn’t do that.

How can you call that?’

and whatever, but if you say to the ref, ‘Call that again and I’ll do something to you’, yeah, you’re going to get in big trouble.

Steve: Big trouble. You’d be suspended.

Mark: Yeah, for sure you would.

Steve: And even if there’s some question about what it was that she actually said, her body language was not very friendly.

Mark: Exactly.

Steve: Waving a racket at this poor little line judge, who was probably half Serena’s weight.

Mark: Well, yeah, and especially in tennis where that just doesn’t happen.

Steve: No.

Mark: It’s supposed to be a little more gentlemanly.

Steve: Well, I know.

Mark: I mean I know that even when I was playing rugby in high school you weren’t allowed to talk to the referees at all.

And you see that in professional rugby, like they don’t get away with saying anything to the umpires.

Steve: No.

Mark: I don’t know what it’s like in soccer, but it’s probably fairly similar.

Steve: One thing that’s true in hockey is that the hockey referees have more attitude.

Like you know if you give lip to a referee he’s going to call another penalty on your team, like they have that kind of latitude.

Mark: Yeah, they do.

Steve: They’ll get back at you. But I don’t know, everything in tennis is much more gentle.

Mark: Right.

Steve: But we have a strange world where a small number of people – tennis players, soccer players, hockey players, golfers – can make this unbelievable amount of money because they’re skilled in this sport.

Mark: Right.

Steve: It’s pretty hard to be making, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars.

And, of course, they’re under some pressure and stress and they’ve got to always be in their best condition.

I mean you can’t have a bad day.

Mark: No.

Steve: I ate too much last night.

I don’t feel like playing today.

Mark: Right.

Steve: So there’s a lot of pressure on those people.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: And they have all this money and they must really think a lot of themselves.

Mark: Oh, for sure. I mean how can you not?

Steve: Yeah.

Mark: Everybody is fawning all over you all day long.

Steve: I know. I mean it’s a strange world.

Those people and then you’ve got these bankers making these obscene amounts of money.

There’s something wrong there.

Mark: Right. Speaking of those types of people…

Steve: Yeah?

Mark: …one of the other things we were going to talk about is the concert.

Steve: Oh, go ahead, yes.

Mark: The outdoor concert here in West Vancouver that was held on Saturday night…

Steve: Right.

Mark: …this past Saturday down at the local park.

I guess it was organized by Sarah McLachlan, who’s a local singer; quite a famous singer, at least here.

I don’t really know, I think she’s quite well known internationally.

Steve: Right. I think she’s quite well known internationally.

Mark: Yeah.

At any rate, she lives in West Vancouver and she hosted this concert for charity, I guess, and invited Sheryl Crow and Neil Young who, I guess, donated their time to put on this concert and all the proceeds will go to her charity.

Which, I must say, I don’t really know what it is, but I think it has something to do with kids and music.

Steve: Okay.

Mark: At any rate, I mean that was a great event anyway locally, fun thing to do.

We’ve never had anything like that, any big name concert here.

You know they’re normally in downtown Vancouver.

Steve: Right.

Mark: Well, they’re normally downtown or out at the university, so it was kind of a neat event.

Steve: You know I was discussing that with my wife.

There’s quite a few famous singers from Vancouver.

Bublé…what’s his first name?

Mark: Michael Bublé.

Steve: Michael Bublé, Diana Krall…

Mark: Right.

Steve: …who’s very good.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: Sarah McLachlan, Brian Adams.

I don’t know of any others, but…

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: I mean there are others.

Oh, what’s her name, Nelly Furtado?

Mark: Oh, yeah.

Steve: She’s quite well known.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: I mean back East you’ve got Shania Twain…

Mark: Right.

Steve: …and Avril Lavigne.

I’ve never even heard them.

I wouldn’t know.

I just see those names.

Mark: Right.

Steve: I don’t know who these people are, but Celine Dion.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: Yeah, there’s quite a few Canadian singers…

Mark: Right.

Steve: …which is kind of interesting. Not that I would ever go to a concert.

Mark: No.

I mean it was mostly just neat to be outside.

It was a nice evening and beautiful sunset partway through the show.

And, yeah, it was just a neat thing to do.

It was neat to be able to walk there.

You know walk there and walk home.

Steve: You know we’ve had great weather, too.

I was out on the water in my canoe.

I can’t go in the kayak now because with my shoulder I can’t raise my shoulder the other side, but I can at least go out and paddle.

Mark: Right.

Steve: And it was spectacular.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: I took some pictures, in fact, that I’m going to put up on my blog.

Wonderful weather we’re having.

I don’t know how long it will last, but…

Mark: Well, I mean this has probably been one of our best summers, if not the best summer that most people can remember, so…

Steve: Yeah.

Mark: After what was probably one of the colder winters that most people can remember. Yeah.

Steve: So, yeah, what else should we talk about?

We had music.

We had a little bit about sports.

How about…I guess we’re continuing to wait.

You know we seem to be getting more good news than bad news with regard to the world economy and yet there is this sense that sort of the distortions or the vulnerability of the world to, you know, derivative trading and the fact that the world is now so interconnected that if there’s one problem anywhere it just permeates the system.

Mark: Right.

Steve: So there continues to be this sort of sense of uncertainty over the future.

Mark: I mean I think a big part of it is that a lot of people just simply don’t understand all the machinations.

Steve: Is there anyone who does?

Mark: I don’t know!

Steve: I mean when you have these, you know, obviously top experts all disagreeing with each other.

Mark: Right.

Steve: There’s no consensus.

Mark: No, not at all.

Steve: No. Who knows?

Mark: I mean you can’t just blame the bankers, though.

I mean they took advantage of the market conditions, but I think a lot of it was caused by the incentives in the U.S.

to try to get more lower-income people into their homes.

Steve: Oh, right.

Mark: And you have that whole issue…

Steve: Oh, that’s going back to the origins of the problem, but there is all this derivative trading.

Mark: Right.

Steve: Many talk about that a lot of the high price for oil was driven by derivative trading.

And then they talk about the Chinese government or some other institutions that had a lot of oil, you know, hedge funds or something that are now worth nothing or they had to pay up on their hedges and they were going to renege on it.

That sort of disappeared.

Every so often you see these articles, you know: “The Secret that No One Wants to Tell You.”

Mark: Right.

Steve: You know?

And then, of course, it sort of disappears.

The great black cloud that was supposed to cause all this damage just evaporates.

Mark: Right, yeah.

Steve: It’s like there’s a guy in Russia, who’s one of their leading, you know, top bestselling book, had predicted 10 years ago that in the year 2009 the United States was going to basically be in a civil war and would break up into five regions.

And that the Pacific region would be then dominated by China, Alaska would go to Russia, the Midwest would go to Canada or would be dominated by Canada, the East Coast would then be closer to Europe and the Southwest to Mexico and there was going to be a civil war.

He’s running out of time.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: We’re nearing the end of 2009.

Mark: Some pretty drastic things have to start to happen.

Steve: I know.

Mark: It’s funny that this guy’s theories didn’t spread further.

Is this some kook? How did you hear about him?

Steve: Because…

Mark: On your Russian radio station, of course.

Steve: On my Russian radio station, but it’s a bestseller and he’s taken seriously.

He was written up in the Wall Street Journal.

Mark: Really.

Steve: He’s mainstream.

Anyway, on the economy, as well, there are these stories about the hidden credit crunch that’s coming.

I don’t understand all that stuff.

Mark: Well, I mean fundamentally, all this hedging and derivative trading and so forth…I mean it didn’t just start happening recently.

Steve: No.

Mark: I mean the factor that caused the problems now is the low-income mortgage issue.

Steve: Mortgages, yeah. But it seems to be more of the…

Mark: That’s what caused the meltdown…

Steve: Right.

Mark: …and then the rest of this stuff.

I mean the more you try…I don’t understand it very well, but the more you try and regulate this stuff — bring in more rules on what you can and can’t do — maybe the net effect is more negative because it prevents people from being inventive, from creating new instruments.

I mean, theoretically, the financial industry is there to help business access capital.

Steve: Well I’ve always felt, you know, when I studied Economics in school, which is a long, long time ago, that when you consider that the banks, which finance the economy, they’re only required to have some small percentage, you know, available against the eventuality that everybody they lent their money out to is going to come back and ask for it.

Mark: Right.

Steve: So you take and I take my money and I put it in the bank and they just lend it out.

Mark: Right.

Steve: And they only have to keep like five percent or some very small number…

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: …which, of course, fuels expansion and activity and business activity and job creation and all those good things.

Mark: Right.

Steve: But it always struck me as a bit of a…you know, like, you know, you’re relying on everything working out properly.

Mark: Right.

Steve: Because people, once they lose that confidence, they all start saying I want my money.

Mark: Well, yeah. It’s like a stampede, right?

Steve: Like a stampede, but it works, it works.

I mean those economies where that isn’t the case I mean, yeah.

Presumably in Afghanistan everybody hoards their money.

Or in Zambia, no, they don’t hoard it they take it out of the country.

Mark: Right.

Steve: So…

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: Who knows?

Mark: Who knows? Certainly we don’t.

Steve: We don’t.

But (A) I’m an optimist by nature and, second of all, I see all the positive things.

Like we have new sectors in the economy, new products, and many of these products don’t even require natural resources, like games, you know, for computers.

So we have new products.

We have new types of activity.

We have all the activity now surrounding new forms of energy and the solar…what have they got now?

They’ve got these concentrated solar power stations, which people are working on.

You have the continued growth in the Chinese economy, in the Indian economy, in the Brazilian economy and they talk about the Russians more resource-based, but still there’s growth there.

And they talk about the Big Four, the BRIC, but also in the smaller, you know, developing countries.

So the economic pie is continuing to get bigger.

It used to be only North America.

Even after the war Europe was in a shambles sort of thing.

And so I can’t help but believe that our overall economic pie is getting bigger and therefore, you know…and people are better educated.

And so I think we’ll have our hiccups, but the alternative, as you say, is not to reintroduce some kind of socialized planning because we know that that doesn’t work.

Mark: Right.

Steve: We know that that doesn’t.

Some very bad decisions are made, you know?

Mark: I mean that’s the way of the world, the sort of overexpansion, boom-bust cycle.

Steve: I know.

Mark: But the trend is continually upwards and to try and do something more controlled has never been shown to work very effectively.

Steve: Well and people are always going on about how, you know, nowadays globalization, it’s no good.

You know, get us back to the “good old days”.

Well, which good old days?

I mean people live longer today.

They’re healthier today in so many different ways.

I’ve been reading this book about the history of alcohol and drinking.

I mean in some societies, I mean (A) lots of people were pretty drunk most of the time.

They couldn’t drink the water because it was unhealthy.

People died.

You know the average person died at age 35.

I mean, yeah, things are much better today.

They’re not perfect and there’s great inequality and there’s all kinds of problems, but, overall, I don’t think going backwards…

Mark: No.

Steve: …is the answer.

Mark: I mean people always look back with rose-colored glasses.

They don’t quite remember.

Steve: Yeah. And have every generation.

Mark: And have always done so, yeah.

Steve: So the caveman must have been quite an outstanding individual.

Mark: That’s for sure.

Anyway, that’s going to do us for today.

Steve: Okay, alright.

Mark: And we’ll talk to you all again next time.

Steve: Remember to stay optimistic.

Study this episode and any others from the LingQ English Podcast on LingQ! Check it out.

Steve: Hello. Hello Mark.

Mark: Hi Steve.

Steve: Hello out there.

It’s time for another EnglishLingQ Podcast.

You know we have had some questions.

We’ve also had people suggest that we should have a female voice, so we are going to try to find one.

In the meantime, you’ll have to deal with Mark and Steve.

Mark: Some people have difficulty telling our two voices apart, apparently.

Steve: That’s right.

Well, which I can understand.

Especially if it’s not in your own language, I can see that as a problem.

Mark: For sure.

Steve: We could try one of us doing a female impersonation, but we won’t do that, no.

Mark: Maybe not today, we’ll save that.

Steve: Not today, we’ll save that.

Some of the questions we’ve had…one question was…I was asked the question, “Do your sons speak a lot of languages?” Because I speak quite a few languages, my wife speaks quite a few languages.

“Did your sons learn a lot of languages as children and how did you manage to do that?”

So my normal answer is that my older son, Eric, essentially speaks English and stumbles around in French.

And Mark for the longest time was in the same situation and now, as a result of having lived in various countries in Europe and in Japan, he does speak four or five languages, so maybe I should ask Mark.

How did your parents try to get you to learn languages and what was the reaction of you and your brother?

Mark: Well, I guess we weren’t that interested in learning languages as kids.

All of our friends spoke English and I don’t think we really saw the point of learning other languages.

We spoke English at home.

Our friends spoke English.

We spoke English at school and when we were encouraged to learn other languages, which we didn’t want to do because we would rather do other things, I think we didn’t go for it.

Steve: Do you remember the time we were traveling in France and I had the cassette playing the French lessons as we drove around the French countryside?

Mark: I remember.

Steve: Was that an effective measure?

Mark: That had a big impact.

I don’t know, I guess it was just too artificial.

Plus, what we were listening to wasn’t interesting.

You have to be…if you’re not motivated you’re just not going to learn.

We weren’t motivated, we didn’t particularly want to learn and I guess we didn’t see the point.

Steve: Now, when you found yourself…I guess the first foreign country you lived in as a hockey player — when you were a professional hockey player — was Italy.

Were you then motivated to learn Italian?

Mark: Oh, absolutely.

So, all of a sudden, there I was in Italy and, hey, it’d be nice to speak to everybody.

You know, most places you go to you can more or less get by speaking English and using hand gestures, but you get a lot more out of it if you can speak to the locals.

I was that way everywhere I went.

I tried to learn as much as I could of the language and tried to speak it because you just get a lot more out of the experience.

So, at that point, yeah, then I started trying to learn Italian.

And I still remember being surprised, actually, in that little town that I was in.

There was a market there — this is right after I got there and I knew essentially no Italian — and I was at the market trying to talk to these guys selling stuff and, actually, hardly any of them spoke any English at all.

I was surprised that they spoke German and they spoke French, but no English, which surprised me.

Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was, thinking a common second language for most people might be English.

Anyway, what French I did have came in handy then and certainly there are similarities with Italian.

Steve: The German, of course, could come from the fact you were in an area that was close to the German-speaking part of Italy.

You’re just below the Alto Adige or South Tyrol, so, yeah.

Mark: Right. I mean, I think, absolutely.

That’s because they got tourists…

Steve: Right.

Mark: …from Germany and probably from France.

Steve: That too, yeah.

Mark: So those are the languages they’re going to learn.

I don’t think they got too many English-speaking people in that area visiting, so they didn’t learn this language.

Steve: And then for three years you played in German-speaking countries, Austria and Switzerland.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: So I guess your German is better than your Italian?

Mark: It is now, yeah.

Steve: Yeah.

Mark: Yeah, for sure.

I mean it’s been a long time since I was in Italy and so… At the time I could get by in Italian.

I wouldn’t say I spoke it well, but I could get by and the French helped a lot.

When I first went to Austria that was different because I just remember having the feeling when I first got there going to a store and I didn’t know…essentially, I didn’t know one German word.

Not one, I don’t think, I mean maybe dunka.

I knew none.

I just remember standing there.

I hadn’t really focused on it because it kind of happened in a hurry and all of a sudden there I was in Austria and I go to speak to someone and wow, I don’t know anything.

Even in Italy it felt like a few more words.

Maybe because I had a little more warning and I had studied a little bit before I went there, but I remember that experience.

Steve: Now a lot of parents, of course, want their children to learn languages, either because they think it’s a good thing for them to do for their education.

Parents of children, you know, who live in non-speaking English countries want their kids to learn English.

There’s a bit of a fad now in North America for parents to get to learn Mandarin Chinese, in the U.S.

I guess Spanish.

Then you have this issue of immigrants who want their kids to learn, you know, the ancestral language, so you have these Chinese kids or Japanese kids that are sent to Chinese school on Saturday, which they don’t like.

What should parents do, in your opinion, to get their kids to learn some of these languages?

Mark: Yeah, I don’t really know.

I know that it seems like quite a few of my kids’ friends…there seem to be quite a few that have a Japanese parent and they all get sent to Japanese school on Saturday.

And I feel bad for those kids because I mean that’s got to be the last thing you want to do on a Saturday.

And I think, in the long run, that’s got to build up a little bit of resentment towards Japanese, you know?

Steve: Right.

Mark: And how much do they really learn?

We lived in Japan when I was a kid and we had Japanese class in school.

It was an English international school, but I didn’t learn much.

We had Japanese a few times a week or whatever it was, so once a week Japanese school.

I don’t know.

I don’t know what they learn there, but it probably doesn’t amount… If they ever got interested and went to Japan for a month they’d probably pick up more.

Steve: Well that’s always been my theory.

That rather than building up resentment or resistance… I say that now, that was not my approach when I was a parent, but, you know, if they’re young enough and you can give them interesting things to do.

At age four, five, six, seven kids don’t care.

Mark: Right.

Steve: You know your three children had French Immersion, they’re quite happy.

Everything happens in French.

That doesn’t bother them.

Mark: No.

Steve: So I think if you can get them to do things early enough when they don’t really resist then later on perhaps more of them might develop an interest and, as you say, once they have an interest then it’s very quick, like three months, six months, whatever.

Go to Japan, go to Germany, whatever, France, you learn it right away.

It’s not difficult.

If a person is motivated it’s not difficult, so.

But, yeah, we were not very successful.

We tried a number of different things.

Mark: Yeah.

I don’t know why, particularly, but I guess fundamentally if there’s something else you’d rather be doing you’re not going to… Whereas, I mean you talk about my kids at school, well they have to go to school anyway, so the school takes place in French.

Steve: Right.

Mark: That’s just how it is.

Steve: You know I think that even…your kids are in French Immersion, but even kids that aren’t in French Immersion I think they should start – and I’ve said this on my blog – languages in grade one and it should consist purely and simply of listening and reading and watching movies with no requirement to speak the language whatsoever.

Mark: And it’d be different if…like they’re in school anyway.

Steve: Right.

Mark: So if they’re not studying a language then they’re studying History or they’re doing some other…whatever.

Steve: Yeah.

Mark: So they’re there anyway and if it’s something fun and you just listen and it’s easy to do they can start to enjoy that.

It’s a little bit different if you’re choosing between studying French or running around outside with your friends.

Steve: Right.

But, no, my point is, though, that they start them early and then they test them, okay?

Mark: Right.

Steve: You know your child got C in French or your child got A in French.

And we know that all those children in the Canadian system in grade two, three, four, five, six got A in French, in grade 12 when they graduate they can’t speak French.

Mark: Right.

Steve: So does it really matter whether they got an A or a C in grade two?

Mark: Right.

Steve: Anyway.

But, so that was one subject, one question we had.

Another question we had was…

Mark: Well how about you when you were a kid?

Steve: Yeah, my parents tried to get us to speak French.

Okay, kids, now we’re going to speak French around the table, you know?

We’d say three things about the “pommes de terre” and that was it.

We’d switch back to English because you couldn’t do it.

Mark: No.

Steve: And it was only at the age of 16 when I got turned on.

That once motivated then you can learn in a hurry.

Mark: So your parents spoke French?

Steve: They knew how to speak French.

Mark: Right.

Steve: But, you know, parents have these moments.

Mark: Right.

Steve: Okay, now we’re going to do this.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: So, okay, now we’re going to speak French around the table.

Mark: Right.

Steve: There would be about three or four words exchanged before a few, you know, tears or whatever, depending on the age…

Mark: Right.

Steve: …and pretty soon we’re back to English.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: It was done.

Mark: Right.

Steve: Although I know some parents who are not French speaking who speak French to their kids all the time and the kids reply in English.

Mark: Right.

Steve: It’s so unnatural.

Mark: I know.

Steve: I don’t know how they can do it.

Mark: I mean your kids only grow up the one time.

You can’t do it in English the second time.

Steve: I know.

Mark: It’s just strange.

Steve: I mean the big thing is a motivated child will learn so very quickly, why go through the torture?

But, as I say, if you can get them interested at an early age, that’s why stories, videos, fun.

I mean one day we’ll have our LingQ for juniors.

Mark: I mean, I guess, like what if…I don’t even know.

You know you talked about when we were in France and you had French tapes playing, what if you had a French audio book of something that we were interested in?

Steve: Right. See you were already older then.

Mark: Right.

Steve: You would already know.

Mark: That’s true.

Steve: I think it’s more like grade one when the kids are so happy to be in school eager to learn.

Mark: Right.

Steve: It’s the first two or three years.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: If you can get them to listen to even more than one language and learn about different words.

In a different language they have different sounds and they say things this way and they use these different words and kids think — you know when they’re that young — that’s great.

Mark: It’s fun, yeah.

Steve: That’s fun.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: Once they’re 10-11 everything is just, no, so that’s a problem.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: Okay, let’s just cover the other subject we were asked about and that was nationalism because one of our members posted a video or at least a link to a video on our forum.

It was a Japanese nationalist at the Yasukuni Shrine who was explaining how really Japan didn’t start the Pacific part of the Second World War.

That they were really trying to liberate all the Asian people from, you know, white racist imperialism and that really all the countries of Asia really thanked the Japanese for that, that they liked them and stuff.

And then there was a foreigner there who said, no, you can’t say that because in Germany that’s against the Constitution.

That’s what he said.

Mark: Right.

Steve: So everybody just shouted and weren’t even listening to him.

Mark: No.

Steve: I mean it was a tremendously sort of nationalistic reaction.

And the person who posted this on our forum is Japanese and he said he was very embarrassed by the behavior of these Japanese people and nationalism is a bad thing and what do we think of nationalism.

So I responded that in that particular case, like I know a lot is made is this business of Japanese people going to the Yasukuni Shrine, but the vast majority of people who are buried there are ordinary Japanese soldiers, as far as I know.

So for the Japanese to go and pay their respects to people who gave their lives to their country I really don’t have a big problem.

I mean that’s normal.

That happens everywhere.

Mark: Right.

Steve: When this fellow says that, you know, the Japanese were just trying to liberate their Asian brothers from European imperialism that’s really not quite true.

There’s a very small element of truth in there, but mostly it’s not true.

But he believes it to be true.

Mark: Right.

Steve: But would he go to China and make that speech?

Mark: Right. He wouldn’t get out of China after having made that speech.

Steve: He wouldn’t get out of China or Korea or the Philippines.

And, yet, you know, as I now learn different languages, as I listen to Russian, I am on a Chinese forum where people talk and so forth, there’s a lot of nationalism around.

Or even when we watch, you know, the American politicians during the Democratic Convention or the Republican Convention, God Bless America, America is the greatest force for good in the world.

Even here in Canada you have people who, you know, believe we’re just so much nicer than the Americans because we’re Canadian.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: Well, no, we’ve got just as many nasty people as any other place, you know?

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: So by enlarge I think it’s nice to feel that you belong somewhere and that you feel a sense of closeness to your own, until you discover that you don’t like them as individuals…

Mark: Right.

Steve: …and you can find people of a totally different nationality whom you like.

But in a very general sense to feel you like this place, you like being identified with this place, you feel good about the countryside, the people, whatever, that’s fine.

But some people do that it well beyond that and so in Japan they’re rewriting history, in Russia they’re rewriting history.

So, yeah, it is…

Mark: Well, I mean in Canada they’re rewriting history, you know, all the time with that more politically correct bent.

I mean, depending on the prevailing sentiment, people are always rewriting history, which is kind of unfortunate.

But I guess there was probably a prevailing sentiment at the time those history books were written in the first place.

Steve: Well, exactly.

I mean you can’t avoid it.

History is a description of what happened so that in terms of what they choose to identify as important…

Mark: Right.

Steve: …there’s already a bias.

Mark: Seen through the…yeah.

Steve: And then their interpretation of that there’s a bias, so you can get the sort of more politically correct sort of European colonialists were all bad stuff.

Mark: Right.

Steve: Or you can get the other side, which is we’re the greatest.

I don’t know how you strike a happy…

Mark: Right.

Steve: There should almost be some kind of… Particularly in the Far East there should be almost like a Korean-Chinese-Japanese joint history committee to write the textbooks…

Mark: Right.

Steve: …to be used in all three countries.

Mark: Well, you know it was interesting, actually.

I was listening to… Serge has a collection on French history, so I was listening to his chapter about the Second World War.

Steve: Right.

Mark: And you know it was just interesting to hear it from a French perspective.

It was just different than what we normally hear.

Steve: Right.

Mark: Obviously here in Canada we always hear about the contribution of the Canadian troops.

Steve: Right.

Mark: But when the rest of the world talks about the Second World War the Canadian troops don’t get much of a mention.

Mostly they’re grouped in with the British troops.

Steve: Right.

Mark: So there was that A and B and I don’t know how big a role the Free French Army had in the invasion of Normandy, but certainly I heard more about it there than I would have if I was reading about it here.

And that’s just natural, you read history or you see it through the lens of the person telling the story.

Steve: Well, I mean, yeah, and it’s interesting in Russia.

First of all, because we see so many movies, most of our information about the Second World War seems to come from movies.

Most of our movies are not about the Russian Front…

Mark: Right.

Steve: …they’re about the Western Front.

Mark: Right.

Steve: So we would assume, somehow, that the Second World War was fought in Western Europe.

Mark: Right.

Steve: In fact, it was overwhelmingly fought in Russia.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: And so, on the other hand, the Russians are persuaded that people in the West don’t even know that the Russians were in the War kind of thing, you know?

And the other thing that’s interesting now is that in Russia people — at least the government and many people in the government — feel that the Soviet Union, as such, Stalin’s Soviet Union, is them, is their country and therefore you cannot say anything negative about what the Soviet Union did in the Second World War.

Mark: Right.

Steve: And therefore something like the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact is now being justified as a very clever move by Stalin to, you know, stall the Germans for two years so he could build up his defenses and move the boarder a little further, you know, to the West so that he would be better able to deal with Hitler, which is, of course, complete and utter nonsense…

Mark: Right.

Steve: …because the Russian Army of five million people was essentially wiped out by the German advance.

And the Germans were much weaker in 1939, September ’39, where then if the Russians had taken them on together with the British and the French they would have stopped them.

Whereas, by ’41 the Germans were much stronger, they’d already dealt with their Western enemies and they just came in and smeared the Russians.

On top of which Stalin had decimated all his senior officers.

I mean the whole story is just like it was a completely stupid thing to do.

Mark: Right.

Steve: But because it’s identified with the Soviet Union and the Soviet Union is identified with when Russia was strong so now there’s this whole attempt to kind of make that part of their…this is us.

Mark: Right.

Steve: You can’t say nasty things about us.

So nationalism does that.

Mark: I mean it starts to get a bit scary when countries start to get belligerent and deny or, as you say, not just sort of changing the tone of the history, but actually changing it completely around.

Steve: Well it is in the way of interpretation, but again in Russia they have a committee to deal with falsification of history that is against the interest of the… But that’s only Russia.

I happen to be into Russia because I’m reading Russian.

Mark: Right.

Steve: But nationalism, I think, my feeling on nationalism is, in a modest way, a sense of belonging, sense of pride, sense of community, sense of solidarity, is a good thing.

Mark: Well, people like to belong.

Steve: Once you think your group is better than some other group we’ve got problems.

Mark: And that’s not just nationalism, I mean that’s religion…

Steve: …any ideology.

Mark: But those are probably subjects to touch on in future…

Steve: And touch on lightly.

Mark: And touch on lightly in future episodes.

Steve: Alright, thank you for listening. Bye for now.

Want to study this episode as a lesson on LingQ? Give it a try!

Steve: Of course with our sawmill in northern Alberta, every year we are a little bit, you know, apprehensive.

We have a bomber station; not ours, but the provincial, you know, forestry has a bomber station right near by and they’re constantly on the lookout.

I’ve driven up there in the summer and you see, off in the distance, these bits of smoke because there’s lightening strikes and other things.

Mark: Right.

Steve: So there’s always a little bit of forest fire action and then the bombers.

These are these water bombers; they’ll take off and try to put out the fire.

Mark: Right.

Steve: And so far so good. We haven’t lost significant amounts of timber.

Mark: No.

Steve: But a lot of the timber that we are logging is all…like in one area it will be all 120 years old and in another area it’s all 80 years old.

Mark: Right.

Steve: Because that’s when the last huge forest fire moved through there.

And nobody lives up there.

Mark: No.

Steve: So… I mean now there are farmers and that, but 100 years ago there was no one there.

Mark: I mean, yeah, there are always fires.

I remember when we went camping up in Salmon Arm…

Steve: Oh, yeah.

Mark: …like, I don’t know, 20 years ago now, whenever it was.

Steve: More than 20 ah? Twenty-five years ago.

Mark: And we were camping at a camp site…

Steve: Right.

Mark: …and it was just scorching hot.

Steve: Forty degrees.

Mark: Forty degrees or whatever it was.

Steve: Yeah.

Mark: I don’t remember what kind of trees they were…

Steve: Yeah.

Mark: …but they were wilting in the heat.

Steve: Right.

Mark: They wilted and they leaned over so much.

Steve: They were some kind of aspen.

Mark: Some kind of aspen…

Steve: Right.

Mark: …or leafy tree and it leaned over so much that it came into contact with the power lines.

Steve: Right.

Mark: And then, eventually, it started to sizzle…

Steve: It started a fire.

Mark: …and started a fire.

I mean it was a small town, wherever we were, and the local volunteer fire department showed up.

It was pretty funny.

There was one guy in his ranching attire, you know, in his chaps came right off the ranch and other guys from town came out.

The volunteer fire department came out to put out the fire.

Steve: Yeah.

I mean the fact is that we are always living at the mercy of nature and fire is just a perfectly natural phenomenon, so is wind, so is earthquake, so is heavy rain storms.

Mark: Hey, I read in the news the other day that near you a house almost got burned.

A guy was burning a stump in his backyard and started a fire and the fire department had to come put it out.

Steve: Well mom wasn’t home or she would have stopped it.

Mark: I mean he would have wiped out your whole area.

Steve: Well they’re a little further up.

Mark: Oh, okay.

Steve: It wouldn’t have come down to where we are.

But, yeah, the road was blocked off and there were fire trucks there.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: So…

Mark: And a house in Dundarave burnt down a week ago.

Steve: But that had nothing to do with the forest.

Mark: No, it didn’t have anything to do with forest, but we’re on the fire theme.

Steve: Right, yeah, yeah.

No, there are fewer fires than before because people build differently.

Mark: Right.

Steve: I mean all of the codes governing, you know, electrical installations and then, of course, the use of gypsum board and all of this and so now… You know I golfed with a fireman and he said most of the time they’re called out because someone had a heart attack or something.

Mark: Right.

Steve: So that they are also this sort of emergency response thing.

Mark: Although apparently this house in Dundarave, which is three doors down from a friend of ours…

Steve: Yeah?

Mark: …so the fire department, apparently, was not there very quickly.

And you know if that’s at 23rd, the fire station is at 16th, that’s seven blocks that the fire truck had to go.

They should be there in 30 seconds.

Steve: Yes.

Mark: And, apparently, it was more like 10 minutes.

Steve: And the reason was?

Mark: They haven’t heard why.

Steve: Right.

Mark: And maybe the timing is not exact, but their…

Steve: It took them longer than it should.

Mark: …feeling was that it took a lot longer than it should have and that led to things being as bad as they were.

But they were quite worried because being three doors down and it’s been so hot.

So I guess they were up on the roof hosing down the shingles.

Steve: Oh yeah.

Mark: Because the wood shingles are dry and a lot of the roofs here are made out of wood shingles.

Steve: Well, that’s true.

Mark: So the embers, if they land on your roof, I mean I think that’s the one worry.

Steve: Yeah. Well, that’s true.

I mean I know from a friend who’s always fighting the municipal government to get them to reduce taxes because they have so many useless bureaucrats there…

Mark: Right.

Steve: You know they really do.

I mean earning obscene salaries, you know, five different levels of administration and supervision and one thing and another.

And, of course, one of the untouchable areas is the fire department.

Mark: Right.

Steve: Even though they have like, probably, three times as many fire chiefs and other senior people as they need…

Mark: Right.

Steve: …that people say I don’t want to pay any more taxes.

Okay, we’re going to cut the fire department.

No, no, no, you can’t touch the fire department, so they’re a bit of a sacred cow.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: But, yeah, they should respond or people get mad at them.

Mark: Well, yeah. I mean, as you say…

Steve: They’ve got nothing to do.

Mark: They’ve got nothing to do.

I mean unless maybe they were called away to an accident…

Steve: Right.

Mark: …and then didn’t come back.

Steve: But then there’s more than one fire station, they should be able to get there.

Mark: Yeah, that’s right, that’s right.

Although, I mean from the next fire station it’s going to be a lot longer to get there, you know.

Steve: Well, that’s true.

Mark: Yeah, it could take 10 minutes.

They’re not all that close together.

Steve: I mean still, though, we’re very lucky to have the possibility within these communities to have these kinds of, you know, community response, you know, teams or, you know.

Mark: For sure.

Steve: For sure.

I mean otherwise we’re back to your group in the interior with a volunteer fire department…

Mark: Right.

Steve: …pulling people away from their jobs and they show up with buckets of water or whatever they’ve got.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: No, I’m sure they had a fire truck.

Mark: They had a fire truck, but… I mean, in a way, it does make sense, too.

Steve: Sure.

Mark: Because what happens here is they sit around all day doing nothing being paid.

Steve: I know.

Mark: The volunteer fire department…

Steve: Right.

Mark: Buy a nice truck and have enough people so that you have enough…there’s always people that can respond.

Steve: Well, you know that’s a subject that we can talk about another time, but we’re so used to the government doing stuff for us.

Mark: Right.

Steve: We just pay taxes…

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: …so we can lead an unhealthy life.

Mark: Right.

Steve: You know we don’t have to worry about educating ourselves.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: Everything will be done for us.

Well maybe we should get back to people doing more…

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: …as you say, volunteer fire department.

Maybe on our health program if you are a smoker or a drinker or whatever, you lead an unhealthy lifestyle, you pay more for your health insurance.

Mark: That’s right, yeah. I mean that should be the case.

Steve: It should be, really.

Mark: It should be the case.

Anyway, I think we’ve kind of covered the forest fire topic and it’s probably a good place to wrap it up for today.

Steve: We got in a few other kicks too.

Mark: For sure.

Anyway, thanks to Maryann for suggesting that topic and we’re always open for…

Steve: One thing, by the way, I should say is we are going to try to bring in some more voices.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: There was a comment that the two of us sound more or less the same.

People had asked for Jill.

She’s busy looking after her child, but we think Kate can be an excellent person, so we’re going to talk to her about some of her experiences.

Mark: And maybe other people, if we find other suitable people.

Steve: And so we do respond to your suggestions.

Mark: Okay.

Anyway, keep them coming.

Talk to you soon.

Steve: Thank you.

Mark: Bye-bye.

Steve: Bye.

Want to study this episode as a lesson on LingQ? Give it a try!

Mark: Here we are again.

Welcome back to EnglishLingQ, Mark here with Steve.

Steve: Hi Mark.

Mark: Hi Steve. What’s going on today?

Steve: Well, we did have someone ask about these fires in the interior of British Columbia.

Mark: Yeah, Maryann was inquiring.

Steve: Right.

Mark: She was saying that it seems like in the summers we have…I guess you see in the news that there are fires in California and in the west coast of North America and British Columbia, of course.

Steve: But, you know, there are fires.

I mean we live with nature.

We live surrounded by nature, by trees.

There are fires.

I mean we sometimes forget that there are seven billion people on the planet heading towards nine billion.

And, for most of history, there were…I don’t know a couple of hundred million at most or less?

Mark: Oh, for sure.

There have always been fires and I don’t think it’s restricted.

The fires are not restricted to California and British Columbia.

Steve: No.

Mark: I saw in the paper today that there are a bunch of wildfires in Corsica and Sardinia.

Steve: Corsica, Portugal, Greece.

Mark: Greece.

Steve: Australia.

Mark: Australia had some big ones.

I guess they don’t have them at this time of year, but they have them in their summer.

I think part of the reason why there seem to be a lot here is that there is a lot of nature, a lot of forests.

Probably because it is relatively wet most of the year and when we do have long stretches of dry weather there’s a lot of growth that can burn.

Steve: Well and it is very dry and hot in the interior.

People don’t realize that even on the coast here we haven’t had rain for two months.

Mark: Well that’s not true.

Steve: Well, we haven’t had very much.

Mark: Yeah, we had a few days of rain.

A few weeks ago we had two days of solid rain.

I mean we did have rain.

Steve: Okay, but we haven’t had very much.

I mean you can get six weeks with no rain, so we do get forest fires even on the coast.

I mean I have…

Mark: Oh, all the time.

Steve: All the time.

Mark: There are a lot of forests.

Steve: There are a lot of forests.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: And, you know, I think there are several things that are different here; one is that we tend not to clean out the forests.

So if you go to Europe the forests there, in fact, are not natural forests they’re more like tree farms, you know, they’re plantation forests.

So you’ve got the standing tree and all the little twigs have been removed.

Mark: Plus, people are a lot closer to it in a lot of cases.

Like there are more people around, say, to put out fires, perhaps?

I don’t know.

Steve: I mean the fires in Kelowna are where people live.

Mark: That’s true.

Steve: But, the forest itself we, here, tend to not clean out the forests.

They do in Europe, but they have other problems.

Because the forests are just a bunch of telephone poles, when they get a big wind storm they get this tremendous blow down; whereas, our forests are more natural and a little messier, so there’s a lot of food there for a fire.

Mark: Right.

Steve: So there is, I mean, tremendous parts of British Columbia where all the trees there are of the same age because, you know, 100 years ago that vast area burned.

Mark: Right.

Steve: So, yeah, we do get fires.

And the other thing we do here, say unlike Japan where we lived, in Japan if they’re going to build they flatten a whole area and build little platforms to put the houses on.

Mark: Right.

Steve: And, in fact, probably most of the time, they’re converting rice land or something.

Mark: Right.

Steve: And even if they do build on the hillside they tend not to leave the forest there.

Mark: Right.

Steve: Whereas, here we build these houses in amongst the forests.

Mark: Right.

Steve: So in Vancouver we get a big wind storm and a great big 200-year-old hemlock tree falls on a house.

Or, in the interior, people are surrounded by these pine and Douglas fir trees…

Mark: Right.

Steve: …and they’re right on the edge of the forest, so they’re more vulnerable.

Mark: For sure they are.

There was that fire…I remember, ah…I mean was it five years ago they had that big fire?

The last time they had a big fire in Kelowna – Kelowna is a big city in the interior of B.C., one of the larger cities in B.C.

– I remember, actually, first of all, this fire burned out all these trestles on the famous Kettle Valley Railway…

Steve: Right. Mostly forest there, yes.

Mark: …this old railway that used to run from the interior down to the coast.

And the day before that fire my family and I biked that Kettle Valley Railway.

It’s like a biking trail because it’s no longer a railway.

Steve: They’ve turned it into a logging railway. Or was it not?

Mark: Logging and mining and I think it brought a lot of maybe coal from the southeastern part of the province.

I can’t remember exactly where, but I think that might have been part of it.

At any rate, we biked it because it had been turned into a hiking-bilking because it’s flat, it’s perfect.

I mean it’s a spectacular thing to do.

Steve: So you’re quite high up there.

Mark: You’re on your bikes, you’re quite high up.

You’re halfway up the mountainside if not higher and you’re biking through these ravines and along the sides of the mountain and you can look out over the valley and the lakes.

I mean it’s spectacular; over these huge wooden trestle bridges, over these big gullies.

I mean it was quite a spectacular thing to do.

And then they had the fire and it burnt all these old trestle bridges that had been there since they were built made out of wood, out of these massive…

Steve: …timbers, yeah.

Mark: …timbers and, so, but they all got burnt out.

Steve: And they’re not going to replace them.

Mark: They have replaced them, though, in fact.

Steve: Oh?

Mark: If not all of them some of them.

I mean you can go and bike it now again.

Steve: Oh, okay.

Mark: So they did replace them.

I don’t know if they’ve done them all, but they will eventually.

Steve: I mean people forget that the interior of British Columbia…I mean I remember from my school days when we were taught that the sort of Mediterranean climate zones of the world obviously included the Mediterranean, included California, included, you know, the coast of Chili.

I can’t remember where else, but the Okanogan was also included.

They have wet, dry, excuse me, they have hot, dry summers.

Mark: Right.

Steve: And that’s why it’s a great wine growing region and people were quite surprised.

Mark: And, of course, a great holidaying region because there are lots of big lakes there too.

Steve: Lots of big lakes, it’s very beautiful.

But forest fires are a fact of life.

Mark: Actually another interesting thing that same trip.

We’d been on that Kettle Railway biking and then I think the next night or one of those nights…you’ve been to the Mission Hill Winery there in Kelowna.

Steve: Yes, yeah.

Mark: So we were staying on the lake, so one night the people we were staying with we found a babysitter for the kids and then we went out for dinner at the Mission Hill Winery.

And then they had this bard on the vineyard where they had, I think, A Midsummer Night’s Dream Shakespeare play as you eat your dinner.

It’s this little amphitheatre in the winery.

Steve: It’s a spectacular building there.

Mark: Spectacular.

And they’ve built this little amphitheatre with a stage and in the background is the lake.

I mean it was just phenomenal.

Steve: It’s very nice.

Oh, yeah, no, no.

Mark: Beautiful summer evening and that night we saw the little fire starting.

You could see it.

Steve: Was that the fire?

Mark: The fire in Kelowna five years ago that burnt out.

Steve: Yeah?

Mark: Yeah.

So we were on the other side of the lake and we watched this thing and then we saw the smoke and a little bit of flame and, hey, there’s a forest fire starting up there.

Then we left the next day.

I mean I don’t know how many days it burned for, but it was…

Steve: It was a terrible fire.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: Thousands of people had their homes destroyed.

Mark: Yeah.

Study this episode and any others from the LingQ English Podcast on LingQ! Check it out.

Steve: Hi Mark.

Mark: Hi Steve.

Steve: Well, here we are again.

Mark: Yes, we are.

Steve: We had a one-week hiatus.

You know what I want to talk about today?

Mark: I was away, actually.

Steve: I know.

Mark: Up the coast. We had some nice weather, so…

Steve: Well, talk a little bit about that.

Where exactly did you go?

Mark: Well, we seem to go up to the same area, for the last few years anyway.

Just up the coast here north of Vancouver; I guess it’s slightly north.

It’s really not very far; it’s a 35-minute boat ride.

It’s called the Sunshine Coast.

You take a ferry about 40 minutes and then we drove up to a lake, which is an hour from the other side of the ferry.

Sakinaw Lake, it was called, which was actually great because the weather was so hot.

It’s always nice to be in a lake where the temperature is a little warmer and fresh water, of course, as opposed to the salt water here in the ocean where we normally do our swimming.

So we were at the lake for three or four days and then we stopped at another friend who lived along the coast.

These are all summer places that friends have and we like to stop in on our friends that have summer places.

It’s a very economical way to vacation.

Steve: You know it’s interesting that it’s called the Sunshine Coast; actually, here, it’s a rainforest.

I mean it’s a little less rainy up there.

It’s not rainy in the summer.

In the winter it rains there as much as here, I think.

Mark: I mean it’s not very far away, as I said, in kilometers.

As the crow flies, as they say, it’s even less far, but it’s, you know, 40 minutes away by ferry.

But, actually, they do get less rain than we do…

Steve: Okay.

Mark: …especially the further north you go.

Like Powell River, apparently they get half as much rain as we do.

Steve: Really. Powell River is actually a beautiful location.

Mark: Yeah. I mean that’s not to say they don’t get rain.

I guess that just tells you how much rain we get.

Steve: Right.

But Powell River, it’s beautiful.

And you can tell by the vegetation there, more Douglas fir and sort of Arbutus trees and less Cedar and less Hemlock.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: So, ah… But, hey, you know what I want to talk about?

You know that I like to go to bookstores.

Mark: Bookstores have a special shrine devoted to you.

Steve: Right. And so… I mean I do have a lot of books.

I like buying books and I think books are a great value, you know?

Fifteen dollars and you’ve got something that you spend a lot of time with, you go back to and I like looking at books that I’ve read before.

Anyway, one of the sections that I like to go to, of course, is the Language Section.

So I went to the Language Section, just to see what people are up to.

Mark: And machine-gun a few LingQ cards.

Steve: Well, I always have some LingQ cards to hand out.

But it was interesting to see, people are developing these… I mean the idea is that, really, people (A) they don’t want to spend much money and (B) they want to learn it right away.

Mark: Right.

Steve: So now there’s more and more sort of “Chinese in a Day”, $10.

Sure, Chinese?

Learn Chinese in a day only $10, why wouldn’t I, right?

And then they’ve also got things that work with your iPod.

Although, those are things that anyone can do, really.

You just fill up things in your iPod that you can then easily see in the menu.

And there was one girl there who was interested in Japanese, so I chatted with her for a while and her boyfriend was Mexican, so I chatted with him — two LingQ cards handed out.

And then this fellow arrives and he’s got one of the bookstore assistants with him…

Mark: Right, yeah.

Steve: …and he’s also looking at Japanese.

And so she shows him the Michel Thomas Series, which is like eight CDs, $99.

Mark: Right.

Steve: And so I can’t resist, so I say, “No, you want to buy the cheapest thing you can find.” He said, “Well why?” I said, “First of all, because you may not continue.” You know?

Mark: Right.

Steve: And most people buy something and they never do anything with it.

Mark: Or they try it for a week and then it gathers dust in the corner.

Steve: Um-hum.

So I said, “First of all for that reason and second of all because you want to really only have this sort of starter-type content for a short while.

I would buy…” In fact, my strategy, in the past, has been to buy two starter sets.

When I started on Korean about five-six years ago, buy the teach yourself and buy the colloquial and they cover the same ground and I just listen and listen.

And so I said, I said to him, I said, “’Teach Yourself’ is quite good.

Why don’t you get the ‘Teach Yourself Japanese’”?

So the lady there said, “Oh no, no, I wouldn’t take that because I bought the ‘Teach Yourself Ancient English’ and I didn’t like how the grammar was organized.”

Mark: Well you told me that earlier and thought that, aye, okay, whatever, she wants to learn Ancient English, for whatever reason.

Is anyone going to care if her grammar is not bang on?

Is anyone going to notice?

I mean who knows the grammar of Ancient English?

Steve: Well, exactly.

I’m sure the grammar of Ancient English is more complicated than the grammar of Modern English.

Mark: Right.

Steve: But, I’m sure, you know… Like Russian grammar is complicated.

As long as all I’m doing is reading and listening I don’t really have to have that much grammar.

I can kind of figure it out.

Mark: Right.

Steve: And besides which, I pointed out, you know, the order in which you think it should be organized may not be the order in which the brain wants to learn it.

You can always go to the Index if you’re interesting in, you know, whatever, participles or…. I have no idea what’s in Ancient English.

But, at any rate, no, I mean you don’t want to belittle.

I mean that’s what she likes to do, so that’s fine.

Mark: Right.

Steve: But it was interesting because this fellow said…so I said “Yeah, you should come to LingQ, but” I said, “with Japanese, you know, our Japanese Program is only about 80% effective compared to the programs for other languages, because of this issue of the Asian languages not being divided.

Mark: Right.

Steve: And he said, “Oh, it doesn’t matter.

It doesn’t have to be Japanese.” I said, “Well, why?” “Well,” he said, “I just want to learn any language.” I said, “Well, why?” He said because he had an accident and so he had some brain damage.

Mark: Right.

Steve: And he says sometimes he has trouble finding words and he thinks it would be useful for him to learn another language to take his mind of this problem that he has.

Mark: Right.

Steve: I said, “It’s possible that it could.” I mean we do know that the brain, even if it’s been damaged, it continues to create neurons.

It continues to renew itself, rejuvenate itself.

I mean people who all of a sudden become blind develop the neuro networks to read Braille at age 40.

Mark: And, as you say, I mean learning one language very often helps you in another.

Steve: Right.

Mark: So, obviously, the same should hold true for your native language and learning another language should help your native language.

Steve: That’s right…like picking up the garbage next door.

So I thought that was interesting, so, of course, I handed him a LingQ card.

Mark: Of course you did.

Steve: So… But it was interesting.

So you have the two, I guess, extremes.

On the one hand you have the $2-$300… Oh, of course he asked me what I thought of Rosetta Stone.

Mark: Which, I guess, recently Rosetta Stone offered to send you a sample.

Steve: Well, that’s right.

Because I published sort of a critique of Rosetta Stone on my blog, which I entitled “Seven Reasons Why I Would Not Use Rosetta Stone.”

Mark: Right.

Steve: Although I pointed out that I have not personally used it, but you’ve used it.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: I’ve heard from you and I read a number of reviews on the Internet, many of which…they were all positive.

Mark: Right.

Steve: Most of them were written by people who are in some way connected with Rosetta Stone.

Mark: Right.

Steve: And that doesn’t surprise me, Rosetta Stone are tremendous marketers.

If you go to Google and put “learn…” any language, “Azerbaijani”, I don’t care, “Finnish”, Rosetta Stone will come up top.

Mark: I mean everybody has heard of them, more and more.

Like when I used Rosetta Stone — that was maybe seven-eight years ago — it was nowhere near the household name that it’s become.

People didn’t know about it.

It was kind of new, here’s this thing Rosetta Stone.

But now everybody I talk to, even people who aren’t necessarily interested in language learning, when I mention what I do, “Oh, yeah, are you kind of like Rosetta Stone?” They’ve heard of it.

“What’s that software, Rosetta Stone?

Yeah, that’s it.”

Steve: And, of course, I mean I think this is good.

I don’t want to knock Rosetta Stone because what it is, it’s good, it promotes the idea that you can learn on your own.

And you have to learn on your own and you don’t have to go to school, so all of this is good and makes people think of learning languages, it’s already good.

Mark: Plus, recently, they had their IPO (Initial Public Offering) on the stock market, which just raises awareness…

Steve: It raises awareness.

Mark: …as people hear about it.

Steve: Right.

Mark: Just in terms of PR value, that, of course, adds to…

Steve: …adds to the buzz.

Mark: …the buzz about Rosetta Stone.

Steve: But, from what I read, you know, they sort of pointed out that you have the sort of multiple choice things where you’re picking.

You know after going through it once, you know, is this a bird?

You know you hear a word and you have to choose whether it’s a bird, a car, a tree or an airplane or something.

Mark: Right.

Steve: And since this is very easy one argument by one of the supporters of Rosetta Stone was that this makes it, you know, gratifying, you know?

Mark: Right.

Steve: You know you can immediately see what happened, so you’re gratified right away.

Mark: Right.

Steve: Whereas, if you’re learning a language you often have the impression that you’re not making any progress, was one point.

Mark: Right.

Steve: But most of the people who commented on my blog just found it boring.

And my objection and I put it on my blog is that it’s not communicating, it’s playing little games.

And most of my activity is listening to my iPod.

Mark: Right.

Steve: If I’m in my car, if I’m wandering through a bookstore, if I’m mowing the lawn, whatever I’m doing I gain all this dead time.

Mark: Right.

Steve: If I had to sit chained to a computer playing these games I wouldn’t do it.

Mark: Yeah.

I mean I don’t know if it even qualifies as games; although, when I did it, yeah, it’s kind of neat at first and you click all the…it’s very easy.

Like I sit down and I can just kind of go through it and I hardly ever get any…

Steve: You did it for Japanese when you were living in Japan.

Mark: I did it for Japanese when I was living in Japan.

I’d hardly get any wrong.

Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ten minutes later I’ve done three units.

Okay.

But how long are you going to sit there doing that?

Steve: Right.

Mark: And the worst part about it is, even if you do sit there and do it and you know it inside and out, at the end of it all you’re still not very far.

Steve: No.

Mark: You’re still not capable of communicating.

And I think I had two levels of it before I gave up and I would have been far better off getting into real content, listening to stuff, reading stuff and expanding my vocabulary.

Steve: Well, exactly.

And that’s where… Somebody else on my blog asked me if I knew about the Birkenbihl Method.

And I had never heard of it, but I looked it up on the Web and I came to the site.

And there’s a lady in Germany who has developed this system which, in many ways, is very similar to what we’re doing.

Mark: Right.

Steve: She introduced some elements that are kind of complicated and I think unnecessarily confusing, complicated, things that people, in my mind, are not likely to continue doing.

Mark: Exactly.

That’s the thing I thought when I saw that.

Steve: But the principle is, yes, don’t learn words in isolation, don’t worry too much about grammar — there Rosetta Stone also agrees — and a lot of emphasis on listening.

But she separates listening from reading and you have to listen to the word-for-word translation.

It gets quite complicated.

But, anyway, getting back to this fellow, I think that, yeah, what he’s doing is he’s going to try to train his brain; stimulate his brain, exercise his brain by learning another language.

I think that’s a good thing and that’s, in fact, how you learn.

And so with Rosetta Stone the fact that you could learn the word for the color yellow and never forget it, it just is not going to happen.

Mark: No.

Steve: You’re going to forget it.

And only when you’ve seen yellow in many different situations are you going to remember it; otherwise… I mean I’m quite good in Portuguese, but colors are difficult.

I’m quite good in Russian and Portuguese.

I find colors difficult.

Was that green or yellow or red?

I can’t remember.

Mark: Right.

Steve: Colors are hard. Colors are hard, so are numbers.

Mark: Numbers are hard, for sure.

Steve: Numbers are very hard.

Mark: Numbers are very hard.

Steve: Very hard.

I get a date in Russian; I haven’t a clue what date they’re talking about.

Mark: When I get a date in French I have to start dissecting it now.

It takes me about three seconds after I’ve heard it before I’m, okay, that’s what it was.

Steve: It’s surprising what’s hard and what’s easy.

Mark: Right.

Steve: Things that you think would be easy to remember are often hard.

Things that you would think are hard maybe are easy to remember because they’re hard.

Mark: Right.

Steve: We don’t know how the brain is going to grab them.

Anyway, so, hopefully, that person will get on our Website, so language learning as brain rehabilitation. Why not?

Mark: Well, yeah.

I mean they often recommend that for seniors, that they study languages to keep their brain active and young, so it should work for him.

Steve: By the way, on another subject, President Obama was in Russia and gave speeches to students and gave speeches to the business community or at least met with the business community and opposition parties and other nongovernmental organizations, as well as, of course, meeting with the President of Russia and the Prime Minster of Russia and so forth.

And he stressed this idea that, you know, not all relationships have to be between the President and the President.

That there are many things that people in society should get more involved.

Mark: Right.

Steve: And I read an interesting book about democracy and the democratization of so many things, you know, which is, to some extent, what the Web is about and, to some extent, what we’re doing in language learning.

The power of the publisher, the newspaper publisher, the power of the book publisher, of the media empire, of the teacher, of the school, of all of these institutions is getting less.

Mark: Right.

Steve: And, more and more, people can, you know, have a blog or have a podcast, set up a language class online or a language system online.

And, similarly, in our society there are probably more things that people can do on their own and get the government out of so much of this stuff.

Mark: Right.

Steve: I mean we had a bit of a scandal here in Canada over the government providing $1.9 million to the Calgary Stampede, which is annual tourist event…

Mark: Right.

Steve: …where people rope cattle and charge around and probably the cattle get badly done by, which happens to them all the time on a working ranch anyway.

And then there was a large amount of money donated for the Gay Pride Parade in Toronto.

And, of course, since the government is a conservative government and somewhat conservative socially, there was a great human cry that the government spent money on promoting this Gay Pride Parade.

And, of course, those who were in favor of the Gay Pride Parade say that this is a great tourist attraction.

It’s a great big party, all kinds of people come.

I mean I don’t want to get into the issue of the Gay Pride Parade, but why is the government handing out $400,000 to the Gay Pride Parade, $1.9 million to the Calgary Stampede?

You mean those events would not go on if the government didn’t hand them money?

Mark: I mean it’s ridiculous.

The government should not be in the business of giving money to anything like that.

Steve: Well, of course.

Because then what happens is anybody that’s got any kind of event, their major activity now becomes going after government money.

Mark: Right.

Steve: It completely distorts everything.

It’s the same, you know, as in language teaching.

Mark: Right.

Steve: We can’t get any… Any organization that’s helping immigrants to learn English is never going to look at LingQ, because their main modus vivendi, their business model, is extracting more money from government.

Mark: Right.

Steve: And, certainly, I mean we hear in Russia where they are one of the more corrupt countries in the world according to some international…apparently they’re ranked behind… I don’t know, I don’t remember the country, but it wasn’t high on the list of non… I mean they’re corrupt.

And a big part of it is that the government’s in everything.

And the more government has got its fingers in different things the more you get these distortions.

Mark: Right.

Steve: But this interesting book that I read by a fellow whose name I can’t remember… he has a Muslim name, actually, and he writes for Newsweek.

But he wrote a bestseller on democracy…you know I can’t remember his name anymore…but he made the point that this excess of democracy, though, has caused some problems.

And…here we are.

His name is…I can’t remember…Zachariah?

Fareed Zachariah.

And it has caused problems.

Like in California the people have had plebiscite after plebiscite saying you cannot spend more than this on this, you cannot have a deficit, you cannot do this, you can’t spend…forty percent of the budget has to be spent on education.

So with the result that their roads are falling apart, they’re practically bankrupt…

In other words, you get these popular movements where people have a single issue…

Mark: Right.

Steve: …that they’re totally wrapped up about.

They have a plebiscite, they win, because a motivated minority of people will always win against the vast majority who are yawning on the issue and pretty soon you restrict what government can do.

Mark: But I guess the problem there is that it’s not true democracy, because only a motivated portion of the people voted on the issue.

Steve: This is true.

Mark: If everybody voted on the issue then it presumably wouldn’t have passed.

Or, it may have, but the people would have had to deal with it.

And then if you have that for one issue then you kind of have to have that for all issues.

Steve: Right.

Mark: So, all of a sudden, okay, 40% is going to schools, now we have a problem where our roads are falling apart, should we take some of this money out of school and everybody has to vote again.

Presumably, people will say, yeah, that’s a good idea, but if you have that publicized in isolation then I don’t see how that would work.

Steve: Well, that’s right.

Mark: You can’t have a combination you have to open it up.

Steve: That’s true.

Mark: Yeah.

I mean so it’s really not an excess of democracy at all, it’s just kind of a red herring thrown in there.

Steve: Right.

And this book I read by Zachariah, he pointed out…which is an interesting book, by the way, it was a New York Times bestseller back in 2003.

You know, we could have another session on it one day, but he points out that there were a lot of undemocratic governments that were, you know, monarchies, but where they had the rule of law…

Mark: Right.

Steve: …where they had a number of institutions.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: Freedom of speech, rule of law, but the king decided.

Mark: Right.

Steve: Anyway…

Mark: So he’s suggesting that democracy is a bad thing?

Steve: No. He’s just saying that it’s not necessarily the first step.

Mark: Right.

Steve: And his biggest thing is land reform

Mark: Right.

Steve: And that there are many countries where you can’t go at them first with democracy if they don’t have these other things in place.

Mark: Right.

Steve: It’s an interesting book.

Mark: We’ll save it for another time.

Steve: We’ll save it. We never run out of things to say.

Mark: No.

Steve: Look forward to your comments. Thank you.

Mark: Okay, bye-bye.

Steve: Bye.

Want to study this episode as a lesson on LingQ? Give it a try!

Steve: Hi Mark.

Mark: Hi Steve.

Steve: Well, here we are; another podcast discussion.

You look happy.

Why are you happy?

Mark: I’m not particularly happy.

I’m not unhappy, I just…maybe it’s my brilliant smile, white smile.

Steve: I was going to say, what just happened to you? Tell us.

Mark: I was just…I just had my teeth cleaned at the dentist.

So, I don’t know what the regular dental cleaning schedule is in other countries, but here it seems like every six months you get a call from the dentist to schedule a new cleaning appointment and that was what happened to me today, so I went in.

Cleaning and then the dentist takes a look, inspects your teeth; it takes about an hour.

The dentist scrapes the hard to reach places with whatever the tool is called that she uses.

Not the dentist, I guess she’s a dental hygienist.

Steve: She’s not even a hygienist, I think…or maybe she is.

Mark: Yes, she is.

Steve: Yes, she is. Right you are, yeah.

Mark: Yeah, she’s a dental hygienist.

Steve: Because the dental assistant is someone else.

Mark: Okay, that’s right, who helps with the…

Steve: Hands him his tools.

Mark: Hands him his tools and whatever needs to be done, if he’s actually doing dental work, but the hygienist…

Steve: When he says “7EX” or something and she takes notes.

Mark: That’s right, that’s right.

Steve: Right, yeah.

Mark: Whereas, the hygienist just basically cleans teeth, I guess.

Steve: Right.

Mark: So, yeah…

Steve: Then she asks you questions and then you struggle (gur-gur-gur).

Mark: Well that’s the thing.

You’re there and she’s talking away and you have her tool in your mouth.

Steve: And you have water up to your…

Mark: I know.

“So, are you going anywhere this summer?” (blak-kah-kah) You know?

Anyway, I guess it’s something to do.

Steve: They want to keep things cheerful.

Mark: I mean it helps the time go by if the hygienist is lively.

Steve: How would you like to spend all day with your fingers in lots of different people’s mouths?

Mark: I know…and cleaning; some not as pleasant to clean as others.

Steve: But it’s good, you know?

I think all this dental hygiene and flossing and stuff is good for people’s teeth; whereas, it used to be you went to the dentist every three years and got drilled.

Mark: Oh, absolutely. I mean they clean…I guess it’s called scaling.

Steve: Right.

Mark: They scrape, whatever it is, the plaque off, they polish them, they brush, they floss them, they give you a fluoride treatment…

Steve: Terrible tasting stuff.

Mark: …which is supposed to…I don’t know exactly, make your teeth stronger.

Steve: I guess.

Mark: And then the dentist does a quick check.

Yeah, everything’s okay.

I guess it’s not always okay.

If they find a cavity then they’ll schedule you for an appointment.

But I wanted to talk about…like we have a new dentist.

Steve: Right.

Mark: We both have been going to the same dentist and he, unfortunately, had a heart attack I guess a couple of years ago now.

Steve: Yeah.

Mark: But the new dentist…I find that when I’m in there they’re always trying to sell you something.

Steve: Right.

Mark: Like they can’t just clean your teeth.

Have you noticed that?

Steve: Well, not really. Except he’s got just so much more fancy equipment than they used to have, so he’s got to pay it off.

Mark: Well that’s for sure.

The old dentist was kind of more old school, but the new guy…like this time I sat down and the hygienist is doing her thing and then she says, “Oh and we’ve got this new machine that we’ve invested in.

It helps us spot things that I can’t spot on your tongue.”

Steve: On your tongue?

Mark: Yeah, she looked at my tongue.

That was the first time that’s ever happened to me in a dentist’s office.

And then she volunteered that they had this new piece of equipment and for $30 they could do this check on me, so they can spot any like mouth cancer.

Which, I mean, I don’t know.

Just, well, no, just clean my teeth, I’m not that concerned about that.

But it just felt like…

They’re always talking about, oh, would you like your teeth white and would you like this procedure?

Whereas, the old guy wasn’t like that, he looked at your teeth and if you needed something he’d do it or volunteer it.

But they seem to be trying to…whether it’s teeth whitening or whatever things they offer.

Steve: I don’t need the teeth whitening.

Mark: Oh, yeah? I don’t know.

Steve: I may be past the target age demographic.

Mark: I don’t know.

Steve: But that reminds me, you know, I was once in Ottawa and I had nothing better to do.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: I’m just talking about teeth whitening…

Mark: Right.

Steve: …we can get back to the dentist overselling.

But I went to the University of Ottawa or Carlton University in the Student Union Building and I was just talking to people about language learning because I had some time to kill and you know me, right?

Well there were people there selling…like the big thing they were selling was teeth whitening toothpaste or something.

It was all about teeth whitening.

Mark: Oh, okay.

Steve: Like all these young people who, supposedly, are all upset about I don’t know what, the third world or the ecology and they supposed to be all this, you know, altruistic or whatever and their big thing is teeth whitening.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: Come on.

Your teeth, just brush them.

Teeth whitening for gosh sakes.

Mark: Well, I know.

And a lot of the toothpaste that you get now is teeth whitening toothpaste.

Steve: Right.

Mark: I find it tastes terrible.

I try to discourage my wife from buying it.

Steve: I don’t use it.

Mark: I mean she buys whatever comes in the family pack at Costco, you know?

Steve: Right.

Although, one thing I did find, I had some work done on my teeth and I had a sensitive area and it wouldn’t go away.

The dentist said “get Sensodyne” and that solved the problem.

Mark: Actually, Sensodyne is good.

Kindrey, my wife, had the same issue.

She had some sensitive teeth and we’ve been using Sensodyne lately and it’s made a big difference for her, so, yeah.

Steve: Anyways… I mean the things that we worry about in this country.

Well, I guess everywhere in the world they have dentists and they worry about these things.

But, just looking at world events, of course, the dramatic…I mean there are a number of dramatic events.

Obviously we had that terrible subway crash in Washington, D.C., which is scary.

I mean I’ve been in a lot of subways and you are kind of way down there.

You hope that they don’t have three trains scheduled to fight for the same space at the same time.

Mark: Presumably they…

Steve: There must have been a mistake.

I haven’t been following it.

Mark: I haven’t either. Actually, I don’t know that I’ve even heard of it.

Steve: Oh, yeah, it was in the paper.

Mark: Today?

Steve: Yesterday. I don’t like to follow disasters like that.

I don’t follow the Air France disaster.

I mean what can…I feel sorry for those people.

Mark: I know.

Steve: I hope I’m not in a plane that crashes.

I don’t need the details.

Mark: Well, that’s right.

Whereas, CNN will be filming hour after hour of the ocean, you know?

Steve: I know.

Mark: We haven’t seen any debris, yet, but we’re here 24 hours.

Steve: But, no, the situation in Iran I think is extremely interesting, it’s one that I am following for many, many different reasons.

But, yeah, we don’t know very much about what goes on in that country.

Mark: No, that’s for sure, that’s for sure.

And they’re doing their best to make sure that we don’t find out what goes on, what’s going on right now anyway.

I mean, obviously, foreign news organizations are prevented from getting out and talking to people, I understand, and certainly trying to get their message out.

Steve: But some of the interesting things about Iran that I’ve come to know over the last few days because I Google — you know now you can Google different things — first of all, anyone running for parliament there has to be vetted by this committee.

Mark: The religious guys.

Steve: The religious guys.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: So you don’t have anybody who they don’t like running for parliament, that’s number one.

Mark: No.

Steve: Number two, this Mousavi, who’s the figure that everyone is rallying behind, is one of the founders of the Islamic Revolution.

Mark: Right.

Steve: And he’s…

Mark: Like the ’79, like overthrowing the Shah, yeah.

Steve: That’s right. He’s one of the originals and he’s also a supporter of Hezbollah.

Mark: Oh, yeah?

Steve: So I don’t see, at least on certain issues, how big an alternative is he and then to hear that the mullahs, or, these religious people, control all the wealth in the country.

And many of them actually keep it in their own pockets, like this guy Rafsanjani, who’s apparently the richest guy in the country and that there’s billions of dollars invested outside Iran, regularly.

So that they take this oil wealth and they distribute it to the rural communities or whatever they do with it.

There’s no work in the country.

Like 40% unemployed, some tremendous number.

They are, on average, poorer than they were in ’79, but a certain number of people are quite well off.

Mark: Which is probably not much different than the situation in ’79, you had your…

Steve: It’s just a different group of people; although, there seems to be an affluent group in Tehran who are anti the régime.

Mark: Right.

Steve: Because when you see the pictures of the demonstrators these are somewhat affluent-looking people.

Mark: Right, a lot of university students and so forth.

Steve: That’s right.

So it doesn’t sort of quite fit with the average income level in that country.

Mark: And so for, obviously, a segment of these approved representatives to be causing this much of a fuss suggests that perhaps there’s something really unfair happening there.

Steve: Well it suggests to me that people were looking for some cause to sort of build their expression of dissatisfaction around, it just happened to be Mousavi, I don’t know.

And it seems the more evidence, the more that you see, it seems that the… It might well have been that Ahmadinejad (whatever his name is) won, but he could not possibly have won…

Mark: …by the margin that he won by.

Steve: …by the margin that he indicated.

And he wouldn’t have had the results so quickly.

Like it was an hour after the polls closed and he won by this tremendous margin.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: And polls that historically had 50-60% turnout all of a sudden 125 or 90% turnout.

Mark: Right.

Steve: I mean there’s ample, ample cause to suspect that the whole thing was rigged.

Mark: For sure.

And, apparently, for him to get the numbers that he got, large numbers of voters who voted the other way at the previous election would have had to swing his way, which is…these are people who have traditionally voted the other way.

Steve: Right.

Mark: So it’s possible.

And I guess, probably, it’s possible we’ll never know; probable we’ll never know.

Steve: Well, that’s right.

Mark: Because they seem to be clamping down fairly strongly there, but I guess if…

Steve: I mean Iran is a religious state.

It’s a Shiite state, that’s what it is.

So, yeah, you kind of tow the line.

I was listening, again, to my Russian, my Ekho Moskvy radio station, and they interviewed some Russian fellow who represented the Iranian Cultural Center in Russia.

Of course he explained that, in fact, there wasn’t very much happening, it’s just the Western media that are exaggerating this.

They photographed a small group of people in Tehran and, of course, if you go around everywhere else there are much larger demonstrations in favor of Ahmadinejad.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: I mean he just went on and on and on.

Mark: For sure.

Steve: It’s unbelievable.

Mark: That’s like the guy when the Americans went into Iraq, the guy who kept saying…

Steve: Chemical alley?

Mark: Remember his Minister of…whatever he was…

Steve: …Information or something.

Mark: “The Americans are not here.

We will drown them in their own blood”, whatever he said.

Anyway… But what was interesting, too, with Iran is because the news organizations were limited in their access, apparently a lot of the news, especially earlier on, was coming out through Twitter.

Steve: Right.

Mark: Twitter, which you often pooh-pooh and which we both pooh-pooh, actually.

But, apparently, there were days, early on in the conflict, where that was the best source of information of what was going on.

In fact, Twitter had an update scheduled, which they postponed.

I think the Government asked them to postpone — the U.S.

Government – in order for them to continue to follow events through Twitter, which is kind of interesting.

Steve: I mean I think that’s a very good use of Twitter.

People have their little cell phones, they can send out short messages.

And so you get like hundreds or maybe thousands of people sending in these little 140 character messages about what’s happening, that’s very useful.

Mark: And pictures and videos.

Steve: And pictures and videos.

Mark: Links to videos and pictures, yeah.

Steve: But every time I sort of say, okay, I’m going to try and make sense of Twitter and I go on there and I’ve got X number of people following me.

So I go, okay, I’m going to follow them.

So I follow all these people and I get these people telling me, “I had a cup of coffee.

Check this out.

Do this.

Do that.” I mean there’s nothing there.

How can I possibly spend time following all that stuff?

Mark: No. I mean the idea is to follow something that’s useful to you; that provides information.

Steve: Can you go and say I only want information on this?

Mark: You know what, I don’t use it much either, but that is an example.

Steve: Right.

Mark: You know if you found….I mean I think that it is a source of news for some people.

Steve: Yeah, I think that’s a good use for it.

Mark: Yeah, but you have to, I guess, understand it and follow the right people.

And then people say, “Oh, did you see this posted over here?”

Steve: Right.

Mark: And so that the word kind of spreads.

Steve: I guess you have to invest the time in it.

And I also don’t really see it in a major way for language learning.

Mark: No.

Steve: Because, again, I believe that it’s more input-based than scribbling little notes like that.

But, at any rate, it certainly has been quite instrumental in following the events in Iran.

Mark: Yeah, which is quite interesting.

And, obviously, the more the Web spreads and the capabilities of the Web and the things you’re able to do on it spreads the more difficult it will become for some of these regimes to keep their people bottled up and kept down, you know, whether it’s in Iran or in China.

Maybe the Tiananmen Square situation might not be repeatable now in this current age.

Steve: Well, I think the government would…I think they’re still going to suppress.

Mark: Right.

Steve: But they don’t care if people find out.

Mark: That’s true.

Steve: They’re going to kill off enough of them, so.

But what’s interesting is, again, I always refer to Ekho Moskvy because I listen to it all the time, but they were interviewing this fellow and the discussion was will the new media replace traditional media or can traditional media survive and stuff like that.

He made the point that in the olden days before we had newspapers, news traveled by word of mouth.

You met someone in the market and rumors spread, just by people talking to people.

And then we ended up with newspapers and the mass media where, in a sense, the mass media controlled what people knew because they had tremendous influence, the newspapers, the television stations and the radio stations.

And now with the Facebooks and Twitters and all these different things — and we’re only seeing the beginning of it — we’re going back to a situation where it’s people meeting in the marketplace, except that the marketplace is not a little marketplace in this village, it’s a global marketplace.

Mark: Right.

Steve: And so that the established media can no longer control opinion.

I mean we’ve got blogs, we’ve got podcasts and there are so many different… So the professional journalist who went to journalism school and whatever he learnt there, he’s no longer in the position of power that he once was.

Mark: Right, yeah.

Steve: So…

Mark: Yeah, I mean which is a good thing.

Steve: In the end I’d like to see how that plays out.

And, of course, we’re interested in how that affects language learning, which is what we’re interested in.

Mark: Well, I mean I think the major media outlets seem to be on the downswing.

I mean newspapers are going under, going bankrupt.

I think…it is…Canwest is in financial trouble, which is probably the biggest…

Steve: In Canada, yeah.

Mark: …private media network in Canada.

Steve: Yeah. And it should be in trouble, it has too big a position.

Mark: Way too big.

Steve: Way too big.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: I think this is a great thing.

People don’t necessarily rely on the opinions of this or that newspaper now, they have their favorite blogs.

Mark: Exactly.

Steve: Yeah.

Mark: And I guess the danger is that you find the blogs and people that agree with you and that’s all you read and you never see the opposing point of view, I guess, but…

Steve: Newspapers tend to be somewhat oriented one way or another.

Mark: Absolutely.

Steve: And this way at least you have the choice.

Mark: Right.

Steve: You can choose to subscribe to this blog or that.

You know a mixture of different opinions and different subjects and so forth and so on.

No, I think it’s a better way.

Mark: Oh, absolutely.

And the more different opinions that are out there the people, then, can form their own decisions.

Steve: Right.

I remember when we first started with LingQ we approached the newspaper here if we could use their content for language learning and they sort of said, no, our major asset is our content.

Well, today your content is worth nothing.

Mark: Right.

Steve: Because either I access theirs for free or I go somewhere else and access this explosion of content that’s out there.

Mark: I know, exactly.

Steve: So, it’s a changing world.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: And our teeth are being better looked after, so.

Mark: That’s right.

Steve: I think we’ve had our usual.

Mark: Yes, we did.

Steve: Alright. Thank you, Mark.

I hope this is beneficial and we would like to get some feedback.

Mark: Absolutely.

Steve: What do you want us to talk about?

Are there words and phrases you want to hear about?

Are there subjects you want to hear about?

Do you want us to argue more?

What would you like to have?

Okay, bye for now.

Mark: Bye.

This and all episodes of this podcast are available to study as a lesson on LingQ. Try it here.

Mark: Hi everyone, Mark here for another installment of EnglishLingQ.

Steve: And Steve.

Mark: Hi Steve.

Steve: Hi Mark.

Mark: Oh, yeah, you’re here, too.

Steve: I am.

Mark: I thought today was going to be a monologue.

Steve: Well, we can both do a monologue.

Mark: Okay. Now I know today we thought we’d…

Steve: Let’s talk about energy.

Mark: …talk about energy, yeah.

It’s obviously a very topical subject between oil and oil supply and the demands for oil and then, of course, the whole global warming climate change, green energy side, so it’s probably quite a interesting thing to talk about.

Steve: Yeah.

I have a vested interest because I’m involved in a sawmill and we have a lot of forest industry waste.

We use a very small part of it, just for our own dry kilns where we dry our lumber.

We also heat the mill, I mean the sawmill itself.

I mean it’s very cold up there in the winter.

It’s minus 30 degrees or whatever.

But, we use a…

Mark: Yeah. To be clear, you use the chips…

Steve: Not so much the chips.

I mean if you picture a log…

Mark: …or the sawdust. Yeah?

Steve: Yeah.

Again, the sawdust goes into it, it’s what’s known as hog fuel.

It includes bark, it includes broken branches or sometimes the logs come in and there are bits and pieces of dirty wood and stuff that all goes into this general category of what we call hog fuel.

So this is biomass when they talk about different sources of energy, biomass.

Now we leave a lot in the bush because when they bring in the logs they only bring in clean logs, so branches and the very small tops known as the rattails.

Because a tree, you know, starts, you know, three feet in diameter at the trunk, at the butt, and it’s tapered so that it ends up as a very small piece, which is the last shoot of the tree trying to go up to the sky kind of thing, right?

And the branches grow sideways.

You’ve seen a tree.

Mark: I understand how a tree works.

Steve: You’ve seen a tree.

So, anyway, all of the branches and the tops and all of this stuff is not used for anything.

Now we do ship our hog fuel to the pulp mill.

Mark: The stuff in the bush, though, that’s just left there?

Steve: It’s just left there.

Mark: Do you burn it or do you leave it?

Steve: In some cases they might burn it.

Because they burn and scarify and this tends to improve the performance of the forest land when we plant.

Mark: Right.

Steve: And I guess, to some extent, these are nutrients that are required in the forest.

Mark: Right.

Steve: We can’t strip it clean, but if you look at places like Sweden they pull a lot more out of the forest and biomass there is a huge part.

Like 25% of their energy comes from forest industry waste, so we could do more with our forest industry waste.

Mark: Right.

Steve: What is required is that the cost of energy increase so that we can justify making the investment because it’s not cheap and we have looked into it.

We went to Italy to see a very good bit of technology there where they use hot oil to drive the turbines, which means we don’t need a Steam Engineer.

For a small scale power station, as we would be look at building, we want to reduce our costs and a Power Engineer is an expensive person that has to be there 24 hours a day that we’d rather not have to have.

So we’ve looked into all of this, but the cost of doing it is much higher than the value of the energy.

Mark: Right.

Steve: So…but…

Mark: As in most things the market forces tend to provide incentives of disincentives to provide for green energy, I guess.

Steve: Well, that’s true.

Mark: Unless the government steps in with incentives.

Steve: Well, if they have these green, you know, carbon credits.

In Europe, a lot of places, a lot of the coal-fired stations are mixing in wood, whether in pellet form or some other form.

So that if 15% of their energy source is biomass then they’ve reduced their CO2 emissions by that amount because wood is CO2 neutral.

This is all carbon dioxide that’s above the surface of the earth, so the tree grows absorbing CO2 and when it dies it decomposes or it burns and it gives off CO2.

Mark: Right.

Steve: But it’s all CO2 neutral, so therefore you’re reducing the amount of CO2 that, in effect, you’re pulling up out of the ground and basically belching out into the air, right?

So if the government says or either they legislate you must have 30% wood, we’d love that.

Mark: Right.

Steve: You know if they said you must have 30% wood then we could get rid of our wood and get paid for it.

Mark: Right.

Steve: Because it costs us money to bring it in, right?

Mark: The wood waste you mean.

Steve: The wood waste, yeah. So, anyway, I’m interested in this.

And, of course, we see the price of oil, which crashed to, whatever it was, $40 some odd and I think it’s up to $70 now.

Mark: Right.

Steve: But, on the other hand, I was reading a book about China.

The growth of their economy and across the scale of that country, 1.3 billion people is growing at 7-8-10%, the increase in the number of cars, their appetite for oil.

And they’re out now all over the world competing with the big multinationals, the Shell and the BP and the Total out of France and now the Chinese are out there competing, so there’s this tremendous competition for oil.

They are finding new sources off the coast of Africa or they’re looking at the Antarctica, but by the same token if a country like China and India increase then there’s going to be tremendously increased demand.

What’s also happening is China, in order to get at the oil and as a newcomer, they’re going into places like Africa and they have made a major contribution to improving the economic situation in Africa building roads and infrastructure and railways and dams.

And, of course, Africa now finds that they have a lot of oil, so they’re starting to do better so they have more cars.

I can’t see that the price is oil is going to stay low.

Mark: Well, I mean I guess this argument or hypothesis and I guess you’re angling toward the peak oil hypothesis or that we’re going to run out or the price is going to go through the roof.

Steve: So we can get paid for our wood waste. You understand my…

Mark: Well I guess that’s your angle, but… I mean people have been talking about this for a long time, I mean since, I don’t know, the ‘70s at least.

We’re going to hit peak oil, which is the most oil we’ll ever have before our reserves start to be depleted forever…

Steve: Right.

Mark: …or just the fact that we’re running out, the price is going to be $150 a barrel.

But, in fact, the more the demand increases the more supply we seem to be finding, like there’s more oil today than ever before.

Steve: Right.

Mark: So there is that certain amount of scare mongering in that.

I mean people believe that, yes, we’re running out, but in fact that hasn’t proven to be the case, yet.

Steve: Right. But…

Mark: And…

Steve: Yeah?

Mark: …what’s more, if, in fact, we did start to run out, which would then drive the price up, then your wood waste energy source starts to make sense.

Steve: Or other high-cost oil…

Mark: Or high-cost oil, right.

Steve: …or natural gas, shale gas, all these other things.

Mark: Or this, whatever, undersea methane or whatever it is.

Steve: Yeah, there are lots of different options out there.

However, I still believe that…someone said we all have a tendency to overestimate short-term change and underestimate long-term change, so that people would overestimate how quickly this peak oil is going to be achieved.

But it’s like the story, you know if you have a pond, a lily pond, and the lilies double every day and they’re covering the pond, right, these lilies…

Mark: Right.

Steve: …on what day is the pond half full of lilies?

If it takes 30 days to fill the pond with lilies on which day is the pond half full of lilies?

It’s the 29th day.

Mark: Yes.

Steve: You understand my point.

Mark: Yes.

Steve: So it gets back to this idea that we tend to get all excited, oh, it’s going to change, it’s going to change.

It doesn’t quite change as quickly and then we, basically, let our guard down.

But, in the long run, there is no question that the demand is going to outstrip the supply, but there are fixes, you know, energy conservation, better utilization and stuff.

But the big change, in terms of the need for oil, is that up until I would say the ‘80s, economic growth really only took place in Europe and North America and Japan.

I’ve had a long involvement with China when I was learning Chinese and read a lot about their history and stuff.

If you look at China since 1949, from 1949 to 1979, if you take those 30 years, nothing happened in China in terms of economic growth, nothing.

In the last 20 years there has been phenomenal economic growth.

Mark: Right.

Steve: And they are now taking that capability where they, as a low-wage call it third world country, found the secret to rapid economic development.

They are very good at construction.

They build things fast, they’re good at production and stuff like that and they’re now fanning out and taking these lessons to other countries.

And I don’t know as much about India, but India is also developing.

So if we see development now starting to happen outside of North America, Western Europe, Japan, across 5/6th of the population of the world, then I think we’re going to start to see some very dramatic increases in demand for oil.

That’s my point, I rest my case, now move on to another subject.

I think I’ve squashed you pretty thoroughly on that subject.

Mark: You know I think to suggest that demand for oil is going to increase doesn’t take a Ph.D., but I’m not sure what your point is.

Okay, demand for oil is going to increase.

Steve: Right.

Mark: Are you worried that we’re going to run out of oil?

Are you worried that prices are going to become too high and that there will be riots because people can’t afford to drive their cars anymore?

I mean what’s your point, basically?

Steve: My point is, simply, that the price of oil is going to go up very high so that we can get paid for our wood waste.

I think that my truly altruistic and ecological…

Mark: Well, you made a statement earlier about supply or demand outstripping supply.

But I guess once the prices become…if that, of course, demand exceeds supply prices will go up and people will find alternative energy sources.

Steve: I agree with you there.

Mark: I mean I don’t think it’s anything we need to worry about, things will happen.

Steve: I agree with you there as well.

Mark: We need that, actually, to encourage development of alternatives.

Steve: Well, I mean I couldn’t agree with you more.

And I think, to some extent, one of the contributing factors to the economic crisis we’re in right now is the $150 oil.

However, we will get used to $150 a barrel oil because we used to have $5 a barrel oil.

Mark: Right.

Steve: And if someone had suggested when we had $5 a barrel oil that the economy of the world would continue to function at $50 a barrel people wouldn’t have believed them.

They’d say that would be a catastrophe and like half the people would be out of work, so I agree with you.

And if we have $1,000 a barrel oil people will find different ways and get by with less energy, so I firmly believe, I agree with you, that people will adapt.

Either they’ll find different sources or they’ll find ways of living that manage to do with less energy.

Mark: What bothers me are the artificial types of stimulus like carbon trading and carbon taxes…

Steve: Well, this depends on…

Mark: …and those kinds of things.

I just don’t think there’s a way to apply them evenly.

They’re artificial and so they provide artificial stimulus and encourage economic activity in areas that maybe there shouldn’t be economic activity.

Steve: Okay. But society is allowed to set certain…have certain values and if a majority of people….

For example, I’ve mentioned this before, in our forestry operation we have to invest $7 to $14 a cubic meter to renew the forest.

We plant, we scarify, we do a whole bunch of stuff.

There is no economic return on that stuff because our trees take 90 to 100 years to grow.

First of all, I’m not going to be here and, second of all, if I took that $7 a cubic meter and put it in the bank I’d be better off than trying to guess what those trees are going to be worth 90 years from now.

Mark: Right.

Steve: No economic case for it, except that the government says thou shalt reforest.

Mark: Right.

Steve: Because we like to see trees and, therefore, we look upon it not as an investment that’s going to be coming to maturity in 100 years, we look at it as a cost.

Mark: Right.

Steve: And so if the government says we think, the majority of people decide and, yes, there are scientists on one side and on the other side of the argument.

But if the government says we think that global warming is, you know, human-activity induced, global warming is a problem, (B) we are in a position to mitigate it and, therefore, we are going to force people to reduce their carbon emissions or encourage them to do so and one way is through these carbon credits.

I mean that’s a societal decision and then they can apply.

They can say, alright, you are a coal-fired or a gas-fired generating station, you have to use X amount of biomass or renewables that’s a law.

Yeah, they just put that in there.

Mark: A law I prefer more than some kind of a trading system.

Some kind of trading system is…

Steve: Well it depends what’s more effective, I have no idea.

I don’t understand this cap and trade, lots of stuff I don’t understand.

Mark: Yeah.

I mean I don’t thoroughly understand it either.

But they have some deal in the States now where they were going to auction off licenses — I can’t even remember — to major polluters.

And now they’re giving them away free and it’s all going to be based on which state you’re in, I’m sure.

Pretty soon any kind of a system like that is no longer going to be fair.

Steve: Is this brought to us by the same people who came up with all the derivatives and fancy financial instruments…

Mark: Maybe, maybe.

Steve: …clever people?

Mark: I mean I think initially they were hoping to raise money from auctioning off these pollution licenses or whatever they are.

Steve: And as with any other distortion of free trade it’s going to be used for other purposes.

And the Americans are already saying that they were going to discriminate against products that come from countries where they don’t feel that those countries are doing as much as the U.S.

in terms of reducing their carbon emissions or whatever, so there’s a whole protectionist thing that’s going to come into the picture, too.

M; Well there’s that and then, of course, this whole “Buy American” thing that’s been in the news here lately.

Steve: Well that’s a whole other issue, yeah.

Mark: They’ve said any money that’s targeted for infrastructure from their stimulus package has to source all their contracts through American businesses.

Steve: But, but, there was an article in the National Post, the Canadian newspaper, pointing out that the Americans…there’s several levels of public procurement, right?

There’s the federal, there’s the state and there’s the municipal.

Mark: Right.

Steve: And I think the federal level is open, it’s more the state and municipal level where they have this “Buy American.” Any country that has signed an agreement with the United States to open up the sort of secondary levels of public, you know, procurement to international competition, those countries are exempt from this provision.

Because Canada for all of our chest thumping and criticizing the U.S., the provinces and the municipalities, especially the provinces, have refused.

We have to have free trade agreements between the provinces because there are restrictions on trade between the provinces…

Mark: Right, right.

Steve: …and we don’t have free competition.

In other words, provincial procurement in Canada favors buy Canadian.

And because we wouldn’t sign those agreements we are now behind the eight ball vis-à-vis the Americans.

And we’re not the only ones; I mean all these different countries.

Everybody points to the other country as a bad actor and, yet, if you look around in the European market, Canada or any of these places, Japan, you name it, China, Korea, I can only imagine, is full of all kinds of these obstacles.

So the Americans aren’t the only ones.

Mark: No, I’m sure, I’m sure. Well, I think we…

Steve: …solved a few problems.

Mark: …solved a few problems there.

Hopefully that made things a little less clear for everybody.

Steve: We should have arguments on these things, Mark.

We end up agreeing too much, it’s not so much fun for people.

Mark: I know.

Steve: Okay.

Mark: Anyway, we’ll talk to you again next time.

Steve: Thank you.

Mark: Bye.

Steve: Bye.

Study the transcript of this episode as a lesson on LingQ, saving the words and phrases you don’t know to your database. Here it is!

Mark: Hello and welcome back to EnglishLingQ for another podcast from sunny Vancouver.

Steve: It sure is sunny. Hello.

It’s wonderful.

It’s what, 25 to 30 degrees centigrade?

Mark: Yeah. Today is the warmest day of the year, for sure.

Steve: Yeah.

Mark: It could end up being the warmest day of the year, period.

Steve: Well, here in Vancouver between May and September you get three glorious months and two bad months and it can literally be any month, it seems.

I mean I can remember the first of July terrible conditions.

I guess August is normally the best month.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: I think so.

Mark: In general. Mid July to mid August is the most guaranteed weather.

Steve: And you know the weather is so warm and yet here we are, sort of the Canadian sporting event of the year, the Stanley Cup Playoffs.

Although, both of the teams are in the United States, but there’s more interest in Canada than there is in the United States.

It’s exciting to watch, I guess it takes forever.

I guess they have to make enough money to pay all these high salaries to people, so they drag the season out.

I mean it is ridiculous to be playing hockey in June.

Mark: It is ridiculous to be playing.

In fact, I guess the owners make all their money in the playoffs.

So they have their budgets set so that the players’ salaries are all paid by the end of the year and if the teams do well in the playoffs the owners make money.

And the players want to be paid a lot of money and the owners, therefore, need to make that money.

So they have, as you say, a lot of games they play over the course of a season.

So by the time the playoffs start in mid April and the playoffs go on for a long time.

Steve: Right.

So you have to kind of close the curtains, shut out the sunlight and turn on the air conditioning, if you have it…

Mark: That’s right.

Steve: …and pretend it’s winter.

But there’ve been some exciting games and it’s interesting to see some of the sort of unsung heroes or the journeymen players.

Players who have been around a long time who don’t get a lot of publicity have been producing and some of the younger players that don’t get a lot of publicity.

The big stars have also been producing, but they haven’t been as dominant.

Mark: No.

Steve: It’s fun to see some of these other players really come through.

Like Maxime Talbot last night was outstanding.

He was definitely the best player there and he probably earns one-tenth, maybe not one-tenth, but a third of what Crosby and Malkin and these people make.

Mark: Yeah, but you know it’s a team game and on any given night anyone can be the hero…

Steve: Sure.

Mark: …especially in the Playoffs when the other team’s best defensive players are concentrating on stopping the opposition’s best offensive players.

Very often it’s someone else who kind of sneaks through and finds a little open ice because it gets pretty tight checking out there.

There’s a lot more opportunity to do good things offensively during the season than during the Playoffs where everybody is trying that much harder.

Steve: Yeah, for sure.

To me it’s the most exciting game.

I know, for most people in the world, soccer is the number one game, but for us hockey is the most exciting game.

I think in certain countries in the world like Sweden, Finland, Czech Republic, Russia, certain areas of the United States this is the biggest game.

Latvia is another country where it’s popular.

Mark: In Switzerland it’s quite popular, too.

Steve: Switzerland, yeah.

It’s a phenomenal game and a very international game.

Certainly the teams in the finals, you’ve got players from every country, Sweden, Finland, Czechs, Russians, Canadians and Americans.

Maybe I’ve left some out.

Mark: Right.

Steve: You know just to digress to language learning for a second, all those players speak English and speak English well.

I always find it annoying when people say that language learning is a matter of aptitude, I just don’t believe that.

There are all kinds of figures.

I was listening in Russian to the story of a famous Polish queen who was actually Hungarian and who was, you know, made a Saint by Pope John Paul some while ago.

But she spoke four languages and the people in the Courts of Europe spoke four or five languages.

Don’t tell me that just those people who were born in the Courts of Europe had a natural aptitude for language learning.

Mark: Well, as you often point out, I mean everyone in Sweden basically speaks English.

Steve: Right.

Mark: During the hockey game last night they had Don Cherry, who’s the Canadian cultural icon, who’s got a segment between periods during the hockey games on Hockey Night in Canada, which is the broadcaster of hockey games.

Anyway, every year at this time he introduces the top five or six or whatever it is prospects that are coming up.

I think it was the top six most highly-ranked prospects in the upcoming entry draft and of the six one was from Sweden.

I can’t remember his name, Victor Hedman or something like that.

At any rate, the other four guys are Canadian and they do their thing.

They say, you know, I’m so and so I played here.

I was coached by so and so.

My favorite player is whoever.

And then the Swedish guy goes and it’s unbelievable.

Like he’s a 16-17-year old Swede and he just, no problem; on national TV in fluent English.

He’s lived in Sweden all his life.

Steve: And I don’t believe that all the Swedes have a special gene that makes then good language learners.

Mark: Right.

Steve: I don’t believe in this aptitude thing.

Mark: No.

Steve: People in the United States, because they speak English and they consider English is good enough…and in Canada, Anglophone Canadians are no better…

Mark: No better.

Steve: …don’t learn languages well.

Mark: Right.

Steve: And in smaller countries or in certain circumstances…I mean in Russia in the 19th century the aristocracy all spoke French and Russian and possibly German and English.

It was normal, it was no big deal, they all did it and I don’t think they had any special aptitude that somehow other populations don’t have.

So it’s fun to see those players how they all get along.

I mean they’re all part of the team and it doesn’t matter where they’re from.

It’s kind of fun to see that.

Mark: Many of you may have heard this theme before, but we’ve talked about university professors, foreign university professors here, for example, who don’t speak English very well.

I mean they’ve probably worked here for 20 years; whereas, these hockey players come over and if they don’t speak English when they get here they pick it up pretty quickly.

Steve: Yeah.

Now you could say it’s opportunity, but it’s also attitude, it’s also attitude.

But, you know, we were both watching an interview with President Obama of the United States, first interview with French television.

And, of course, it’s not reasonable to expect the President of the United States to speak in a foreign language, I guess.

Mark: Right.

Steve: I guess.

But we expect that the Chancellor of Germany or the Prime Minister of France…all these other people can speak at least one other language.

I gather Chancellor Merkel can speak Russian as well as English.

It would be nice if the President of the United States could speak Spanish or French or Chinese or some other language.

Mark: Well I have a call into him.

Steve: Get him on LingQ.

Mark: Get him on LingQ.

I know a way he can do it.

Steve: Right. It needn’t cost a lot of money because he doesn’t have the funds.

Mark: Him and a hundred thousand of his closest friends.

Steve: Right.

Mark: We’ll put them on for a discount.

Steve: But you know it’s interesting, Mr. Obama said that the United States is one of the largest Muslim countries in the world.

Mark: You know I heard that and I kind of thought, why is he…

Steve: But we checked it up on Le Figaro.

That’s what he said.

So are there a million and a half Muslims in the United States, maybe?

Mark: I know.

Steve: Maybe, so let’s compare that, like one of the largest Muslim countries in the world.

I mean Russia is the largest country by area; it has, I don’t know, twenty million Muslims.

Mark: Right.

Steve: So how about France?

It’s probably 10% Muslim.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: That’s without going to the real Muslim countries.

Well India is the largest by population.

Mark: Right.

Steve: Indonesia, Pakistan, Egypt…

Mark: …Bangladesh… S; …Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia, Turkey; sixty-seventy-eighty million people.

What’s he talking about?

Mark: I have no idea.

Steve: China.

Mark: Even France and Britain have more Muslims than the U.S.

Steve: I know.

Mark: That was a strange thing to say.

I mean I can understand trying to curry favor with the Muslims, I guess that’s what he’s after.

Not that I think it’s going to do much good, but I mean that’s just simply not true.

Steve: No. But it’s amazing the sort of ignorance.

You know I have to mention when we’re talking about ignorance.

I listened to my Russian radio station Echo Moskvi and there are two things there that are quite interesting.

One is the Russian Government has appointed a committee and the title of the committee is Committee to Investigate the Falsification of History that is Damaging to the Interests of Russia.

That’s the name of the committee.

It’s not a committee on history, let’s see what’s out there, not a committee to exchange information with other countries, not a committee for objectivity in history, it’s a committee to identity the falsification of history that is harmful to the interests of the Russian State.

Mark: Right.

Steve: Now what is that?

That is purely, how are we going to rewrite history?

Anyway…

Mark: But that takes place here, all the do-gooder left-wing types trying to rewrite history and paint the West as a demon or downplay our role in any wars or…

Steve: You know what?

I don’t mind, there could be 10 different textbooks and they say different things and maybe they’re largely influenced one way or another.

I prefer that to the State saying we will police it so that nothing is written that is harmful to the interest of the State.

In other words, either you’re pushing for objectivity or you’re pushing for — and what I would most like to see – a variety of points of view.

Mark: Yeah, but you don’t get a variety. That’s my point, there is no variety.

Steve: Right.

Mark: All the teachers come from the same teachers colleges, from the same unions where there’s one way of thinking.

Steve: Right.

Mark: This is how it is and this is how the textbooks have to write it.

Steve: Okay. But let’s leave that, we’ve been on that theme before.

But let’s look at the other perspective, which is what happens in Russia.

So I was listening to a radio interview with this lady who is from the Duma, which is the Russian Parliament and she is the Deputy Leader of the second largest fraction, which basically supports Putin.

But it’s some kind of a mixture of nationalists and communists; it’s called the Just Russia Party.

The issue is that in Portugal there was a Russian woman who had a child and couldn’t look after the child.

So the child was raised by this Portuguese family who were sort of guardians and raised the child for six years in Portugal.

Then the mother wanted the child back and so the Portuguese Court ruled that the mother should have the child back because the child, in fact, was not put up for adoption by this Portuguese family.

The Portuguese family was just looking after it.

So then this girl goes back to Russia and there was some question about the mother was a suitable mother and blah, blah, blah.

So there was lots of discussion about the pros and cons, should a child always go to the natural mother and so forth and so on.

But what was very interesting was this woman, who is typical of the attitude that seems to come out of the Russian Duma and the governing circles in Russia, one of her main points was, you know, Americans come to Russia and adopt children.

And, apparently, there’s been like 55,000 Russian children adopted by American families and she says they go around the world adopting families.

Mark: Adopting children.

Steve: Excuse me, adopting children.

What is their purpose?

Are they trying to recruit soldiers for their upcoming wars?

That was her comment.

I mean, you know to attribute…

Now the fact that the Canadians and the Irish and the Australians and the Swedes all adopt internationally, to a similar extent as the Americans…

Mark: I mean you’d think the bigger issue would be why are there so many Russian kids up for adoption?

Steve: Well, they talked about it.

They recognize there are lots of social problems in Russia, but to attribute these kinds of motives.

I mean the Americans have to be pretty, pretty long-term thinking to be planning now for the army 20 years from now.

And, of course, they’re not the only ones that do this…

Mark: Right.

Steve: …it’s a whole social issue.

I mean I can see if Canada were a poor country and let’s say Japan or China were rich and every year there’s thousands of Canadian kids that are put up for adoption and taken elsewhere to be raised when our population is declining.

I would not be very happy with that situation, but I wouldn’t necessarily assume that it’s because the Japanese want to fill their armed forces with Canadian children.

It’s amazing what people come up with.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: It’s amazing.

Mark: For sure.

Steve: Yeah, but getting back to Barack Obama.

Yeah, he’s a sophisticated guy, if he could do an interview in French or in Spanish…

Mark: Yeah, but I mean I guess.

I mean Spanish would be of more use to him.

Steve: Relevance, yeah.

Mark: Relevance in the States.

French, yeah, but I mean, really, why is he going to speak French?

Steve: Yeah. Not necessarily French, no, no.

Mark: Unless out of interest.

Steve: Right.

Mark: We don’t really care what language he learns as long as he does it on LingQ and tells everybody.

Steve: That too, that too.

But I think it alters your perspective, just even knowing one other language.

I don’t want to get carried away with this thing, but it shows that you’ve made an effort to try to learn a little bit about another culture.

Mark: I don’t know, I don’t know.

Steve: No?

Mark: I mean some people like learning languages and some people don’t.

Steve: Maybe you’re right, maybe you’re right.

Mark: I don’t think it has any bearing on whether you’d make a good president or not.

I’m sure there are lots of people that speak any languages that you wouldn’t want as president.

Steve: This is true. You wouldn’t want me that’s for sure.

Mark: You know?

Steve: Right. So what do you think of the economic crisis?

We’re starting to see a few more positive indicators.

Mark: Seems to be.

The stock markets seem to have recovered much of what they lost…

Steve: Yeah.

Mark: …which is an encouraging sign.

I believe that the stock market is a leading indicator.

The stock market has to recovery before the economy.

Steve: It tends to be.

Mark: It tends to be a predictor.

It tends to drop, it tends to precede recessions and it tends to signal recovery.

Steve: To me it’s interesting.

You have those indicators or those economic statistics, which tell us what has happened.

So we’ve seen, for example, the sale of existing homes in the United States rose by some tremendous number, the largest year-to-year increase.

From May of 2008 to May of 2009 was the largest year-to-year increase in like 10 years or something.

Mark: Wow.

Steve: So that’s a very significant number.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: Certainly the stock market indicates people’s attitudes, anticipations.

Mark: Right.

Steve: Then there was the Conference Board of Canada, which is a leading economic think tank, did a survey which showed that Canadians are more optimistic about the future now than they have been in a long time, for years.

So that again shows the mood.

Mark: Right.

Steve: And, of course, it’s the mood that drives all this.

Mark: And it’s the mood that drives it all.

Because I mean I saw another statistic that said, I think, the number of foreclosures in the States or something had gone up, in fact, recently.

It was the highest on record or a big jump.

I can’t remember exactly the statistic, but it was a statistic that a year ago would have caused people to panic or at least cause a negative reaction.

Steve: Right.

Mark: It seems to have just kind of gone by.

The general sentiment seems to be on the positive these days.

Steve: Well there are several things there.

First of all, some of those bad debts and people who can’t afford to live in their homes they’ve got to be cleared out some how, so I don’t fully understand.

Maybe getting all of those foreclosures out of the way is a good thing, I don’t know.

Obviously the fact that people are buying more homes might be because the homes are so cheap, so somebody took a tremendous beating on those homes.

Mark: Right. But, again, as you say, it’s mostly the sentiment that we’re worried about.

Steve: Right.

Mark: I mean there are always people making money.

Every time someone’s losing money someone else is making money.

Steve: Well, that’s right.

Mark: So whether, you know, all those people that took a bath on the mortgage…whether they invested in those mortgage-backed securities or had to foreclose on their mortgage.

I mean they lost money, but someone else made that money.

Steve: Right, well someone is going to walk in there.

Someone who is prudent with their money is going to walk in there and buy the house at 60% of the value.

Mark: Exactly.

But my point is that it’s not like that money is disappearing and nobody is earning any money.

Throughout the crisis some people were making money, but it was more of the sentiment that people thought, oh-oh…

Steve: Right.

Mark: …things are going into the tank.

Steve: Yeah.

But if overall the value of people’s home declines and overall the value of stocks on the stock market declines…

Mark: Right.

Steve: …then people have less money.

Mark: Right.

Steve: Their net worth declines…

Mark: For sure.

Steve: …therefore they say I don’t have as much money as I thought.

I’m not going to go to Hawaii.

I’m not going to buy a car.

I’m not going to buy this and that…

Mark: Right.

Steve: …and it all tends to spiral down.

Mark: That’s true, yeah.

Steve: And so it’s when people start feeling more positive they buy stuff and then people start getting employed.

I think just to see the increase in the number of unemployed is declining; whereas, whatever it was, like a 10% increase in unemployment then it’s an eight percent increase.

It’s still an increase…

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: …but it’s less of an increase than the previous month, so that comes up as a positive indicator, you know.

Mark: Right.

Steve: But, yeah.

Mark: Well people have to start spending money and helping to turn the economy around because someone has to pay for all the money the governments are forking out…

Steve: Well, that’s right.

Mark: …through all the different…

Steve: Well, it’s going to be.

With the amount of money they’re spending if we have sustained low growth than the deficit burden is going to be horrendous.

Mark: I know. I mean to me I just don’t…

Steve: Yeah. I don’t know.

Mark: I think it’s wrong, all this money they’re forking out to …

Steve: But maybe, first of all, they may not spend it all.

Mark: Right.

Steve: And that perhaps the feeling was that they had to, you know, appear to be doing something.

Mark: Right.

Steve: That this was all part of getting people to feel a little more confident about the future.

Mark: Right.

Steve: But…

Mark: I mean I guess if things turn around here and the positive momentum continues maybe they’ll come out smelling like a rose.

Steve: Right.

Mark: But we’ll have to see. But it’s sure an awful lot of money for the States.

Steve: Especially for this General Motors buyout.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: And in Canada…

Mark: And in Canada, too.

Steve: …the same on a per capita basis.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: It’s the same.

Whereas, the forest industry that I’m interested in, far more people out of work; nothing, no help for them.

Mark: Well, that’s the thing.

The thing that bugs me the most, I guess, about these handouts is why are you handpicking industries to support and letting others fail?

Steve: Right.

Mark: You’re taking money from some industries and giving it to others.

Steve: Right.

Mark: I mean that’s just not right.

Steve: No.

Mark: Either you give money to all industries, which should take the form of a tax cut…

Steve: Including LingQ.

Mark: …including LingQ or don’t give them any.

You can’t handpick, it’s just not right.

But I mean that’s what governments do, they’re buying votes.

Steve: Yes.

Mark: That’s, unfortunately, the case.

Steve: Yeah.

Mark: Anyhow, I think that’s going to do it.

Steve: There it is. That’s our run for the day.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: We do appreciate any feedback, we don’t get a lot.

We’d like some arguments.

Get some people to phone in and tell us we’re stupid, we can take it.

Mark: Don’t just turn us off.

Steve: Yeah.

Mark: Tell us we’re stupid and tell us why.

Steve: Tell us something we don’t know.

Mark: Okay. We’ll talk to you next time.

Steve: Bye for now.

Study this episode and any others from the LingQ English Podcast on LingQ! Check it out.

Mark: Hello and welcome back to EnglishLingQ, Mark here with Steve.

How’s it going today?

Steve: Fine, Mark, nice to be here again, as usual.

You know I was just in Boston visiting with your brother and his family.

I was very impressed with Boston; it’s a very nice city.

It combines sort of green parks and leafy neighborhoods and you have lakes, a river and then you have the ocean and old homes and historical buildings.

It’s really a very nice city and we enjoyed being with the family there.

Mark: Right.

I never spent that much time in Boston.

I’d kind of go in and out when I was there at university in Connecticut, but I know it always had the reputation of being a very nice city and what little I saw of it seemed very nice, but I never spent much time there or did any exploring in that area.

Steve: I went to Harvard.

Of course you went to Yale and you used to play hockey against Harvard and so forth.

Mark: Right.

Steve: But I went to Harvard.

And, of course, it’s a nice campus; it’s not as nice as Yale.

I went to the various language departments to exchange views.

They looked at me with a certain amount of apprehension.

Mark: Right.

Steve: Anyway, it was kind of interesting.

It made me think of the U.S.

and all the things that are happening in the U.S.

and, of course, how President Obama is having to deal with all these problems of the economic crisis and yet he has an agenda to introduce reforms and one area, of course, is in education.

It seems that he has some willingness to take on the teachers unions and all of the forces that want to sort of maintain the education system the way it is.

And, really, the education system hasn’t changed over the last 100 years; it’s the same basic idea.

We think that at LingQ we’re on the cutting edge of a different approach.

Mark: Right.

Steve: Most people inside the education establishment just want to pick and choose a few little elements of technology, but they’re not really prepared to change the model.

Mark: Well they’re essentially looking at how can we do what we currently do in a more…I don’t want to say clever way, a more appealing way or a fancier way using technology, but they’re not really interested in new models.

I mean I think if you look at innovation in industry, certainly that’s an industry that has not seen its share of advancements in the last 100 years.

Steve: Well it’s so difficult because it’s so bureaucratic and such a big organization.

There’s no real opportunity for innovation to happen, except that smaller company like LingQ and others.

If we can somehow access…I mean most people don’t have a lot of money to spend.

Mark: Right.

Steve: I mean they’ve already paid for the education system through their taxes, so they don’t want to spend more money; although, private schools are popular with some people.

And that’s where I think this whole idea of vouchers is a good idea.

Where parents or other people who want to learn… If the taxpayer is going to fund education then fund the learners more and fund the established institutions less.

Mark: Well that’s the thing.

I mean anyone with innovation like ours, for instance, has to somehow break the stranglehold that the government monopolies have on education and, obviously, that’s a big challenge.

But a voucher system would go a long way toward enabling that because then, hopefully, you wouldn’t have to deal with the large institutions because anyone could open a school.

As long as they were successful and people wanted to send their kids there and presumably there’d be some sort of a required curriculum, they can be a lot more flexible than the enormous educational institutions that exist today.

Steve: Yeah.

You know the problem is the commitment that any established institution has to the way it operates.

You know it’s interesting, right now in the car industry Fiat is going to come in and reform General Motors or at least Chrysler.

Mark: Right.

Steve: So why couldn’t Chrysler reform Chrysler?

Why does it take Fiat?

Mark: Right.

Steve: Well often it does take a different perspective to bring about change.

Mark: And there’s no guarantee that Fiat is going to make it happen.

Steve: No guarantee.

Mark: Because Daimler-Benz tried to reform Chrysler, too, and that didn’t go so well.

Steve: No. But it reminds me of an interesting discussion I had this morning.

There was a recent report done in Toronto showing that employers… What they did, they sent out job applications, one where the applicant had an obviously English name and then the others had either Chinese names or Indian names and there were more call backs, like 16% call backs for the English names and 11% call backs for the names that appeared not to be English names.

So I was speaking to someone who works with the Immigration Department and I said to them, I said you know it’s not very useful to keep on putting out these negative reports, it doesn’t encourage the immigrants.

There is a problem with the ability to communicate and after 10 years of a lot of immigrants in the workplace, the employer is…there may be some prejudice employers, but largely the employers want someone who can communicate.

If you continue to send out the message that the employers are prejudice you’re just going to discourage the immigrants.

I said what you need to do is to have a website where you are promoting the examples; using the examples of the successful immigrants.

I, of course, suggested we could tie this to LingQ and they could learn from it and blah, blah, blah.

He said to me, you know what — speaking from someone within the government who is sort of in sympathy with what the political leaders want to do – he said it’s impossible to move the bureaucracy.

The bureaucracy has no interest in doing this kind of thing.

The bureaucracy is interested in making the problem seem bigger so that they can get more funding.

Mark: Right.

Steve: This is from a person that’s in government, he’s telling me this.

But a person who was brought in, he’s saying, they’re interested in maintaining the present system, sort of pointing out the problems to justify more money for more of the same kinds of programs.

So he said try to get a private sector person to fund that kind of initiative.

I just thought it was an interesting reflection.

Mark: Right.

Steve: I think this is true in education, in whatever, as I’ve pointed out.

That people are always saying 40% of the population can’t read and all of these sorts of dramatic scenarios in order to get more funding.

The major motivation is always get more funding not to improve what we’re doing.

Mark: I mean I guess it all comes back to…not to keep beating on the same tom-tom all the time, but you know this whole issue of for profit and not for profit and you’re for profit and you’re just in it because you want to make money.

Fundamentally it doesn’t matter what business or industry you’re in, for profit, not for profit, charity, environmental cause, government department, you’re motivated to do better.

That’s what motivates people, so it’s not surprising that bureaucrats are motivated to increase the amount of money that their department gets, increase the number of employees, increase their pay.

I mean whether they like to believe that they’re for profit or not, it doesn’t matter what field you’re in, the basic motivation is there for everybody.

And so whether you start out with the best of intentions in whatever field, eventually it starts to become more about what’s going to be good for me.

Steve: Right.

Mark: That seems to be the way it goes.

Steve: Well I mean every organization is concerned about what’s good for that particular organization.

Mark: Right.

Steve: So, in a way, the smaller the organization, the greater number of different organizations, the greater the flexibility.

I mean I love public facilities and we’ve said this before.

A nice park is great.

I don’t mind the fact that they plant flowers here and we get to, you know, and the environment that we live in… I’m not in favor of cutting all public facilities down to zero, by no means.

I think it’s a great idea to have a lot of things that are public and free, like parks, like libraries and so forth.

But governments don’t only bring us good things and, certainly, very few wars are started by private industry.

Wars tend to be started by governments.

Mark: Right.

Steve: And so we can maybe move on to another subject, which is sort of some of the world hot spots.

We have the situation in Sri Lanka where, certainly for a long time, I think in Canada people were not in sympathy with the Tamil Tigers because they were a pretty vicious terrorist organization.

Now we’re seeing in the paper that because the Sri Lankan Government has been able to kill the leader (I won’t even try to pronounce his name) they are now carrying on as if the Tamils don’t exist.

Apparently there has been tremendous killing of women and children and dismembering and the Head of the sort of Sri Lankan Government is sort of being presented as a king and a god and, yeah, we defeated the Tamils in this tremendous sort of triumphalism; whereas, 15% of their population is Tamil.

Mark: Right.

Steve: I mean, you know, is there no room there for some sense of, okay, they lost, the Tamil Tigers were defeated, but still we want to recognize them as a valid independent group?

It’s pretty discouraging to read the news coming out of Sri Lanka these days.

Mark: I would imagine, though, that…I mean if that’s the government, at least, expressing those positions, I would imagine that that reflects the position of the general population.

Steve: Sure.

Mark: I mean that’s been a long, drawn out conflict and the Tamils have been reeking a lot of havoc there.

I don’t know how many people have died, but many of the Sri Lankans — the majority there — have been affected.

So I would imagine that now that it’s all finally said and done there’s a certain amount of gloating going on.

Not that that excuses the behavior versus the Tamils, but I mean it’s not really that surprising that would happen.

Steve: Right.

Mark: You would hope that the people in charge, who should hopefully have a better sense of things, would want to make amends with the Tamils and try and insure that this kind of thing doesn’t keep on happening, but that doesn’t look like that’s the case.

Steve: It’s pretty discouraging.

Mark: Yeah.

Especially such a small minority, I mean it’s 15%.

I mean it’s not small, but you vastly outnumber them.

It’s not that difficult to be a little…

Steve: …accommodating…

Mark: …forgiving and try and reach an agreement of some kind.

Steve: I mean we live with the situation here in Canada where we have (whatever it is) 23-4% of the population that’s French-speaking and throughout our history there have been struggles between the French-speaking and the English-speaking populations.

I’m sure the French-speaking, you know, had hoped that they would have a bigger share of say Western Canada as it was developed…

Mark: Right.

Steve: …and they would have loved not to have lost the Battle of Quebec.

Mark: Right.

Steve: However, they’ve been able to sort of create a position for themselves, one that’s not always appreciated by all English Canadians.

I mean there continues to be a certain amount of friction there, but basically, you know, I think the relationship is quite mature.

When you see the way minorities are treated in places; I mean Turkey is another example.

I mean we have the whole situation in the Balkans and lots of places where there seems to be…I’m not that familiar with the situation in Europe and in Belgium and in Spain.

Probably a greater effort to try to accommodate regional, you know, cultures, yet without having to give up the integrity of the whole country.

Not easy to do because you probably have the hotheads on both sides.

Mark: I mean I think that has always been and will always be.

I don’t think there’s much that can be done.

Steve: No.

Mark: I mean there’s always our group versus your group, it’s the basic human condition.

Steve: Well, that’s right.

Mark: And, you know, once we separate our group from your group then we’ll find separations within our own group that we can get excited about.

That reminds me, today in the paper I read an article put out by the (whatever he’s called) Official Languages Commissioner or something in Canada.

Steve: Right.

Mark: You didn’t hear this?

Steve: Okay, what nonsense did he have to say?

Mark: He said that the Vancouver 2010 has to do something quickly…

Steve: Right.

Mark: …or else the games will not be fully bilingual for all.

Steve: Right.

Mark: That the French Canadians will not receive the proper French signage and so on during the Olympics.

Like, for instance, they raided the Vancouver Airport, the worst airport in Canada for displaying French prominently.

I mean how many French people are coming to the Olympics?

Steve: You know it’s so silly, it’s so silly.

I mean the Vancouver Airport has French.

Mark: Right.

Steve: It has lots of bilingual stuff, but it also has Chinese, it has Korean, Spanish, it reflects the travelers that are coming through that airport.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: I mean if the Olympics were held…I don’t know what happened when they had the Olympics in Montreal.

Mark: Right.

Steve: But I think if they had the Olympics in Quebec City…

Mark: …there’d be a lot more French than English.

Steve: And I don’t mind that.

Mark: Absolutely not.

Steve: Because that’s what they are.

If they had the Olympics in, I don’t know some part of Quebec where there was…I mean Montreal is, whatever, 40% English-speaking, but if they’re in an area that’s predominantly French-speaking, that’s their local color.

If they have it in the German-speaking part of Switzerland or in the French or the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland, let them show off their local language.

What’s the problem?

Mark: I mean this clown has got to justify his salary, I guess.

But, realistically, how many people from Quebec are going to come here and say, hey, how come everything is in English?

I thought everybody would speak French to me.

I mean everybody realizes nobody speaks French in Vancouver.

Everybody in Quebec…nobody expects to be spoken to and handled in French, it’s just solely this guy and his department.

Steve: I mean let’s face it; Whistler is an English-speaking town in an English-speaking province.

Now, French will have pride of place in the Olympics because it was Pierre Coubertin…

Mark: Sure, yeah.

Steve: …who started the Olympic movement and they always use French and I’m sure that they’re falling over backwards to find people who can speak French and blah, blah, blah.

Mark: Right.

Steve: But, I mean let’s not get carried away.

Mark: Yeah. No, I know, but the headline was like, you know…

Steve: …or else.

Mark: Vancouver 2010 has to do something now or else.

Steve: Well, you know it reminds me of…I mean people are so, you know, myopic.

He is the Commissioner for Languages, so what’s important for him is important for everyone.

Mark: Right.

Steve: No. That’s a childish, stupid thing to say Mr. Commissioner.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: And if the tables were turned and somebody from Ottawa went into Quebec and said you have to have more English signs, there would have been hue and cry in Quebec.

Mark: Yeah, for sure.

Steve: This is our chance to show off who we are and, because in Quebec they’re far more sort of cultural nationalists than English Canadians, they would specifically want to reduce the English content and show off their French. And go to it!

Mark: Absolutely.

Actually, that reminds me.

Another thing he said in this article was that Supreme Court Judges in Canada should have to be bilingual.

Steve: Right.

Mark: Because sometimes they have to write legislation in both languages and we have to make sure that the legislation is the same in both languages.

Steve: You know it’s an interesting point because most Canadians are not bilingual.

And I would say that the vast majority of English Canadians are not bilingual.

Like I don’t think there’s 10%…

Mark: …truly bilingual.

Steve: Truly, about five percent.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: And I have, of course, talked about this because the way we teach languages in school is a joke, it’s a joke.

It’s a colossal waste of money, it’s a disgrace.

Mark: Although I’m surprised that people that you meet from Ottawa, a lot of them speak French.

Steve: Oh, from Ottawa?

Mark: Yeah, and, obviously, from Montreal.

Steve: Oh, sure, but they’re surrounded. I mean that’s different.

Mark: Yeah, that’s right.

Steve: And so, obviously, people who are from… Ottawa is 30 or 40% French.

Mark: Oh, it’s that many?

Steve: Oh, it’s that many, yeah.

Mark: Oh, okay.

Steve: And in Ottawa people are conscious of one day I might want to work for the Federal Government.

Mark: Right.

Steve: So French has a relevance there for them and they can use it.

They can hear the radio, they can read newspapers.

They’re an hour from Montreal.

Mark: Right.

Steve: They’re across the boarder from Quebec.

Mark: Yeah, right.

Steve: Yeah, that I can understand.

But it’s not realistic to expect that people in Vancouver are going to be bilingual.

Mark: Right.

Steve: So when you say that for this position, like to be a Supreme Court Judge, you’re going to have your whole career…you’re living and working in British Columbia, you have no dealings with anyone who speaks French.

Mark: Right.

Steve: You are an outstanding judge.

You are a brilliant legal mind.

Mark: Right.

Steve: You’re a prime candidate to be on the Supreme Court, but all your life you should be on LingQ learning French so that when you reach the age of 60 they can appoint you to the Supreme Court.

Mark: Right.

Steve: I mean I just think that’s not realistic.

Mark: No.

Steve: That’s not realistic.

They can have the trial in one or other languages, they can provide translation, they can provide interpretation and I don’t think that it should be required to be a French-speaking judge.

Mark: Absolutely ridiculous.

Translation is not that difficult a thing to do.

You can have a triple translation done if you really need to.

Steve: And I think with regard to politicians, again, there’s no point in having a rule that you must be bilingual.

The fact of the matter is that if you can’t speak French you’re probably not going to get votes in Quebec.

Mark: Right.

Steve: So that the reality of the situation is going to mean that people who go into politics are all going to work on their French.

Mark: Right.

Steve: You know. But, no, I think that’s perfectly silly.

But he says all kinds of silly things.

He said that they should make it a rule that everyone graduating from a university in Canada should speak French.

Mark: Yeah. So nobody is going to graduate?

Steve: No one is going to graduate. But you’re going to force people?

Here, you can’t speak French?

Come here!

Listen to me now.

Here’s French, learn it.

You know it just doesn’t work that way.

Mark: No.

Steve: You can’t force people.

Mark: No. Anyway…

Steve: Anyway.

Mark: Anyway, we’re paying for that guy.

Steve: So, yeah. Well I should be the Commissioner for Languages in Canada!

Mark: I know.

Steve: I’d change a few things.

Mark: Start a campaign…

Steve: Start a campaign.

Mark: …on the Internet, a petition.

Steve: Learn Spanish.

Mark: Anyway, with that we’ll sign off for today.

Steve: Okay.

Mark: We’ll pick it up again next week.

Steve: Thank you for listening.

Want to study this episode as a lesson on LingQ? Give it a try!

Mark: Yeah.

I think they could try and do things to reduce the…make it a little less onerous, for instance.

I mean in this day and age you shouldn’t have to move to Ottawa, for instance.

Steve: Right.

Mark: You should be able to do it, you know, over the Internet or that kind of thing.

Steve: I mean I agree with you.

Sitting in Parliament where they’re all yakking at each other and behaving like a bunch of monkeys is bad for the image of democracy.

Mark: For sure.

Steve: And so then, of course, the other issue with democracy is the way in which, you know to some extent, the idea of democracy itself becomes a little ideological and so the Americans are out promoting democracy in the world.

Mark: Right.

Steve: So, I mean in some countries, yeah, we have democracy in Venezuela or in I guess it’s Bolivia and they vote in governments that are not very…

Mark: …democratic…

Steve: …and quickly start changing the laws so they can stay president for life.

Mark: Well, I saw where in Russia they just fired…or there was some head of the judiciary or something that was able to vote down motions.

I don’t remember the exact details, but it was a potential impediment to Putin becoming president again and all of a sudden now that guy’s been canned.

The legislature voted to remove that position or something, so yet another Czech is removed there.

Steve: Right. But Russia is not considered a very democratic country, with all due respect to Russians.

Mark: Right.

Steve: I mean the government controls the media and there was a certain amount of intimidation during the election, so it’s not really a free democratic system.

Even the Russians themselves recognize that they don’t have an independent judiciary, so a lot of the pieces are missing there.

But even where you have a better setup, people can slide from a properly-functioning democracy into a situation where people take over who start to corrupt.

Mark: Well like in Venezuela.

Steve: Like in Venezuela or like what happened in Nazi Germany and so forth, so one has to be always vigilant.

And that’s where I think, obviously, even in Venezuela, I mean if the people want Hugo Chavez to be president for life and they vote for it then that’s their democratic wish and that’s fine.

Mark: Right.

Steve: The problem can arise when all of a sudden in Venezuela the president doesn’t respect the independence of the judiciary or doesn’t allow newspapers to print criticism, so I think the freedom of the press…

I was once listening to Russian on this Echo Moskvi my favorite Russian radio station; they were talking about corruption in Russia.

And this one Russian commentator said, you know, there’s no point in doing what the Chinese do, which is shoot people.

You know so and so is corrupt, we shoot him to make an example.

We shoot a few, 10, 100; it doesn’t matter in those countries.

He said, what we need to have is we need to have an independent judiciary and freedom of the press and freedom of expression and less government interference in all spheres, especially in economic life, because a lot of the corruption has to do with things that the government controls.

Mark: Right.

Steve: And so if the government says you want to start a factory you pay me so much or you want to do this you pay me.

The smaller the role of government the less opportunity for that kind of corruption.

Mark: Right.

Steve: And if there is an independent judiciary then if a government official is abusing his power at least there’s some place to go or if there’s freedom of the press then I can go to the newspapers.

Mark: Right.

Steve: But in a country where you don’t have freedom of the press and you don’t have an independent judiciary you’re kind of at the mercy of the government and then the government can, because they control the press, insure that they get “elected”, you know.

Mark: Right.

Steve: But in countries where you don’t have these traditions (I’m looking at Afghanistan) and in countries where they don’t have enough to eat and where they’re all shooting each other, democracy is probably not at the top of their list of things that they’re wishing for.

Mark: No.

And if there was a democratic vote they’d be trying to vote in their buddies who could then go and wipe out the other guys that have been irritating them for so long.

Steve: Well, that’s right.

And, of course, there are countries where there’s always a struggle between the secularists and the more religious groups, especially in some of these Islamic countries.

And, conceivably, you could have maybe 30-40% of the population that favors a very fundamentalist Islamic group and maybe the other secular group is divided between the conservatives and the leftists and the communists and some separatist independent group over there.

And so all of a sudden your 30% independent fundamentalists come in and their view is that all laws come from God.

So if you have a democracy where the parliament votes in laws that are based on the authority of the elected parliament that’s a sacrilege.

Mark: Right.

Steve: Because people don’t make laws, you know, Allah makes laws.

Mark: Right.

Steve: So, anyway, how do you change that culture?

Mark: I don’t know.

Steve: I don’t think we’re going to change it today in this discussion.

Mark: No, I don’t think so, I don’t think so.

You wonder with the Americans in Iraq whether…I mean their goal, of course, is to try and institute a functioning democracy in Iraq and establish, at least, a functioning democracy in the Middle East, a functioning Muslim democracy in the Middle East.

I don’t know if there is one at the moment.

Steve: Considered to be the most successful democratic Muslim state today is Indonesia and/or the Muslim people in India who regularly participate in the elections and do so in a responsible manner.

Mark: But they’re not in the Middle East.

Steve: No, not in the Middle East.

Mark: I mean obviously the Middle East has been such a powder keg for so long, I think the hope is that Iraq could be used as a model.

Can that happen, I mean given what you’re saying about laws being handed down from God?

There’s a certain contradiction there.

Steve: Well, of course, don’t forget…yeah, I don’t know…I mean Syria is not an Islamic state.

Iraq under Saddam Hussein was not an Islamic state.

Mark: No, right.

Steve: It wasn’t a democratic state.

Mark: No.

Steve: And I think that there all kinds of different forces in Iraq.

There are the Shiah and the Sunni Muslims or the Curds who obviously have their own ethnic agenda and there are, I’m sure, a lot of secularist-type people.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: I mean they had quite a successful election given the circumstances, but I guess there are just so many people pulling in different directions.

Mark: Right.

Steve: So it’s a bit like Yugoslavia.

Once the lid was lifted it off it led to people settling scores and that kind of thing.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: In the long run whether Iraq can succeed, it would be nice.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: I mean it’s been at an unbelievable cost in human life.

Hopefully, yeah, things settle down.

But, you know it brings up this whole issue of peace.

One of the things that’s interesting about learning languages is that you start to hear about events in the world from different perspectives.

So I’m listening to my Russian radio station and they’re interviewing people from Afghanistan and, apparently, there’s been a whole delegation of Afghan politicians who have descended on Moscow.

Of course their main goal there is to get aid from Russia.

Mark: Right.

Steve: And Russia has had a long history with Afghanistan before the very bloody war.

They were neighbors when those central Asian countries were part of the Soviet Union, so to hear those discussions.

I mean I think part of the problem is we only ever see the problem from our own perspective.

So I think languages are good, you can hear another person’s perspectives.

You know today I had lunch in an Iranian restaurant, it was quite good.

It was a stew; it was like $7, it was quite cheap.

And they had the Farsi radio blaring and music, yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, and Arabic script dashing across the screen of their TV.

But I’m saying you know I wish I could understand Farsi…

Mark: Right.

Steve: …and I might have a little better understanding of their perspective.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: But, you know, that probably doesn’t help either.

The French and the German they all understood each other and they went to war twice in the last century.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: And I’m sure the Tamils and the Sinhalese in Sri Lanka speak the same language or understand each other’s language.

Mark: I’m sure they don’t want to read what the other guys are writing about them.

Steve: Well, that’s right. Maybe that will just make them angry.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: I don’t know.

Mark: No.

Steve: Well it seems like even in the Middle East there is no question that in a totally ideal world that if you had a country that consisted of Jordan, Lebanon, Israel, West Bank, Gaza, all that as one country.

Mark: Right.

Steve: I mean Israel has most of the seacoast, which Jordan doesn’t have.

Mark: Right.

Steve: Jordan, in fact, is an artificial country, was created out of Palestine and the king there is originally from Saudi Arabia.

But it’s just not practical.

There is just no way because there’s so much bitterness, in theory at least.

Mark: Right.

Steve: Not only is there bitterness, but there are so many different agendas.

Even in a country like Israel you have the Orthodox Jews who have their thing, which is like totally, I don’t know, out of the 14th century and you have the Muslim fundamentalists who are out of the 12th century.

Mark: It doesn’t matter how small your pie is there’s always people that are willing to…

Steve: I know.

Mark: There’s always in-fighting in different groups because it’s always about looking out for your own group versus other groups out there.

Steve: I mean families can’t even get together.

I mean we read so much about family violence and so forth and so on.

Mark: Right.

Steve: I guess it’s unrealistic to expect.

I mean even amongst the Palestinians they’re all fighting each other.

Mark: Yeah, different sects.

Steve: The Hamas and the Hezbollah and I don’t know what other groups they have there and so…we’re a pretty bad bunch the human race.

But, in the meantime, we have to keep on the bright side.

Mark: That’s right.

So I guess we shouldn’t be knocking our political system here too badly.

I mean it more or less works.

Steve: Well, you know, absolutely.

You know I was listening, there’s a service on the Internet called TED (t-e-d), which puts out these videos of famous people talking about different subjects.

And, by the way, I’ve gotten permission to put audio and text from that site on LingQ in our Library.

Mark: Right.

Steve: But they had one presentation there by Isabel Allende who wrote a number of books Hija de la fortuna and whatever, books, and she was talking about the need for passion.

And she went on and gave an example of some woman in East Africa who plants trees or saves orphans or whatever and she’s totally passionate about it and so forth and so on and we need passion to make things happen.

Mark: Right.

Steve: You know what? I think less passion is a good thing.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: You know?

Fifty-one percent or whatever, we had a very apathetic voter turnout.

Mark: Right.

Steve: Maybe that’s a good thing.

I would rather have people apathetic than having them drive around with machine guns mounted on the back of pickup trucks shooting at each other.

Mark: Or out having big demonstrations in support of one party or the other.

Steve: Something to be said for apathy.

Mark: Well, I mean, yeah, partly. Obviously, people are comfortable.

Steve: Well, that’s right.

Mark: If they weren’t comfortable they would be less apathetic.

Steve: Well, that’s right.

Mark: Things are more or less working, so, okay, yeah, that’s fine.

We don’t really need to vote.

I guess there are countries…like in Australia you have to vote, do you not?

Steve: I’m not against that.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: I’m not against that.

Mark: Right.

Steve: Compulsory vote. I’m not against that at all.

Mark: No.

Steve: It’s a civic duty.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: I mean you have to vote like you have to serve on a jury.

You can’t park wherever you want.

You know there are rules.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: So you belong to this society and you have to vote because that’s how we determine how we should run the country…

Mark: That’s right.

Steve: …and tax people and so forth and so on.

Mark: I mean I think that’s probably a good system.

It can’t be that difficult to implement.

Steve: No. They do it over there we can do it here.

Mark: Yeah. Anyhow, we’ve probably…

Steve: We’ve covered a few subjects; didn’t solve too many.

Mark: No.

Steve: Alright. I hope this is helpful to people learning English.

Mark: Lots of terminology related to politics and so on.

So, again, let us know.

Steve: Let us know what you like to hear about.

Mark: Exactly.

We’ll talk to you again soon.

Bye-bye.

Steve: Bye for now.