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

LingQ cofounder and Godfather of the internet polyglot scene Steve Kaufmann shares his language learning goals with us in today’s episode.

Elle: Hi, everyone.

It’s me Elle  and welcome to episode four of the English LingQ podcast.

Remember if you want to study this video as a lesson on LingQ, the link to the lesson is in the description.

So today I’m joined again by

Steve Kaufmann.

Steve, how

Elle: are you?

Steve: I’m fine. Thank you Elle. How are you?

Elle: I’m great.

Thank you.

How was your Christmas?

Steve: Well, it was a more limited than normal, um, because of the COVID restrictions.

Um, but, uh, it was pleasant.

Um, we were able to meet with, uh, with Mark and his family sort of outside and exchange gifts and stuff.

The rules were, uh, no, Christmas dinner.

Uh, you know, it was like everyone under one roof.

So if you’ve been living under one roof with someone, you are allowed to get together with them, otherwise,

even your bubble was, it was not allowed theoretically, although I’m sure a lot of people didn’t necessarily follow that, but yeah, we’re past that now looking forward to the new year.

Elle: Excellent.

Excellent.

Um, yeah, I also had Christmas with uh  bubble, I guess it’s not really breaking the rules because my husband’s parents, who live next door, to us, uh, look after our son.

So it’s yeah, the guidelines were kind of unclear, but, but in that sense, clear, I guess if your caregiver is having your child on christmas Eve, I think it’s okay christmas day to also… but anyway.

Steve: And when we consider when we consider that the premier of the province was going to break his own rules until he was caught.

And then he said, Oh, I’m sorry.

Okay.

I won’t do that.

So.

Yeah, I think we just have to be a little bit reasonable.

I didn’t go to a sports bar and shout and do karaoke with a bunch of people.

I don’t know.

So…

Elle: Exactly.

Yeah.

I think these restrictions help stop the 50-person Christmas party.

Yeah.

So that’s good.

Yeah.

But, um, yeah..

Steve: You, you were telling me that, uh, that, uh, your husband and your father-in-law have a tradition of, uh, going crabbing and, and, and prawning, uh, every, uh, 24th of December, then they bring home a big catch and, and you guys have a big, uh, seafood feast.

How was that?

Elle: Yeah, it was delicious.

Yeah.

They go out every Christmas Eve they drop a trap for prawns, a trap trap for crabs, just off West Vancouver, around where you live and yeah, great haul, I think eight crabs and around 50 prawns this year so….

What, what

Steve: percent, I mean, I’ve been crabbing there and, and, uh, depending on the time of year, you get a lot of small crabs.

You get a lot of females which have to go back.

What percentage of the crabs were legal size males that they could take home?

Have you any idea?

Elle: Uh, I think it’s usually, I mean, I’ve been many times I didn’t go on Christmas Eve, but.

It’s usually like even 50% are thrown back.

Yeah.

Thrown back.

Yeah.

Steve: Yeah.

Easily, easily.

50% are thrown back.

Yep.

Elle: We’re really strict because we have this measuring device, this plastic

Steve: I think most people

Elle: are.

Yeah, you have to be, if we want people to be able to do this, you know, forever, then we have to have to go by the rules.

But yeah, it’s really sweet this time of year too, the meat, and the prawns in the winter and the crabs

shell is very soft, so yeah, it’s just delicious.

Steve: Wow. Okay, good.

Elle: But, um, yeah, I wanted to get you on today to talk about your goals, language learning, and otherwise for 2021.

Um, yeah.

What are you up to?

Steve: Uh, well, I have, let’s say I have two sets of goals.

I have goals with regard to my own language learning.

And then I also have a goal with regards to sort of language learning content.

So right now I’m in my Middle Eastern period.

So I had my three month challenge with Arabic, where I feel that I improved, my comprehension improved.

I feel that  in the livestream that I did, I spoke better than I have before.

Now.

I’m on Persian.

Persian is easier than Arabic because it’s an Indo-European language and the structure is more like things that we’re familiar with.

Uh, and Turkish is difficult because it’s a different language family, but it’s easier because it’s written in the Latin alphabet.

So I’m, I’ve decided to leave Turkish on the back burner and totally try to get used to this, uh, Arabic writing system.

Um, so my immediate goals would be to stay with Persian for another couple of months.

Probably go back to Arabic and at some point introduce Turkish again.

So those would be my language learning goals, uh, during the year.

Um, yeah, the other thing is, um, I’m very interested in the whole subject of, of creating content.

Uh, the person that works with us, she lives in Iran.

Sahra creates tremendous content

in…in, in Persian.

Uh, she sent one yesterday about, uh, Persian soup…. Uh, so I mean, it’s just fun.

And she had a number of them on Persian cuisine on, uh, she’s done them on Persian history.

Uh, we’ve got a series of Persians or Iranians talking about themselves, their lives, what they do, uh, you know, uh, Coronavirus, whatever it might be.

And I would love to see some way that we can get people in all or their various native languages to kind of contribute a monologues, dialogues, talking about their countries, talking with their friends.

Uh, and if we can get it transcribed, uh, either they transcribe it or they use automatic transcription.

I, I would like to see us get more of this kind of casual content going.

I don’t know how I, how I go about doing that, but that’s something that I, I would like to see if there’s some way we can make that happen, but in terms of the things that I can control, uh, I’m going to be staying with my, uh, Middle Eastern languages and, and, and learning about the history at the same time.

Hmm.

And

Elle: so you didn’t have that kind of content for Arabic then?

Is this…

Steve: No, that’s I it’s, uh, I know I wasn’t able to generate that.

It’s not so easy to do.

And I, I went to Upwork and tried to find people to do that, but people have to understand like this Sahra in Iran, she really understands it.

She really understands it.

She creates.

She has a voice that’s pleasant to listen to, which is important, good quality audio.

And, uh, she creates a, she has these 26 episodes on the history of Iran followed by circling questions.

She has a thing on Persian food followed by circling questions.

She really understands it.

Uh, I got a good series of Ukrainians talking about themselves, uh, but the key is it’s not everyone who can do it.

And with Arabic, I’m sort of stuck between, uh, you know, the mini stories on the one hand and the Al-Jazeera podcasts at the other end, which are difficult.

Uh, I would love to have content in Arabic where someone say, we could have a series called the Egyptians, have another one called the, the, the Moroccans and another one called the Lebanese or the Syrians.

The problem is of course that the natural language that those people speak in their everyday lives is not the standard Arabic that I’m learning, but they could, they could do it.

I mean, we have Egyptian and Leventine Arabic at LingQ, so they could do it in thos uh, you know, forms of Arabic as well, or they do it in, in standard Arabic.

Uh, but the key thing is to get people who can just talk casually on subjects of interest, not too difficult and somehow, uh, arrange for the transcript.

And, uh, but I like to see it in other languages in French.

I mean, we have Francais Authentique, I think there’s more of that intermediate content available in some of those other languages, Polish, for example,  Piotr, whom I know.

Uh, but I would like to see more of that kind of content because it’s easy to find beginner content.

Although, I believe that our mini stories are better because there’s so much repetition.

Your typical minis, your typical beginner content just moves you from the train station to the customs, to the hospital, to whatever.

And it’s not a lot of, not a lot of repetition, uh, but there’s a lot of beginner material and there’s a lot of advanced material.

And I would like to see more of this intermediate.

Yeah.

But genuinely interesting intermediate material develop.

Yeah.

Elle: And what exactly is your history then sticking with Persian?

I know you’ve said you’ve studied it a little before.

Did you, do you did a 90 day challenge in Persian?

So what would you say your level is?

Steve: Yeah.

Okay.

So my level in, I would say that I’ve spent far more time… Like if I studied my statistics at LingQ, I will see that I started into Arabic Persian two years ago.

And I’ve spent most of the time on Arabic.

I’ve spent, uh, maybe four or five months on Persian, three months on Turkish.

Uh, but my Persian is, I would say.

It’s difficult to compare.

I think I know have a bigger vocabulary in Arabic, but I find it easier to speak in Persian.

Uh, and, and if I were to spend another two months, like I had three months, full-time on Arabic.

If I not go three months, full-time on Persian, I’ll be ahead in my Persian, uh, simply because it’s easier.

Um, but, but I I’m concentrating on those two because I want to get better at reading and I’m a lot better at reading.

One of the biggest problems with Persian and Arabic is that the people who produce books, their font is so small.

And it’s so difficult to read that script.

And the font is so small.

Uh, but now I find that I’m starting to be able to read in books, even with a small font, to some extent, to some extent.

So I’m getting there.

But it’s a long road.

It’s a long road.

Elle: And of course, uh, as a Vancouverite, um, there there’s huge, uh, Persian community, especially in North Vancouver.

I don’t know about, uh, West Vancouver, I guess, too.

Yeah.

Excellent.

And so have you chatted with anyone?

Steve: Oh of course, I never, never miss an opportunity.

Never miss an opportunity.

Yeah.

There’s so many Iranians here and you go to a store, you go to a pharmacy and wherever you go and you go to, if I want to have a good conversation in Farsi or Persian, I just go to Best Buy,

because half the sales staff, there are Persians, but, um, Of course nowadays with COVID I’m not so anxious to go out and interact with people, random people in stores.

Uh, but that was one of my motivations.

Like I started with Arabic and then there’s hardly any Arabic speakers in Vancouver, but there’s lots of, uh, Persian speakers.

So I said, well, I may as well learn Persian.

But any opportunity and different language communities react differently when you speak to them in their language, uh, the Persians react very positively if you speak to them.

You know, some people say, well, what’s the matter, you think I can’t speak English?

You know, you get sometimes get the kind of reaction, like, not necessarily, but the Persians generally speaking are just, Oh, and I had a very nice, uh, interaction at the supermarket here because there is the occasional Iranian there.

Uh, say checkout clerk.

So I arrive and there’s this, uh, checkout clerk and she has some kind of a Muslim name.

So I’m assuming, I assume that she’s a Iranian.

So I greet her in Persian and she says, no, no, I’m not Persian.

I’m Arab.

So I said, that’s fine.

So I switched to Arabic.

She was so happy.

I don’t know who was happier.

Was she happier?

Was I happier?

I don’t know, but it was fun.

And actually

Elle: something that just… that I’ve always wanted to ask you that is not so relevant to goals, but when you’re learning languages, do you, do you ever dream in the language?

Maybe you’ve been asked this before.

Steve: I don’t dream in the language that I’m learning.

If I’m going to dream in another language, I’ll dream in a language that I speak well.

So depending on what the dream is about.

If the dream is taking place in Japan or in France or Spain or something, then I’ll speak those languages… chinese.

I’m not going to dream… and the dream, it means that that a character in my dream will speak in those languages and I’ll answer in those languages in my dream.

But I can hardly remember.

I can hardly remember what the dream was about, except that I do remember that there was some other language there.

Elle: Right, right.

It’s a good idea to… I’m really into dreams… write it down in the morning.

If you have a very strange one.

Cause it’s crazy how you can wake up and think that was an amazing dream and then just forget it.

Steve: Yeah.

Yeah.

The amazing thing about dreams is how creative we are in our dreams.

Like just like going from one thing to something totally unconnected.

And it’s all very clever how it all fits together and in the morning it’s gone.

Yeah.

Elle: Um, so with, of course, COVID this question, this is something maybe you’d be doing a long ways off, but I know that when you learn a language, you are really interested in traveling to the country.

Steve: Right.

Elle: So with that, have you ever been to Iran?

I don’t

think so, eh.

Steve: I’ve never

been to… oh, actually in 1967, I visited Tehran for two or three days because I was assigned to Hong Kong.

So I went out and I stopped at a number of places along the way.

Uh, New Delhi and, and, but Tehran and, uh, I stopped there for three days.

I have a vague recollection, 1967 in Tehran, but definitely would like to go back and I’m reading about the history of Iran and, uh, about Isfahan  and Shiraz and all these places.

And, uh, certainly would like to go there.

And, uh, it’s not ideal right now that a, because of COVID and even the political situation there is, is not the best.

I don’t like being in countries where.

You know, people are hauled off to jail and executed and stuff like that in general.

Not so much fun.

Elle: UM, and in terms of goals then too, of course, you’re a language learner, but you’re a YouTuber, famous polyglot Youtuber.

Um, are there any plans for specific content this year?

Is there anything you’d like to do on your channel?

Steve: You know,

again, so if I get back to this issue of something that we should discuss, um, I mean this whole idea of, I understand that a lot of my videos are used by people who are learning English, which is a good thing to do.

And most of my videos appear as lessons in LingQ with the closed captions.

It’s easy to follow.

The learners can import those lessons into those videos, into LingQ as, as lessons and so forth.

I’ve often thought, you know, not everybody wants to watch a video.

Uh, I, some, I feel I should be doing more podcasting with the goal of just like this LingQ podcast here is providing people with more sort of casually spoken English, uh, which they can use as learning material.

If it’s just a podcast it’s more difficult in fact, to get at the transcript.

We have some background fans in the background.

Elle: That’s my son.

Steve: Um, so I don’t know if it, no problem.

No problem.

It’s good.

Um, yeah, if we just make podcasts, how do they get the transcripts?

So, but I would like to do podcasts.

I might even want to talk a bit about yeah,

whatever and encourage other people to do the same.

I, I, I’m just, I don’t know how to go about this, but trying to create a bit of a, of a movement where people are putting out podcasts, which can on a variety of different subjects that are just casual learning material in their native language, the issue always is transcripts.

So on YouTube, we have the closed captions automatically.

But if it’s a podcast, I don’t know how, I mean automatic transcription, but that’s like 10 bucks a month that I’m paying.

Not everybody wants to do that.

And then there’s issues of punctuation and stuff.

So I don’t know how we do that.

Maybe we can get members of LingQ to work together in some way that help each other with the punctuation correcting these automatic trends.

I don’t know.

I don’t know.

It’s just a vague, vague thing I’d like to get at in the new year.

Elle: Great.

I actually just…

Steve: yeah.

Elle: Yeah.

I actually just started a podcast for intermediate English learners, as a little segway into that.

It’s called What the English?!

There is, there are transcripts for that two, three, I’ve only done three episodes.

Steve: So do we get the transcripts?

Elle: I it’s actually a scripted podcast, so I present, um, just weird topics and, um, with vocabulary and…

Steve: Ok, very good.

Elle: About 15 minutes.

I think I’ve done Halloween, Bigfoot.

Now the next episode is on flat earth, the flat earth inspired by our conversation on conspiracy theories.

Yeah.

It’s uh, yeah, it’s tough.

Like you say, it is tough to get the transcripts, but, um, but these episodes, I edit the transcripts and then also, so that they’re good in terms of punctuation, but yeah, it’s.

It’s a struggle for sure.

The auto-generated and not always great.

So…

Steve: No

Elle: Excellent.

And any other goals for 2021?

Any other, um, thing you want to achieve.

No.

I mean,

Steve: hopefully we’ll be able to start traveling again, my wife and I, and, um, but other than that, I try to stay active, you know,

Elle: Are you still playing hockey? No, I stopped.

Steve: Well, I stopped the hockey when we started going down to Palm Springs.

Cause I’m never up here and now I could be playing, but they’ve suspended the, you know, indoor sports activities.

So that’s not happening right now.

But if they opened that up again, certainly, I’ll go and play hockey again.

Uh, But, um, realistically I just, I think we’re going to be another three months is going to be worse.

And then hopefully in the spring, more and more people will be vaccinated and things will improve.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I don’t see it getting better.

Yeah.

Unfortunately.

Elle: No.

I Guess they’re going to do it in tiers, age and vulnerability and all that.

Steve: Yeah, fair enough.

But they seem to be very slow in getting started.

I don’t know why.

I don’t know why.

I don’t know what they’re doing.

I presume.

I mean, you, you can’t worry about things that you have no control over, and I’m sure there are people there who know what they’re doing and who are.

Doing the best they can.

But when I look at the numbers in other countries like Israel has, is, is vaccinating, ah, you know, a million people a day or something or some tremendous number and we’ve hardly done any.

Yeah.

And in the… on American TV, they’re all complaining about how poorly they’re doing there, but they’re doing a lot better than Canada.

Canada’s not doing much of anything.

I don’t know whether we didn’t get delivery of the vaccine or we’re just slow in putting it out.

But.

Again, this is not a sprint.

So the, the issue is how many people will be vaccinated by the end of January, end of February.

So there’s no point in worrying about these things, but realistically, it’s going to be the summer before we, uh, get back to any kind of normal life.

Elle: My mum actually has COVID right now.

Steve: Oh Really?

Where does your mum live?

Elle: She’s in the UK.

She’s in Wales.

Fortunately.

She’s she’s doing well.

She has, she has the loss of smell and taste and, uh, just awful, awful headache.

But it was over Christmas, so she had to spend Christmas alone and sick, which is awful, but she’s yeah, I’m very grateful.

I’m very happy that she’s doing well.

And she will be fine.

Steve: Well, I hope she quickly improves

Elle: The UK is a mess. It really is.

Steve: It looks that way, but, uh, the thing is it’s an opportunity to learn languages.

You gotta look on the bright side.

Elle: Exactly, stay home. Study a language on LingQ.

Steve: Right. Does your mum live in, in Wales or in, in, uh, England?

Elle: She lives in Wales. Yeah. All of my family live in Wales. Yeah. Well,

Steve: you know, if we get people to create the mini stories in Welsh, we’ll put Welsh up on LingQ. That would

Elle: be fantastic. I know. I get emails.

I used to get them quite often.

I’m surprised at how many people are interested in learning Welsh, uh, it is, it’s a cool language.

How about you Steve?

One day?

Steve: Who knows.

I mean, I can’t do everything.

People say, why don’t you learn Finnish?

Why don’t you learn… I don’t know Mongolian?

I mean, you can’t.

Can’t learn them all.

If you go to a buffet and they have the beautiful steaks and salmon and you can’t eat it all, you have to choose which dish you’re going to eat.

Right.

So.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I go one step at a time right now I’m in the Middle East.

So I’m staying here for awhile.

Elle: Well, it’s been a pleasure, Steve, as always. Thank you so much.

Steve: Okay. Thank you. All right. Stay safe.

Elle: Yeah, you too.

Steve: Bye. Bye. Yeah.

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

Mark: Hello everyone, Mark here and today we have a special guest.

My wife Kindrey is joining us.

Kindrey: Hi.

Mark: How are you?

Kindrey: I’m fine, how are you?

Mark: Great.

Actually, the sun is shining today, which is kind of nice because yesterday was…

Kindrey: …a monsoon.

Mark: …rather wet here.

It was just dumping rain all day, but the sun is out today and spring seems to finally have arrived.

It’s a little warmer, all the flowers are blooming.

What are the signs that you notice about spring?

Kindrey: Well, I noticed the other day coming down our street that the leaves are all coming out on the chestnut trees.

There are chestnut trees lining the street that we live on and every spring here they come, so that’s my sign that summer’s on its way.

Mark: Absolutely and it’s so nice in the summer when the chestnut trees have their leaves and everything.

In the wintertime, of course, it’s less nice when they have no leaves, so yeah that’s right.

The trees are getting their leaves, the flowers are blooming on the bushes, so finally; it’s been a long time coming.

Anyway, we thought today we would talk about some of the popular TV shows that we or you mostly watch I guess.

I know that a lot of our listeners are also able to watch and like to watch popular American TV shows to work on their English.

I know, for instance, Lost, which is actually one of the shows that I like to watch as well…

Kindrey: I think it’s the only show that we like to watch together.

Mark: Yeah.

Kindrey: Usually you can’t put up with my reality shows because you think it’s too much garbage.

You like Survivor too.

Mark: Yeah, that’s true.

Kindrey: We watch Survivor together.

Mark: But I do know, at least I’ve heard from a few members, that they watch Lost.

Kindrey: Oh, is that right?

Mark: That they’ve bought the DVDs and watch it because it’s a good show and also to work on their English.

Kindrey: That’s the best way to do it too is to rent that whole box set of one season.

We did that a couple years ago to catch up and it was quite fun.

It was very addictive, we would be watching until the wee hours of the morning saying should we go to bed?

Oh, just one more show and then we would watch one more show and pretty soon it would just get away from you.

Mark: Well it’s tough because each show sort of ends on sort of a cliffhanger-type of a note because they want you to come back the next week.

Well when you have the CD or the DVD set you just have to keep watching.

Kindrey: It’s difficult to stop.

Mark: It’s very hard to stop, but yeah that was a good way to watch the series and there are no commercials.

Kindrey: It’s difficult now to watch it waiting every week I find.

I’m impatient that way.

Mark: You still manage to do it though I’ve noticed.

Kindrey: Yeah, well I have no choice do I?

Mark: Yes.

Kindrey: But now we tape it and we blast through the commercials, so we don’t have to watch it with commercials.

Mark: Yeah, that’s nice.

Kindrey: That helps. It makes it more enjoyable.

Mark: Besides Lost…I guess Lost is probably your favorite show.

Kindrey: I think so. I listen to the Lost podcast too; every week I tune in.

Mark: That shows everybody the level of interest…

Kindrey: Obsession?

Mark: …in Lost.

Kindrey: It’s a great podcast we should get that up on LingQ, it’s very entertaining.

Mark: Is it produced by the TV?

Kindrey: It’s produced by ABC.

Mark: ABC?

Kindrey: Yeah.

Mark: We should approach them.

Kindrey: I think they probably have a lot of time for us, ABC.

Mark: Well I mean for language learning if you’re interested in the show Lost and there’s a podcast about it and you’re motivated to understand it that’s perfect material.

We should approach them.

You can approach them for us.

Kindrey: Work on that?

Mark: Yes.

Kindrey: Okay.

Mark: Besides Lost what other shows do you like to watch?

Kindrey: Well I like Survivor. I kind of like the reality shows.

Mark: Just to backpedal a bit, actually, maybe we should explain.

I’m sure a lot of our listeners don’t know what Lost is, so maybe you can explain a little bit first about what Lost is and then some of the reality shows like Survivor and we can talk about them.

Kindrey: Well Lost is difficult to even try to explain because after four seasons of it we still don’t know what’s going on exactly.

But I guess the basis of it is this group of people crash on an island.

An airplane crashes and they land on this island that seems to be off the map.

We’re not sure where they are or why exactly they landed there, but there’s all sorts of mysterious things going on.

There are monsters on the island and some of the Survivors are now time traveling and what else?

It’s just very complex.

Mark: Well, there are other people that live on the island.

Kindrey: That’s right, there are other people that live on the island and we’re not sure why they’re there.

They seem to have been doing some scientific experiments there in the past.

Mark: And there’s a whole bunch of strange buildings.

Kindrey: Yeah, stations…

Mark: …on the island.

It all sounds a bit strange when you describe it like you just did but, in fact, first of all…

Kindrey: …it’s quite engaging.

Mark: It’s shot in Hawaii I think, so it’s, you know, beautiful ocean and lush vegetation and mountainous terrain.

It’s just neat, I guess.

Obviously, there’s a fair bit of science fiction involved there.

Kindrey: Which is weird, I’m not a science fiction fan, but this really appeals.

Mark: No.

Kindrey: But I guess with any good story….

The basis of it too is that they’ve got great characters.

The characters are interesting and they give you sort of a history on the characters of what they did before they crashed on the island and what makes them the way they are, so I think that’s what kind of grabbed me in the beginning.

Mark: For sure and the fact that it’s sort of a mix of science fiction and sort of an adventure.

I mean it’s not like it takes place in space and it’s all about gadgets and rocket ships.

Kindrey: Not at all.

Mark: It takes place on the island and there are a lot of sort of natural actions.

Kindrey: For sure and interaction with each other.

Mark: Right. Anyway, so that’s probably one of the most popular shows.

Kindrey: In our house anyway.

Mark: And probably on TV in general.

Kindrey: Yeah, we have a lot of friends that watch it too.

Mark: But I mean North America-wide I think it’s one of the top handful of programs.

Survivor, which you mentioned is a reality show and I think is actually…

Kindrey: Similar concept, stranded on an island.

Mark: Somewhat similar, yeah.

I think the concept originated in Europe and then it came to the U.S. after that.

But the basic idea…well, you can explain.

Kindrey: Well, it’s a game.

They strand — I don’t know how many, maybe 20 to start with — 20 people on an island and don’t give them anything but a flint and that’s after a few days.

They usually go for three or four days without fire and water.

Mark: They get there with just about nothing.

Kindrey: Whatever’s on their backs.

Mark: And they give them maybe water.

Kindrey: Yeah and they see who can survive.

Each week the tribe, as they call it, gets together and votes out a member of their tribe based on either they’re the weakest or they’re the most conniving.

There are all different reasons to vote somebody off the island, which we’ve seen, so it’s quite fun to watch.

Mark: Yeah and usually what happens is the 20 people arrive and I guess they do it differently every time.

Kindrey: Yeah, they split them into two teams.

Mark: Right.

A lot of the time they’re on an island.

I think a lot…mostly they’re near water, yeah.

Kindrey: It’s mostly tropical.

Like where are they now, Micronesia I think.

Mark: Well I think part of it is they want to be somewhere where they can run around in bathing suits.

Kindrey: Oh yeah, for sure.

Well yeah, the contestants are usually fairly young and good looking.

Mark: Theoretically they could have a Survivor in the Arctic, but I don’t think…

Kindrey: It wouldn’t have the same appeal.

Mark: Yeah, viewers wouldn’t necessarily go for that.

I think it would be a little tough too, but typically it’s in a warm location.

They did it in Africa once where they weren’t near the water.

Kindrey: Yeah, I kind of like that one, but only because Africa is interesting.

Mark: Anyway, yeah, they break them up into two teams and the two teams compete against each other and then the losing team, essentially every week, the losing team has to vote somebody out.

Essentially, in the end there should be one Survivor.

Kindrey: And they win a million bucks.

Mark: Who wins a million dollars, that’s right.

And yeah, anyway, I guess at a certain point the people that get voted off stick around and then decide in the end who deserves the million dollars…

Kindrey: …between the last two…

Mark: …or three or however many it is.

Kindrey: That’s a good show.

Our kids even like that show now; they’re always rooting for somebody.

Mark: Well that’s right.

I mean it’s the whole reality TV phenomenon, which I think started earlier in Europe and in Japan, but which was quite popular here for a while and still is I guess.

There are still other reality shows that are quite popular.

You were watching…

Kindrey: …The Biggest Loser?

Mark: The Biggest Loser.

Kindrey: The Amazing Race. That was a good one.

Mark: Yeah.

Kindrey: I haven’t seen that one in a while.

Mark: What was the premise of The Biggest Loser?

Kindrey: Well a group of extremely overweight people get together and then they bring them to a ranch or a big house and keep them there for six weeks and put them on a diet and give them trainers.

It’s a bit of a contest to see who can lose the most weight.

Mark: Is it only six weeks?

Kindrey: Well maybe it’s more than that.

Mark: Like those people…

Kindrey: Oh, it’s months because they lost like 100 pounds.

Mark: …are losing a ridiculous amount of weight.

Kindrey: Yeah.

No, it’s probably more like six months.

Anyway, yeah, you really didn’t understand the appeal of that one, but there’s something about seeing people weigh in every week losing 12-13-14 pounds.

I don’t know why, I kind of thought it was interesting.

Mark: I mean I didn’t really watch it with you, but I’d see little bits and pieces here and there.

All I know is you’d see these people and I saw them I guess near the beginning and then I didn’t see it again for quite a while and then I saw it at the end and it was unbelievable.

Kindrey: Yeah, the before and after is amazing.

Mark: They went from like, I don’t know…

Kindrey: …300 pounds down to 150…

Mark: …and looked like unhealthily skinny.

Kindrey: Yeah.

Mark: It was unreal, actually.

I mean I don’t know how they did it.

Kindrey: It’s interesting, the winner of that…so if you go through six months of intense training and weight loss the winner of that wins $250,000, yet the winner of Survivor on an island for 30 days wins $1 million.

Mark: Well, I mean I guess on Survivor you’re there in the middle of nowhere.

You have no comforts at all.

Kindrey: That’s true.

Mark: You hopefully have some food and that’s it.

I mean it’s much tougher in a way.

I mean the weight loss thing…you can always leave I suppose.

Kindrey: I suppose.

Mark: I guess they eat, I don’t know, maybe they don’t.

Kindrey: It didn’t look like much.

Mark: They tend to have that same sort of weight loss scenario on Survivor.

Kindrey: Yeah they do. Boy those people are gritty.

Mark: Emaciated by the end.

Kindrey: Sickly.

Mark: Yeah.

Kindrey: Anyway.

Mark: Anyway, you’ve managed to find lots of good stuff to watch on TV.

Kindrey: Yeah.

Mark: Myself I prefer the…

Kindrey: …hockey games.

Mark: Right now we’re in the middle of the Stanley Cup Playoffs, which are the playoffs in the National Hockey League, which happen from April through to June.

Kindrey: Yeah, between you and our son it’s tough to get a TV in this house.

Mark: A lot of hockey games on TV for a while, but it’s all good.

Kindrey: There’s the dog in the background, time to go.

Mark: Anyway, yeah, with that we should probably wrap it up.

Thanks for joining us today.

Kindrey: Okay, you’re welcome.

Mark: I’m sure we’ll find the time to get a hold of you again soon.

Okay, bye-bye.

Kindrey: Bye.

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

Steve: When I’m learning Russian all the words are new and strange to me and I have a tendency to confuse words that look or sound similar to me.

Some of these words are related and some are not.

Paul: That’s right.

Steve: Again, when I’m in our system — I’d be happy to have one of your students get on our system, it’s free by the way – and I’m reading through a text and I have my vocabulary section open on a different tab, so with your example I would say “s-t-o-n”.

See, I’m getting confused, “astonished”, “stone”, I don’t know if there are others.

“Spec” would be a good one, “specification”, “speculate”, “inspection”; they’re all kind of confusing to me.

I would then take “spec” and I would search for that component on my vocabulary list.

Especially in Russian, it will throw up 25 words and these are words that I’ve previously saved in the system, so I’ll see here’s eight of them that are related and here’s a few others that are not related and it’s just as good to know that these are not related so I can eventually train myself not to get confused over them.

Paul: Yeah.

Steve: So you’re looking at it as sort of the deliberate attempt to discover not cognates, but related words that are going to help you, it’s just as useful to get rid of those that are confusing you, if you follow what I’m saying.

Paul: I wouldn’t disagree with that.

The point of the research he’s doing is he’s saying once you know these first 1,000 how will they help.

It’s not as if you’re trying to learn them all at the same time.

Steve: Right.

The other thing in what you said that struck me, I agree with most of what you said.

Our system is very much based on sort of a deliberate learning of vocabulary and where I find crash and falls short is that it’s just not possible to go and just read and read and read, you need some help and you need to focus on vocabulary.

I find that learning the language through vocabulary, especially if you’re looking at all the types and you’re able to see how they work with different words, is very helpful.

One thing I heard you say about numbers…like I believe, certainly in my Russian study, I’ve gone for a long time without using the language.

I’ve been studying it on my own and I do an hour a day when I can.

I can listen to Tolstoy, I can read Tolstoy and so forth, I enjoy it tremendously, but numbers are difficult.

Numbers are very difficult for the simple reason that numbers are so strongly programmed in our brains in our own language.

If I’m listening to a text in say Russian history and they give me a date it’s only now that the date makes sense and this is after almost two years; it takes a long time.

If you force me to answer questions using numbers I find it stressful and annoying.

Granted I’m learning on my own and our learners are learning on their own, so you haven’t got me in a classroom where you can force me to do things, but on my own I don’t want to do things that I find annoying.

I would resist doing things where I can’t quickly find the answer; whereas if I’m just taking it in and taking it in I’m building up this familiarity with the language and a later stage when I’m more comfortable then I will be able to answer those questions.

Therefore, that’s where I question what you were saying about produce it right away.

Maybe in a classroom that’s a good thing to do, but if you’re learning on your own and you want to maintain the motivation and the fun that might just discourage some people.

Paul: Yeah.

For some of the fluency development, particularly with numbers, you’d probably need to have some other person helping you.

A very easy way to develop fluency with numbers is just to sit down say starting with the numbers 1 to 10 written in figures then your teacher or your partner just says the numbers quickly in random order and you point to the figure that’s being said.

Steve: Right.

Paul: Now you do that for 10 minutes and you’ll see your speed of recognition of that improves very much and that once you can do it with single digits do it with double digits, but you only do it for 5-10 minutes a day two or three days a week.

You’ll find that after two or three weeks these are no longer stressful, uncomfortable things for you, but things which you handle very easy and fluently.

There’s no point walking into a shop and saying how much does this cost and when the guy says $98.57 you make a stupid grin because even though you know all the numbers you can’t understand what he said.

Steve: Right.

Paul: That’s what fluency does, it just takes away that stress by getting good initially with a small group of things that are really important to be able to deal with quickly.

Steve: Right.

I’m sure it takes a little more discipline to do that, in a way.

It’s not also obviously, for example in my situation where I have no one to speak Russian to and I have no shops to go to, but I’m interested in being able to read the literature, so some of these abstract nouns, in fact, might be more important to me than numbers.

Everyone has a different purpose in learning the language.

Paul: The problems that you and others face is that when you learn languages, which are not English and perhaps not French or Spanish, is you don’t have a great deal of simplified and adapted material to give you good meaning-focused input and to give you good fluency development for reading.

People who learn English are really privileged in the sense that there’s probably more than 2,000 graded readers now at a whole range of levels, which they can read within the vocabulary that they know and that’s just tremendous for developing fluency, motivation and a whole pile of things.

It would be great if people would do this for Russian, Japanese and Chinese.

It would be tremendous if we had graded readers for those languages.

Steve: Absolutely.

One thing we do at our system is we have a small amount of content that is deliberately sort of easy within the first 1,000 words or so.

Thereafter, because people are saving words to a database, the system gets to know each individual learner’s database and then the system will then grade the material to the vocabulary of the learner so that it will say this has 20% new words for you.

If I’m studying Tolstoy after a while my new word count in Tolstoy is going to be lower than if I went to another author, for example, or if I were into economics.

You can focus on one area and you can actually bring your new word count down and then if you move to another area then you’ll find your new…once you get past the first couple thousand words, we’re able to at least help the learner by telling him or her how many new words there are in a content item.

Paul: There’s good research evidence for that because one of our students did some research comparing an Economics textbook, which was 300,000 words long, with a 300,000 word collection of different texts and each of those different texts were about 2,000 words long.

The total vocabulary in word families of the Economics textbook was just over 5,000 words.

The total vocabulary of the mixed text of the same length as the textbook was over 12,000 different words.

That’s two and a half times the number of new words you can see, so the idea of following one author or following one topic is a really good way of reducing the vocabulary load and it’s really important in the early stages to reduce the vocabulary load.

Steve: Right.

Anyway, it’s interesting.

We’re not doing any research we’re sort of charging ahead with what we think makes sense, but I don’t think we’re that different from what you’re commenting.

It would be very interesting for one of your Ph.D.

students to get into our system — as I say it’s free to register — and just see what we’re doing and see if it’s of any relevance to the research that you’re doing.

Paul: Now if you employed me as an evaluator of your system, which I haven’t looked at so I can say this and you can not feel offended because I haven’t looked at it, what I would do would be to look at what are the different kinds of activities which are encouraged by your system.

I would classify each activity into each of the four strands and then I would see how much time is spent on each activity, if it was possible to do that, and I would see do we have a roughly equal balance across those four strands.

If we don’t then I’d be looking to see how do we redress that balance a bit.

If you had a course which is 90% language-focused learning and 10% of the other three strands you’ve really got a misbalance.

Similarly, if you have a course which is 100% message-focused and no deliberate learning then the learners are missing out on very efficient and effective ways of making quick progress.

As an evaluator that would be one of the things I’d be looking at to see is there a balance of learning opportunities across those four strands of meaning-focused input, meaning-focused output, language-focused learning and fluency development.

Steve: One of the problems we have is that a lot of the input and the sort of vocabulary-related meaning-focused learning is free, so most people do that.

Paul: Yes.

Steve: The output, that is to say writing and having the writing corrected and speaking with our tutors, they have to pay for, so they do less of it.

We are introducing a bunch of improvements in our discussions with the tutors and in our writing correction whereby we integrate the words and phrases that they have trouble with so that they are more easily brought into their flashcards, the words and so forth, the meaning-based studying that they’re doing.

We’re still a few months away from having all of that integrated, but the bigger thing with us is that we’re dealing with, basically, independent learners, so they do whatever they want.

We’re not in a position to control what they do and, as I say, certain things are free so more people are going to do the things that are free then the things that they have to pay for.

Paul: Yeah, that’s right.

It would be good I guess if your learners realized that because then it’s partly their responsibility to try and address that balance between the learning.

Steve: You know it’s a good idea.

What I’m thinking as I hear you talk is that one of the things we have thought about doing as we go forward is to have courses.

One of the things we should strive for then is here’s a course and it’s balanced, so this is a program that includes a balance of the four strands.

We are not yet there in terms of the development of our program.

Paul: Yeah, that’s one direction to go, but I have no problem with the other direction if the learners are intelligent enough and motivated enough to take some responsibility for their own learning.

They can sort of see now how can I get these balanced and if you are offering a range of opportunities or directing people to opportunities then they can take some responsibility for that balance too.

I don’t advocate any particular method, I just like to see that there’s a good balance of learning opportunities.

The other thing I was going to suggest that I think would be quite useful is that I don’t know of frequency counts of languages like Russian and so on, but I’m sure they must be around somewhere.

Steve: Oh they all have them, yeah.

Paul: It would be quite useful if learners had some sort of access to that kind of information so that then they could make decisions in deliberate learning about which words are worth learning and which ones would be best left until later.

Steve: Well sure. What we do is every word has either four stars, three stars, two stars or one star.

Paul: Oh good.

Steve: In the case of English – I think it’s the most frequent – we have 2,000 words, in Russian we have to bump it up because it’s a very heavily-inflected language and we base it simply on the total content that we have in our library.

In the case of English we have over 2,000 items, we have like 30,000 different words, but we only deal with the first few thousand.

Beyond that then it really depends on the interest of the learner, but anytime they save a word it will show up as a four star, three star, two star or one star word.

One of the things we do is of the words that the learner has learned or has saved and is trying to learn, we will pick the 25 highest-frequency words and we call these their priority words, so these are the ones they’re supposed to be trying to learn.

As they learn those and the status of those words moves to known then other words come in, so they’re always focusing on the 25 highest-frequency words of the words that they’re trying to learn, so we definitely deal with the frequency issue.

I was going to say, one other point is that in terms of encouraging people to have a balanced approach, philosophically, the biggest thing is to keep people spending time with the language.

We encourage people to do whatever they like to do, so if a person likes to listen then listen, if you like to read, read.

If we look at the success of traditional language teaching in schools, here in Canada for example, the success of teaching French in the English language school system is just abysmal.

In the case of once province New Brunswick, which is actually the only bilingual province in Canada, 30% of the population is French-speaking.

They have French in the English learning school system 30 minutes a day every day for 12 years.

They did a survey and they found that after 12 years the number of graduates who had what they called an intermediate level of oral proficiency in French was 0.68%.

In other words, they might just as well not done anything because I think they would have had the same number of people who would have done it on their own.

Paul: The advantage you have is that the people who come to use your programs have a strong motivation.

Steve: That’s right.

Paul: That’s something you can then build on and work with.

Steve: Well that’s right, plus we try to encourage the motivation and try to make more people motivated.

Again, that’s why we say do what you like to do, but we can certainly advise them.

I certainly have gotten a lot out of this discussion and one of the things would be to try to encourage them to have a balance.

A lot of people will listen to guidance because people do want to improve in the language.

Paul: Yeah and there’s a lot of good things on the Web. Thanks Steve.

Steve: Thank you very, very much for this discussion.

I would appreciate it if someone there would have a look at what we’re doing.

We’re not going to use it as some kind of a recommendation of our system or anything like that, but I would be interested in any feedback.

Paul: Okay.

Steve: And, as I say, registration is free.

Paul: Good, thanks Steve.

Steve: Thank you very much for this time I really appreciate it.

Paul: No problem, bye-bye.

Steve: Bye-bye.

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

Steve: We’re talking today with Paul Nation who is a leading expert on language learning and English language learning, in particular, who’s located at the University of New Zealand, I believe.

Hi Paul.

Paul: Hi, how are you?

Steve: Fine thank you. Is it, in fact, the University of New Zealand?

Paul: No, it used to be about 100 years ago, but now we’re Victoria University of Wellington.

Steve: Okay, I’m sorry.

Paul: Named after Queen Victoria because it was started when she was on the throne.

Steve: Okay.

We last met when I was in Taiwan about two or three years ago and you spoke to an audience of about 100 eager English teachers in Taiwan.

Paul: Oh yeah.

Steve: You explained your four threads and they were very interesting.

Paul: Four strands.

Steve: Four strands, rather, and you were able to refer to your own experience in learning Japanese and I think other languages and so forth.

Maybe we could begin by my asking you to explain the four strands.

Paul: Sure.

The idea behind the four strands is to make sure that there’s a range of opportunities for learning.

It’s really a way of a teacher or a course designer checking a course to make sure there’s a proper range of opportunities for the learners to learn the language.

The four strands are these: the first strand is the strand of meaning-focused input, which Steve Krashen would call comprehensible input and that’s learning through reading and through listening.

There are certain conditions which have to apply for that learning to take place and Stephen Krashen calls it comprehensible input.

From a vocabulary perspective it means that only about 1 in 50 of the running words should be unknown to the people who are doing the reading or the listening.

Steve: 1 in 50?

Paul: 1 in 50.

We’ve done an experiment to show that.

It would be good to have more research on it; in fact, we’ve got a Ph.D.

student who’s going to start doing more research on that, but it actually agrees with a figure that Michael West arrived at almost 80 years ago when he started designing the very first graded readers.

Steve: Right.

Paul: So that’s the first strand the strand of learning through input.

The second strand is the strand of learning through output.

I call it meaning-focused output where the learners are focusing on conveying messages; getting messages across to listeners or getting messages across to readers through writing and through speaking.

Having to produce language makes you pay attention to input in a different way, but also provides good opportunity for consolidating knowledge that you’ve already got.

The third strand is the strand of language-focused learning.

Rod Ellis and others call it form-focused instruction, but I’m not so happy with that name because it doesn’t actually have to be instruction by a teacher and it can focus on more than form it can focus on meaning as well.

I call it language-focused learning and that means deliberate learning of language features through studying the sound system, the spelling system, vocabulary and so on.

I’m actually very excited about a piece of Ph.D.

research that one of our students has completed.

That student looked to see if you learned vocabulary deliberately on word cards, does this give you the kind of knowledge, the implicit knowledge, which is needed for normal language use.

She actually found that this deliberate learning resulted in both explicit knowledge and implicit knowledge, which is different from the learning of grammar because with the learning of grammar there seems to be evidence that there is no direct route into implicit knowledge through the deliberate learning of grammar.

It’s a rather indirect route, but for vocab it seems different.

Steve: Okay.

Paul: Deliberately-study vocab is available for in-implicit knowledge for normal language use, so that’s the third strand.

Steve: Right.

Paul: Then the fourth strand is the strand of fluency development and fluency development simply means getting good at using what you already know.

This should be at every level of a language course, so even when you’ve just learned the numbers in a very elementary course you should learn how to recognize those numbers very quickly, so if someone says 98 you can get 98 quickly and you can understand what they say.

The idea with fluency development is you get really quick and fast at using what you’ve already learned.

Steve: Oh, okay.

Paul: Now three of these four strands, meaning focused-input, focused-output and fluency development, are message-focused strands.

They would fit nicely into a communicative approach to language teaching for example.

The language-focused learning strand is a deliberate study strand so it’s a bit different from the other three, but I think you have to have all four in a course and you have to have roughly equal proportions of the four.

Steve: Alright.

You know it’s very interesting because we’re doing what we’re doing with our system and I very much would like to have and I very much appreciate you agreeing to sort of have an interchange with me because I’m not a university professor, I’m someone who has been in business and who has a great interest in languages and we’ve developed this system called LingQ.

But if I listen to the things that you’ve described to me here, I’ll tell you what we do is similar and different.

We place a lot of emphasis on input and 1 in 50 unknown words strikes me as very low and I’ll explain why.

I would agree with you if I were reading a book and I had nothing else to help me.

I have been learning Russian using our system starting from scratch and you can’t be 1 in 50 because initially it’s zero.

Paul: That’s right.

Steve: Because what we do is you read something, we ask people to listen to it three-four-five times and to read it.

They look up unknown words and the words go to a database.

This starts to develop then a database that they can look at in terms of flashcards, it develops statistics, etc.

I listened to call it learner language for a while and read learner language listening 20-30-40 times and then I moved into authentic content and, of course, when I first went into authentic content our system tells me that there’s 40 or 50% new words there for me, so that was very hard going, but I did it.

Now I’m down to about 15 to 20% new words if I’m reading Tolstoy (?????

7:00) or whatever, but our learners say that they like to be between 10 and 20%.

Granted, we’re talking about total words, so we’re not talking about word families.

People are quite comfortable as long as they’re reading on a computer with access to an online dictionary where stuff is going into a database.

Our system highlights words they have previously saved so they can refresh on those, so yes input, yes comprehensible.

We tend to encourage people to deal with something that’s a little more challenging and a lot of our learners say they’re happy doing so.

I’m not sure if that contradicts what you’re saying, but that’s sort of what we’re doing.

Paul: The way I’d look at is that, first of all, the 98% coverage is for unassisted reading.

Steve: Okay, right.

Paul: That means you’re reading without a dictionary and without that help.

I guess it’s sort of – how would you say – almost intuitive personal observation of when in your reading most of your focus is on language features or most of your focus is on getting the message.

If you’re doing assisted reading, as you suggest, that assisted reading could be meaning-focused input as long as the major focus is on the message of the text.

Steve: Let’s put it this way, the way we do it, what we try to suggest and the way I’m motivated is I’m interested in the story.

If we can get our learners, again, to select content that they like, which in my case is 19th century literature, which might be a bit of an esoteric interest you know, I don’t mind going at it with 20% unknown words because I’m interested in what I’m doing.

As I listen to it for the third and fourth time and I read it for the second and third time and then I go through all my flashcards the whole experience is enjoyable for me.

Paul: You could argue that what you’re doing is really covering three strands of the course.

When you start off with your reading you’re clearly doing language-focused learning because there is so much that is unknown.

Steve: Right.

Paul: We’ve done studies on English and to get 98% coverage of English — where you’re naturally including proper nouns as words — that can be considered as known, so they are part of that 98% coverage.

You actually need 9,000 words or for a novel you’d need about 8,000 words to read a novel with 98% coverage.

Steve: Now you’re talking word families.

Paul: Yes.

Steve: Okay.

Paul: I’m talking 8 to 9,000 word families to get 98% coverage of what we call the running words or tokens.

Steve: But I’ve read some of your material and you suggest a 1 to 1.6 ratio…

Paul: …no, no, no.

Steve: …of word families to total word count.

I read that in something you wrote somewhere.

Paul: Yeah, that’s old.

Steve: Oh, is that old?

Paul: Even though one of the first principles that students have to follow when they enter my course is that you respect age that’s one that I wouldn’t fight for now.

Steve: I’ll stop quoting you then.

Paul: The problem with that figure is it’s dependent on the length of the text because you’re looking at a variant of type-token ratio and type-token ratio is very strongly dependent on text length.

Steve: Oh, I see.

Paul: If you have a really long text then that ratio of actual words to the number of times it’s repeated then can go up.

Steve: I’m not talking about number of times it’s repeated, I’m saying in English where you have “go” and “going”.

Paul: You’re saying how many members in a word family.

Steve: Yeah, because it just so happens that in our system we consider every different form of the word as a different word.

What we do in our system is when you save a word we automatically capture all phrases in all of your content that use this word and “going” is used differently than “go”.

You gather a bunch of phrases where the word “going” is used, so you get credit for “go”, “going” and “when”; they’re all different.

Paul: Yes.

Steve: I understood you in one of your articles to say that the difference between a word…like if you say 9,000 word families, I would say that on our count you need 1,500 words.

Paul: Word types.

Steve: Word types.

Paul: Yeah, okay. Well, there’s a quick and easy way to find this out.

Steve: Right.

Paul: One way is to go to my website and download the program called The Range Program.

There’s a version there based on the British National Corpus, which goes up to the first 14,000 word families of English.

If you run that program and look at the figures just below the table it will tell you how many families are in each list, which is 1,000, but it will also tell you how many types there are in the same list.

There’s a very, very big difference in the number of types amongst the high-frequency families compared to the lower-frequency families.

Steve: No doubt; far more types in the high-frequency ones.

Paul: Yeah, so if you look at the first 1,000 – I can’t remember the figures – there’d be probably five or seven or eight members of a family; whereas if you look at say the 8 or 9,000 there’s barely two members to a family.

Steve: For sure, yeah, okay.

Paul: So you can’t keep a standard figure for that because it differs so slightly from one frequency level to the other.

The other point I’d raise about that is you say that each word is used differently.

Steve: Right.

Paul: When you look at production, (…) speaking and writing, then I think the word type is probably the best unit for counting.

But if you’re looking at reception that is understanding through reading and listening, I think the word family is a better unit for counting.

Steve: Okay.

But one of the things we’re trying to do in our system is get people, eventually, to be able to use them.

When they save a word in the form of say “going” they will collect 10 sample phrases of that word in use, which they’re supposed to practice.

Eventually they’ll show up when they go to write, so they’ll find “going” is used differently than “go”.

We don’t necessarily treat it as purely receptive or purely productive.

Paul: That’s fair enough.

Steve: I don’t think I disagree with what you’re saying.

Paul: No, I don’t think we’re disagreeing with each other.

Steve: No.

Paul: John Sinclair would agree with you in terms of output because he argues that even different inflections, you know the “ing” or the pluraless, results in a word having different collocates.

Steve: Exactly and that’s what you’re looking for is which words are used with which words.

I find in Russian where there’s a tremendous amount of inflection, I just go about and I save all the different forms of these words.

Our words show up in our vocabulary area sorted in different ways, but if I look at them alphabetically or if I search by roots I’ll find 7-8-10-15 words that are all very similar and then I can just look at them and get a sense of which ones are used how kind of thing.

We like saving individual types, as you call them.

Paul: I think you’re also doing a good thing there.

At the moment, we’ve got a Ph.D.

student just starting who’s looking at if you know the first 1,000 words of English how many lower frequency words does this give you access to.

Say you come across “astonish”, “astonish” actually has the root of “stone”, so when you’re astonished you turn to stone.

Steve: Right.

Paul: Now maybe that doesn’t help with astonish very much, but what he’s looking at is to see that if you actually know the first 1,000 what roots in that will help you with words from the lower-frequency levels.

No one’s actually quantified that in a very systematic way.

Steve: But you know what, based on my experience with Russian I would look at it quite differently.

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 again.

Steve: Hi Mark.

Mark: Welcome to the EnglishLingQ Podcast. My dad Steve and I, Steve, are here.

Steve: You know we miss Jill.

Mark: We do.

Steve: We miss Jill.

Mark: In fact, she usually keeps us organized, so we missed doing the podcast yesterday; a day late, nonetheless.

Steve: And she always has a nice, different perspective on things.

Mark: Right.

Steve: But you know what I thought we’d do today Mark, since Jill’s not here, we’ll try to be a little controversial.

Mark: Jill might be coming in this week.

Maybe we can grab her for a podcast.

Steve: When she comes in?

Well, first of all, we’ll be busy admiring her baby.

Mark: Of course.

Steve: And we may even get the baby to squeal a little bit; a little early in her career, but who knows.

No, I thought we’d be a little controversial just for fun and, of course, the big news here in the papers is what’s happening to the Olympic Torch.

Mark: Big news aside from the fact that the Vancouver Canucks didn’t make the playoffs.

Steve: Right, but most people in the world aren’t very interested in hockey.

Mark: I know.

Steve: But no, so the first question I asked myself is given the sort of controversy that we know surrounds the Olympic Games in Beijing; there are all the issues of human rights in Tibet and the smog and so forth, why are they having this around the world Torch Parade?

It’s almost like they’re inviting.

I mean what a tremendous opportunity for the Tibetans or any other group to protest.

Mark: Well, I guess, first of all, is this not a standard thing?

The torch doesn’t normally tour the world before the Olympics?

Steve: Maybe it does, I don’t know.

Mark: I mean I don’t really know exactly.

I can only remember that in the Calgary Winter Olympics the torch was run across Canada.

I don’t think it went…maybe it didn’t go around the world.

Maybe normally it just goes through the country in which the Olympics are being held.

Steve: I have no idea.

I gather they’re planning to take the torch through Tibet…

Mark: Yeah, I saw that in the paper.

Steve: …as part of the preparations, so.

Mark: That should be fun.

Steve: I don’t know.

Well, certainly, the Chinese are better able to control crowd activities in an area that they control than in San Francisco, London or Paris.

Mark: Absolutely.

But at the same time they have to let foreign journalists into Tibet or at least they’re saying that they will allow foreign journalists into Tibet to cover the Torch Parade in Tibet, so that ties their hands a little bit.

Steve: But you know the Olympics have always been political.

The Berlin Olympics in 1936 were an opportunity for Hitler to show off to the world.

I know in Japan the Olympics in ’64 were considered a symbol of Japan sort of joining the group of advanced nations.

The Moscow Olympics were boycotted.

Mark: Yeah, I mean this whole we have to keep the Olymp sport and politics separate.

I mean if it wasn’t politically motivated China probably would not have attempted to host the games period.

I mean it is a political statement because their whole system is so strongly politicized.

Steve: Are you suggesting that the Chinese Government and the Communist Party that their motivation in bringing the Olympics to Beijing was not simply that they were interested in sports and wanted the population in Beijing to have a chance to see firsthand some of these international athletes?

Is that what you’re saying?

Mark: I know it’s a rather farfetched hypothesis, but yes I am.

Steve: I mean let’s put it this way, Vancouver is going to host the Winter Olympics in 2010 and there the motivation is purely commercial.

Mark: Exactly.

Steve: That’s all it is, money.

Mark: Absolutely.

Steve: (A) because they think it’s going to be good for tourism and (B) because it’s a chance to grab some federal money so that they can get taxpayers and the rest of Canada to pay for some infrastructure here in Vancouver.

Mark: Exactly, that’s all and hoping that there’ll be some kind of residual benefit from all these people being exposed to Vancouver during the Olympics and that it will payoff in the years following the Olympics.

Yeah, it’s entirely commercial; whereas, in China I don’t think it is.

Steve: It’s not commercial, no.

It will end up costing the economy, but it’s more of a statement of here we are.

We’re one of the leading countries in the world, this is our chance to show off and, you know, China is, after all, the most populous country in the world.

They’ve had this tremendous period of economic growth and they want to flap their wings and strut their stuff.

Mark: Yeah, they want to show that they’ve arrived.

Steve: Right.

Mark: So, obviously, this whole Tibet protest thing is causing a fair amount of consternation.

Steve: But, you know, it shouldn’t come as any surprise.

Mark: Absolutely not.

Steve: What an opportunity for the Tibetans to try to make their case to an international audience.

Mark: Absolutely.

I mean if I’m a Tibetan I’m biding my time.

I’m surprised, they’ve kind of started a little early, but I guess they want to build up to it.

Steve: Well no, no, I think their plan here is that the occasion of these Torch Parades in different world cities gives them tremendous PR.

Mark: Obviously, the crowds are not so easily controlled all over the world as they are in China.

Although, there was obviously a big period of unrest in Tibet last week I guess.

Steve: Well yeah, there have been various forms of unrest not only in Tibet proper, but in all of those areas where the Tibetans form the majority.

Mark: Right.

Steve: Which is not just in what we consider to be Tibet, but it’s in Chinghai Province and in the western part of Sichuan Province.

I mean it’s a very, very difficult issue and I mean there are all kinds of countries in the world where you have groups of people who are in some kind of an arrangement with a larger dominant group.

I mean in Canada we have Quebec where there are people in Quebec who would like Quebec to be independent and others who don’t, so these are very, very complex issues.

We won’t get into all the ins and outs and historical claims one way or another, but I think it is fair to say that the Olympics is a very political and a very commercial event.

Mark: Absolutely and that I don’t think we’ve seen the last of the Tibetans.

Steve: No.

Anyway, we chuckle.

Of course to the Chinese, especially people from mainland China, they feel this was their moment to be in the world spotlight in a positive way.

The best scenario would have been that the games were very well-organized, everybody had a great time, there was great camaraderie, people from around the world, hopefully the Chinese athletes did well in their events so that everything, basically, reflected positively on China.

Mark: Right.

Steve: Now we’ve got one black eye, regardless of who’s right and who’s wrong, whether the Dalai Lama is behind the disturbances or not, it really doesn’t matter.

Mark: No.

Steve: It all reflects badly on China and China’s response with some of their heavy-handed propaganda harkening back to the days of the Cultural Revolution where they are unable to refer the let’s say the Dalai Lama without calling him some bad name.

Mark: Right.

Steve: You know it all comes out in these standard Cultural Revolution-type slogans.

Mark: I can’t remember now what they’re calling him, but the Dalai Lama is a…

Steve: He’s a splitist, splitist.

Mark: There was another statement that I saw that described him as something else; I can’t remember.

Steve: I mean you’d think they should get some PR agent from…

Mark: To write their stuff?

Steve: To write their stuff because the stuff may work internally, but it makes it worse.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: It does, it makes it worse.

I mean if they simply said you know this is very unfortunate and, of course, there has been loss of life of Chinese people as well.

Mark: Right.

Steve: There are elements of this that if you wanted a tribal antagonism it’s antagonism between Tibetans and Chinese and some innocent Chinese people were killed.

Mark: Right.

Steve: So there’s a lot to be said on either side, but it’s just their heavy-handed propaganda that just makes it worse.

Mark: The Dalai Lama a running dog lackey is…

Steve: Whatever; whatever the term is.

Anyway, so that’s a little bit controversial.

I don’t know how much time we have left here, but one of the things that really struck me was that there was a very tragic event on the east coast of Canada where some of the I guess you would call them the seal hunters who are involved in the annual seal hunt drowned as a part of a rescue effort, probably a very sloppy rescue effort, by the Canadian Coastguard.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: A leading environmentalist said that the loss of these four human lives was less important than preventing the slaughter of the baby seals.

Here again, personally, I don’t know all the ins and outs of sealing.

I know that there is a position that if the seal population isn’t kept in check that has devastating effects on the cod population, the fishing population, which we as humans need to feed ourselves.

My view of the environment is very much human-centered.

In other words, whatever we do to the environment through our human activities, our only goal is what’s good for humans.

Mark: Ah, well…

Steve: In the long-term.

Mark: In the long-term, yes.

I guess the point is that I think that you’d hear from environmentalists…well, not all, I mean some would say that it’s not about what’s good for humans at all, it’s about what’s good for nature and yet that’s not exactly fair either because what’s nature?

Nature is always evolving.

One hundred years ago different species existed and different species did well and different species became extinct; nature doesn’t stand still.

There’s no state where you can say this is what we should aspire to in terms of which animals should do well, which animals should not do well.

Obviously, if one species does better another species is likely to do worse; a competitive species is likely to do worse.

I mean that’s just the way it is, so anything that happens has a…it’s like physics, for every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction.

I mean I think the same is true in the natural world.

But with regard to the sealing issue I think, first of all, those environmentalists lose sight of what is real to people.

They get so caught up in we’ve got to save every seal that, you know, a few lives lost, well that’s nothing as long as we save the seals.

Steve: Well I mean I agree with you, I mean we lose sight of priorities.

Is the seal hunt such a big priority?

Even global warming, is that the major priority?

At great cost we can perhaps, perhaps, mitigate the effects of global warming saving a few lives.

In the meantime, in China – we were talking about China earlier – pollution, like particulate matter in the atmosphere, kills half a million people a year.

I mean that has to be a far bigger issue today.

Mark: Well absolutely.

I mean because global warming, no matter what the different government bodies might say, is far from proven.

Steve: You mean, in other words, the influence of the human.

Mark: Human-caused global warming and there’s even debate about whether or not we are in fact warming.

In fact the decade of the ‘90s was warmer than the current decade that we’re in.

And what are we comparing it to?

What’s the standard?

Is it 200 years ago, 400 years ago, 50 years ago?

At what point do we start from and then say okay that point was cooler than today so, therefore, we’re warming.

Steve: Right.

Mark: I mean it’s not at all obvious that (A) anything humans are doing is having an effect or (B) that the warming that we’re experiencing is out of the ordinary.

Steve: But you know what is behind a lot of that is this sense that the way we live today in the 21st century is somehow evil; modern industrial society, globalized society, capitalism, whatever you want to call it is evil.

And then in the case of Paul Watson who said that the death of four human sealers was less important than the fate of these seals, he goes on to say you know we should only have a billion people in the world not seven billion.

Well my response to that is twofold, one, if he really feels that way he should begin by getting out of the way.

Mark: Right.

Steve: Number one.

Mark: I was going to say, he’s free to lead the charge.

Steve: Lead by example.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: The second thing is the fact that we have seven billion people in the world today, the fact that life expectancy even in Africa today is longer than it was 100 years ago, is that in terms of what’s good for human beings our environment is more human-friendly today than at any time in the history of mankind.

And yes, there have been impacts on other forms of life and we don’t deliberately go out wanting to create an imbalance that destroys species, but we do eat other species.

We eat other species of vegetable life, we eat other species of animal life and that is part of how the world operates.

Our concern has to be what’s good for us now and what’s good for us for the foreseeable future.

Yeah, we should reduce our dependence on a resource that may not be around 300 years from now, but I mean when you hear these people say that there’s too many humans in the world, well okay fine then, you go first.

Mark: Absolutely and really you talk about the sealers; I saw statistics, I guess last year at seal hunt time, which said the major seal protesters pull in — in the two-week seal hunt — they pull in 80 or 90% of their yearly budget.

Their yearly donations come in in that time, so they have got to be out there banging the drum and causing a ruckus.

The fact of the matter is, I don’t know about Paul Watson, I mean he’s a bit of a kook; presumably, he’s not doing it for free either.

But I know that this organization that they talked about last time and I think it might have been the one that Paul McCartney was involved with there, but their chief operating officer or whatever he was I mean he was making $200,000 and the second in command was making $180,000 and all this money came from donations that people gave to protect the baby seals.

So it’s not at all, at least not completely, a selfless act I’m here to save the seals; I mean that’s their livelihood.

Steve: You know, maybe we should end on that note.

Mark: Which means…

Steve: Yes, yes.

Mark: Which then causes me to not take environmental organizations very seriously, unless you’re out there for free at your own expense.

Steve: Yeah, but I mean it’s all part of the…I mean who knows?

We could go back to the Tibetans, I’m sure their contributions are up as a result of all these activities too.

Mark: That’s true.

Steve: I’m sure the Dalai Lama lives at a certain level of comfort and flies first class or whatever.

Anyway, we tried to be a bit controversial.

Mark: Yup.

Steve: Hopefully, we’ll get some response.

Mark: Absolutely.

Steve: Let’s hear some people who violently disagree with us.

Mark: That’s right. Okay, we’ll talk to you next time.

Steve: Okay.

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

Steve: Well Mark, this is going to be our first podcast since Jill left.

Mark: That’s right.

I think the last few weeks we had been away and we had recorded a few ahead of time that went up, but this is indeed.

It’s the first time that we’ve done one together in awhile.

Steve: I know.

Mark: Since we sort of switched off with Jill for a long time.

Steve: We’re going to miss Jill.

First of all, of course, it’s a very happy occasion.

She had a baby girl, Clara; whatever she was, 5 ½ pounds.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: Both mom and daughter are doing well, but we’re going to miss her because she was great to have here to talk about different subjects.

Mark: And I’m sure many of you will as well, but you’ll have to settle for us.

Steve: Or we may introduce some other guest speakers.

No, I think it’s good to have both the male and female voices.

Mark: Oh absolutely.

Steve: And so, unfortunately, you’ll have to make do with the Mutt and Jeff combination here of Mark and Steve.

Mark, you mentioned to me that one of our learners had asked about certain words?

Mark: Yeah, on our Forum Annapaula from Brazil was asking us to talk about the difference between or at least the words “groan”, “growl” and “mutter.” I guess the differences and similarities and when to use one and not the other and so forth.

Steve: You know it’s interesting, it’s not only in English, but I’m finding this in Russian as well that words that imply you know “grumble”, “growl”, “grouch”, “mutter”, they all have “r’s” in them, so I think “aarr”, “uurr” is kind of a sound that’s associated with being not too happy or grouchy or growly or whatever.

However, be that as it may…

Mark: Although, mutter isn’t necessarily related to being unhappy. I guess it is; in a way it is.

Steve: No, but if you looked up the entomology the origin of that word it might have something to do with that.

So, when do you growl?

Who growls?

Mark: Well, I know Gordie my dog growls at shadows mostly at night.

Steve: Would you say that we associate the word growl with animals?

Mark: For the most part. I would say it probably comes from animals and then is sort of transferred to humans.

Steve: Right, particularly dogs.

I mean cats don’t growl.

Mark: No.

Steve: But dogs growl.

Mark: Right.

Steve: That is an onomatopoeic word.

In other words, it sounds like the meaning.

Mark: Right.

Steve: What was the next one?

Mark: Obviously, though, if we talk about a person growling at someone that just means they’re talking unkindly or snapping or snarling or growling.

Steve: There’s another “r” word.

Mark: Right.

Steve: And, typically, we think of someone who has a bit of a nasty personality as growling.

Mark: Right.

Steve: And we wouldn’t say, necessarily, I mean we couldn’t imagine Jill growling.

Mark: No.

Steve: No, but you or I might growl.

Mark: Well, when it warrants it.

Steve: When it’s warranted. What was the other word?

Mark: So that was growl. There was groan, I believe.

Steve: Okay, now groan can be either an animal or a human being.

Mark: Yeah, I wouldn’t necessarily associate it with an animal.

I mean, yeah, it could be.

Steve: Right.

Mark: It’s more a sound you make, it’s an unhappy sound or when you’re in pain.

Steve: Pain is the word.

Mark: Yeah, right.

Steve: If I think of a word to associate with groan it’s groaning with pain.

Mark: Or you can groan with disappointment.

Steve: Yes, yes, so that it’s almost sort of figurative pain.

Mark: Right.

Steve: “Oh no” groaned so and so.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: Alright, growl, groan.

Mark: Growl, groan and mutter.

Steve: Mutter; mutter is a little different.

When I think of mutter, again, we often think of sort of handy phrases for words.

When I think of mutter the first phrase that comes to mind is “He muttered under his breathe.

That foolish Mark, why did he do that?” It’s sort of speaking not very clearly and, typically, you’re grumbling and griping…

Mark: …about something or someone.

Steve: There again, we have some similar sounding words.

Mark: Right.

Steve: To grumble is to mutter and to complain and to gripe.

Mark: Right.

Steve: Which means the same.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: So, I hope that helps Annapaula.

You know we’re very happy, very happy to respond to any requests we get from people and, particularly, people like Annapaula.

There’s a small group of very keen people from a variety of language groups — Japanese, Portuguese, German, French, Spanish — I mean all of them really.

In every language group there are a few core people who are very enthusiastic, they’re active on our Forum, they take full advantage of LingQ and so when they ask us a question we’re really happy to answer, but I think we’re happy to answer anybody’s question.

Mark: Yeah, I mean we’re not too fussy.

If it’s a good question and we think our learners would enjoy listening we’re very happy to have the input.

Steve: Right.

Mark: So, yeah, please let us know on the EnglishLingQ Forum or on our Forum somewhere; we’ll see it.

Steve: One thing, thinking of, you know, events in the world, I mean today, of course, we have a very clear sunny day, it’s a little bit windy, a little bit cool, but I think a number of our places in the world have had very late winters.

I was recently in San Francisco and I met a fellow there who got into the elevator and he was from Austria.

He said Austria was just covered in snow; a deep sort of snowfall.

And Eastern Canada has had very cold weather.

It seems that there has been sort of a very late winter in many parts of the world.

Even here we had snow, which is rather unusual for us to have snow at the end of March.

Mark: Yeah, I mean it’s unusual, but it’s not that unusual.

Steve: No.

Mark: I was reading somewhere something like 50% of the snowfall in Canada normally comes after March 1st.

Steve: Oh is that right?

Mark: Yeah, so that, in fact, people kind of think the spring is coming.

To a larger degree maybe it does here in Vancouver, but I mean we do get…March is very often a cool month with a lot of precipitation and if it’s cold enough it snows.

But I do think, yeah, both in Eastern Canada and in Europe they had a cold winter.

I was talking to somebody recently who I guess was in a ski resort in Austria and they said the amount of snow this year was unbelievable.

Steve: Of course you were skiing with your family up in Big White; I guess you had a good time?

Mark: Oh yeah, there again, the amount of snow was…I mean there was a lot of snow, but last year there was a lot of snow too.

We had a cold winter here too last year and I guess in Europe it was quite warm.

Steve: Right.

Mark: At any rate, I guess all of the cold weather in these different parts of the world are bucking the global warming trend, I suppose.

Steve: And, no doubt, very welcome as far as the operators of ski resorts are concerned.

Mark: Yeah, I would think so.

Steve: They need the white stuff.

Mark: That’s right.

Steve: You know I was thinking this morning, actually, as I was driving in and I think about how unreliable weather can be.

I thought to myself, boy, I wouldn’t like to be a farmer.

Can you imagine being a farmer?

At different times of the year if you get unseasonable rainfall it can totally ruin your crops.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: Here we had an early sort of warming period and so certain plants and flowers started to come out and feel good about themselves.

All of a sudden we had this cold spell and then rain and snow and it turns those flowers into mush.

Mark: Is that right.

Steve: Well, that’s what Carmen was telling me; I didn’t look at it that closely.

So to be a farmer you have to have a lot of courage and a deep bank account I think.

Mark: I would think so.

I mean I think it’s no different than I guess the ski resorts.

If you do have a bad year where you don’t get snow I mean you’ve got to make up for it in the good years.

I know that I was up snowshoeing on the local hill yesterday and the amount of snow even here in Vancouver up on the mountain…I mean every time I go up there it’s another three feet higher than it was the time before.

I mean to climb up to the start of the trail from the parking lot is 20 feet up now.

Steve: And it is extraordinary.

We are lucky that, you know, it’s 5-6 degrees Centigrade — whatever that is in Fahrenheit – here and warm and sunny and we drive up there and we can ski.

I went skiing yesterday too, cross-country skiing and the only inconvenience at the lower levels was that when I was in the shade I could actually glide.

Especially if I’m going downhill in the shade and I then I hit a sunny spot, all of a sudden my body goes flying forward and my skis stayed behind somewhere, so you had to really be balanced properly.

I mean you just come to a stop in the sunny spots.

Mark: Yeah, when you have that difference between sun and shade, especially on those cross-country skis, because they don’t…I don’t know, they stick more or they’re lighter.

Steve: They’re lighter or something.

Mark: Yeah and, actually, we thought we’d get spring skiing conditions up at Big White, but I don’t think it was above zero the whole time we were there.

Steve: You know you’re quite right, when I think back of downhill skiing the skis are heavier and you go through the slush and it’s not a problem.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: But in those light cross-country skis they just stick.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: It’s like skiing downhill and then all of a sudden your skis hit glue.

Mark: You didn’t manage to wipeout too many times?

Steve: I didn’t wipeout, no, no.

No, no, I was okay there, but it’s wonderful just to be able to go out for a couple of hours and get that exposure to the nice, cool, still winter environment.

And then in certain places you have this view of the ocean, you know, and the sun glistening on the waves and you’re up there in this white winter wonderland.

We’ve very lucky.

Mark: We are.

I mean you hear it said, but I mean where else can you go where you could have played golf in the morning and gone skiing in the afternoon all within 20 minutes.

Steve: But you know every place has its advantages and its attractions and its charm and, of course, we were in San Francisco…you weren’t, but Carmen and I were in San Francisco over the weekend; that’s a spectacular city.

We could, perhaps, do another podcast just on San Francisco.

Mark: Sure.

Steve: It’s spectacular; cities are interesting to visit.

I could do another one on Riga, which I visited last year, which is also fascinating, you know.

Of course we’ve lived in places like Hong Kong and Tokyo and Paris and there’s so much to explore in the world, whether it be cities where you have a lot of people where they have created this, you know, cultural and, you know, structural thing or whether it be nature.

Mark: Right.

Steve: There’s just so much to see.

Mark: Yeah, for sure.

Steve: So maybe we’ll talk about travel the next time.

Mark: Sounds good.

Steve: Alright.

I hope that there are a lot of good words and expressions here for our listeners and we look forward to hearing from you.

If you have any particular questions about English, don’t hesitate to let us know.

Mark: Or if you’d like us to talk about your city or you have input on your city; maybe we’ve been there too.

Steve: Right, yeah, absolutely.

Okay then, bye Mark.

Mark: Bye-bye.

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

Mark: Hi again, Mark Kaufmann here with Jill Soles for another installment of the EnglishLingQ Podcast.

Jill: Hi there.

Mark: What’s new today Jill?

Jill: Oh gosh, what’s new today?

Oh, you put me on the spot when you ask me stuff like that.

Mark: Oh, I know, I know it. It’s a tough question, it’s a tough question.

Jill: You know when you think when you have such an exciting life like mine there’d be so much new to report.

Mark: I know, I know, I know, I’ll send you a cheat sheet before we do the podcast so you’ll have a chance to prepare.

Jill: Warn me; exactly.

Mark: Actually, some of our members, I should say, ask for that before our discussions.

They prefer further discussions when topics are posted so they can prepare for those topics and prepare for the discussion.

Jill: Right and others actually like the impromptu thing and like sort of thinking on their feet and just having no specific topic.

Mark: I mean everybody’s different.

To my mind if you’re really trying to become proficient in the language I would think you want to be ready for anything but, obviously, if you have a chance to prepare you can go and study specific vocabulary and in that way be better able to carryon a conversation.

Jill: Yeah, if you feel a little bit nervous or intimidated then if you feel like you’re more prepared you might feel less intimidated.

Mark: But in real life Jill you can’t always be prepared for what conversation is going to occur.

Jill: This is true.

Mark: This is what I’m trying to achieve here by throwing these curveballs at you.

Jill: Great, so what’s new? Oh, but really not a whole lot.

Mark: Not a whole lot?

Jill: No.

Mark: You were talking about on the weekend though the news reports that you were listening to.

Or maybe that was you out there keying cars.

Jill: Oh yeah, in my spare time. I have nothing better to do but to key cars, which means for any of you who don’t know…

Mark: Which is probably most of you.

Jill: Right.

When we say to key a car or somebody keyed cars it means that they took a car key or any key or any sharp object really and ran it along usually the side of a car and took off the paint.

It scratches the whole paint.

Mark: Right, basically, idiots.

Jill: Yeah, vandals.

Mark: Vandals trying to cause trouble.

Jill: Right.

Mark: I mean I can’t understand that mindset.

Jill: It happened to my car years ago.

Mark: It did aye?

Jill: I never got it fixed.

It wasn’t a major, major scratch, but a lot of people it will be long or thick or wide and it really needs to be repaired.

So what happened here on the weekend, apparently, in Coquitlam, which is one of the suburbs of Vancouver somebody or several people went to two different locations, neighborhoods within Coquitlam, and just keyed…I’m not even sure how many, but quite a large number.

Mark: It’s amazing.

Jill: And so one area was hit Saturday night.

I believe it was a residential area, so just all the cars that were parked outside they just went along and keyed all these cars.

Then Sunday night it was around a movie theatre, so I guess maybe a parking lot where there are lots of vehicles parked.

Here if you want to get that fixed then you have to pay your deductible and you can make a claim through – as we’ve talked about before on other podcasts – ICBCR our insurance corporation here.

Depending on how much you pay for your insurance you have either I think a $300 or $500 or $700 deductible, so that’s the amount you have to pay.

Mark: So all these people, it’s not like it’s covered by insurance.

Jill: No.

Mark: I mean it is, but only after you’ve paid your $300-$400-$600-$700 deductible.

Jill: Right.

Mark: Like it’s amazing that you know a couple of probably two or three kids or whatever, teenagers, whatever they are…

Jill: Just thought it would be fun.

Mark: Thought it would be a good idea; isn’t this funny.

The number of people that are (A) inconvenienced (B) it costs them money (C) it’s just, you know, you’re wrecking somebody’s personal property.

Like it’s not a good feeling, it’s just unbelievable.

I don’t know if they’ll ever catch the people who did it, but…

Jill: And even if they do, especially if they’re minors, you know under 18…

Mark: Well I know.

Jill: Nothing is going to happen to them anyway.

Mark: That’s where our system is so wrong.

Jill: Yeah.

Mark: I mean I’m maybe a little bit extreme, but they should be, you know if they’re caught, well here are the guys that did it.

Here, look, here they are; come on.

Jill: Throw them to the wolves?

Mark: Yeah, for sure. Like here they are tied up to a post.

Jill: I don’t know.

Mark: Come speak to them, throw stuff at them, whatever.

Well that would sure discourage it; there wouldn’t be any keying of cars.

Jill: Yeah, our laws are definitely too lax here.

Mark: Well the laws aren’t necessarily lax like they exist, but they’re not enforced.

They seem to favor the perpetrator of the crime very often as opposed to the victims.

Actually, the victims suffer and the criminals get off scot-free most of the time or a lot of the time.

Jill: Yeah, it’s true.

Mark: I mean they should have to pay for all the damage.

Jill: Yeah, they should have to pay.

Mark: I don’t care if they’re minors. Here, here, this is who did it, face the music.

Jill: Well, they should have to…

Mark: You know if you think it’s a funny prank, okay, I hope you had fun because now it’s time to face the music.

Jill: They should have to do something like work, work it off.

You know, work for the city or whatever.

Mark: Absolutely.

Jill: And do as much work as it takes to work off the amount that it cost to pay for all of…

Mark: Every last penny that it cost, including what the insurance company shelled out.

Jill: Yeah, I agree, there should be consequences.

Mark: Because right now even if thieves steal stuff and sell it and whatever and you don’t get it back the insurance pays for that, but that thief is not responsible to pay for any damages or losses, which is amazing to me.

Jill: And our insurance premiums increase.

Mark: Like this person stole X thousand dollars worth of stuff, now they’re caught; now they should have to work that off for whoever ended up footing the bill for that.

I mean that’s only fair to my mind.

Jill: Yeah, me too; I don’t know.

Mark: But that’s not how it works unfortunately.

Jill: So now all these poor people you know…even if you’ve got the minimum deductible of $300 that’s a lot of money.

$300 is not nothing to anybody, even to somebody who is well off.

$300 is a lot of money and it’s just the fact that it’s through no fault of your own.

You’ve done absolutely nothing wrong and you just have to shell out $3-$5-$700.

Mark: Yup.

Jill: It’s just not right.

Mark: It’s not right and even if they catch those guys that did it you still have to pay.

They’re not going to be made to pay; it’s just not right.

Jill: No.

Mark: It’s just not right.

Jill: And I found it kind of sad because, you know, people just don’t think about how their actions impact other people.

They were interviewing one young woman whose car had been keyed and you know, clearly, she doesn’t have a lot of extra cash laying around.

She said her mom had just been diagnosed with cancer and so she’s already going through a hard time a stressful time and she was just out at the movies Sunday night to have a bit of fun and to relax and comes out and finds her car vandalized and now has to pay.

I don’t know what her premium is or her deductible – I’m sorry — is and you know it’s very disheartening.

Mark: Yeah, yeah, it’s very disheartening, annoying.

I mean it’s, obviously, only a couple of people like it’s not like people in Coquitlam are bad.

Jill: No.

Mark: You know it’s these two or three handful of vandals ruining many people’s day, evening.

Jill: Exactly, yeah.

Mark: You know and it’s…yeah, I don’t know.

Jill: It’s too bad that there are people out there who find it amusing to wreck and destroy other people’s property.

Mark: I know, I know.

Yeah, I don’t know what…I mean that’s always kind of been an issue here people vandalizing things.

I mean not a major issue, but it’s always kind of been there.

I’ve just never understood it, but you always see, whether it’s street signs or mailboxes pushed over, bus stops wrecked.

Jill: Yeah, the glass shattered at a bus stop.

Mark: Yeah, I don’t know, I’ve just never understood that mentality.

I can’t help thinking that if there were stronger punishments for that sort of thing and being forced to repay any damages.

I mean that’s the most; those people shouldn’t be put in jail.

Jill: I was just going to say, I think it would be more effective and better for everyone involved if they were made to pay back.

Mark: Pay it back; you work it off.

Jill: Don’t send them to jail.

Mark: No.

Jill: They don’t get sent to jail anyway.

Mark: No.

Jill: Basically, they get a slap on the wrist.

Mark: Right.

Jill: But that’s right, they should be made to pay everything back.

Mark: Yeah, I mean probably, I guess there…yeah, somehow or other.

I’ve got to believe that and maybe obviously some kind of public…

Jill: …flogging?

Mark: Not flogging, not unless you want to.

Jill: We’re in Canada, we don’t allow such things.

Mark: Well there’s nothing wrong with flogging, it leaves no permanent scars.

No, but sort of public recognition or like in the North Shore News the local newspaper they’ll put the drunk drivers of the week or something.

They put their pictures up like these guys…

Jill: Their names and their pictures.

Mark: These guys were caught for dunk driving this week, well that’s pretty good.

Jill: It’s humiliating.

Mark: It’s humiliating.

Same with these guys, these idiots were keying cars.

They’re going to be working it off at the license plate factory.

Jill: You know that reminds me of a story that we talked about probably a year ago or something like that that happened in the States.

I think it was at a Wal-Mart or several Wal-Marts were doing this where anybody caught shoplifting had to wear a pin or a button that said I stole from this store and they had to for X amount of time, so a week or two weeks or whatever, every day, go and basically stand there at the front of the store.

Mark: I mean that’s great!

Jill: I mean I don’t know.

Mark: Absolutely.

Jill: I don’t know if that’s the right thing.

Mark: Absolutely, you want to talk about a deterrent.

I’m not going to steal from that store I’ll go to the next store.

Jill: Yeah, that’s true.

Mark: You know?

Jill: Yeah.

Mark: But it’s true and that person shouldn’t go to jail because they stole a pair of socks or something whatever it was.

No, listen, don’t do that anymore.

To make sure you don’t or you think about it harder next time you can stand there with a dummy sticker on.

Jill: For a week.

Mark: Yeah, I think there’s nothing wrong with that.

You did something wrong and you knew it was wrong before you did it.

Jill: Yeah, for sure.

Mark: You’re not suffering by being made to do that it’s teaching you a lesson.

I don’t see that as a problem at all.

Jill: Yeah.

Mark: Far better than going to jail.

Jill: Yeah, for sure.

I don’t see any value in sending somebody like that to jail, but we’ll see; maybe one day.

Mark: We’ll see, maybe they’ll catch those punks.

Jill: Yeah, we assume they’re just young punks.

Maybe they’re not, but in general the people that commit those types of crimes are, typically, fairly young males.

Mark: Yeah, for sure.

Jill: That’s generally who it is, so we’ll have to wait and see.

Mark: We will. I guess with that we’ll probably sign off.

Jill: Alright.

Mark: And l look forward to talking to you again.

Maybe not for awhile…

Jill: Probably not for awhile, but eventually. Bye-bye.

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

Welcome back everyone to EnglishLingQ.

Today I’m joined, once again, by Jill.

Jill: Hello.

Mark: My name is Mark, in case you don’t know that already.

I guess we’re sitting here disappointed because it’s not our usual sunny day.

I’m not sure what’s going on.

Jill: A little bit of everything today.

Mark: Yeah, a little bit of everything.

It was sure raining hard this morning, as I rode here on my bicycle.

Jill: You’re diehard.

Mark: I am pretty diehard. I don’t have to go very far though.

Jill: No, that’s very true.

Mark: Anyway, at least our weather is better than the weather they’re getting in Eastern Canada right now.

Well, you were talking with…who were you talking to this morning in Montreal?

Jill: I was talking to Marguerite one of our Québécois French-speaking members in Montreal, Quebec.

She was saying that they had–I’d heard it on the news this morning as well – over the weekend a huge dump of snow in Eastern Canada and the U.S. as well.

She had said that she thought they had about three feet.

I’m not sure if that’s accurate.

Mark:Right.

Jill: What I read and heard on the news was 50 centimeters.

Mark: Right.

Jill: And then I think in Toronto I heard 30 centimeters.

Mark: Oh, okay.

Jill: So that’s, I don’t know, a foot and a half?

Mark: 50 centimeters is about a foot and a half, yeah.

Jill: About a foot and a half. I mean that’s still a lot of snow.

Mark: Yeah, for sure and, obviously, there are different pockets where you’d get more snow than others.

Jill: Right.

Mark: You’ve often said…well, you grew up in Lynn Valley, which is a valley here nearby that just gets more precipitation than any other place it seems like.

Jill: It’s right at the mountains, it’s up higher and it just gets more snow, yeah, and it’s only a 15-minute drive from the office here.

Mark: Yeah.

Jill: Not even 15 minutes, well, about 15 minutes and there can be snow there and absolutely nothing here.

Mark: Oh, for sure, there can be.

Or you can be driving along the highway…the highway kind of goes laterally across the hillside and Lynn Valley kind of bisects it.

Jill: Right.

Mark: So you’ll be driving along the highway and there’ll maybe be a little bit of snow and then you’ll hit Lynn Valley and there’s a foot of snow, you know? It’s amazing.

Then you kind of drive through and keep on going and then it…

Jill:…there’s no snow again, yeah.

Mark: Yeah, but that’s why Lynn Valley always had all the huge trees, right?

All the biggest trees were always in Lynn Valley because they have always had so much precipitation.

Like the massive cedar trees or Douglas fur trees I guess are all in Lynn Valley.

Jill: Yeah, we’ve got the beautiful parks, so many big beautiful parks there in Lynn Canyon and the Demonstration Forest with just huge trees and so much foliage, ferns.

It’s very beautiful, green and lush but, of course, that’s because of the rain.

Mark: What was it like growing up there in all that rain?

Because in the rest of Vancouver, you know, it’s pretty sunny most of the time.

Jill: Yeah, right. You know I didn’t even think about it to tell you the truth.

Mark: No.

Jill: But it’s funny, now that I live in Vancouver…Lynn Valley is in North Vancouver, which is I guess a suburb of Vancouver.

Mark: Right.

Jill: It’s very close, just across one bridge.

Now that I live over in Vancouver, actually across a couple of bridges, but it’s only about 15 kilometers, it’s not far, being just that much further away from the mountains we do get a lot less rain.

Mark: Oh, for sure.

Jill: And, of course, I mean it’s still Vancouver, so there’s still a lot of rain, but we might have a day where it’s cloudy, just cloudy and we don’t get any rain, whereas over here in North Van or West Van there will be rain or a lot of rain, so there is a difference.

Mark: For sure.

Jill: I know some of the suburbs that are further south that are even half an hour or an hour further south of Vancouver they’ll get quite a few more hours of sunlight every year; I guess that’s just being away from the mountains.

Mark: Yeah, no question.

I mean the clouds hit the mountains and dump their rain; that’s how it works.

Jill: That’s right.

Mark: Even if it is raining in Vancouver very often it’s raining that much harder…

Jill:…right, by the mountains.

That’s the one reason, you know, Chris and I are…well, we have to move, eventually, because our house isn’t big enough anymore.

We would love to stay where we live…in the area that we live, but I just don’t know if that’s going to happen, so the other area we would choose would be North Vancouver because that’s where I’m from, my family’s there, I have friends there.

But he really does not want to come to the North Shore and his biggest reason is just because there’s more rain.

Mark: Which is a really bad reason. That’s not…like, come on!

On a rainy day, essentially, if it’s raining there it’s raining there; like it’s the same place.

Jill: Yeah, but there is a difference.

Mark: There is a slight difference, but there’s not that much of a difference.

Jill: It can be quite a difference.

We’ve been over at our place and then come over for dinner–for example at my mom’s house–and, literally, we haven’t had had any rain all day and we’ll come over and it’s pouring over here.

Mark: It’s not like you’re sitting out sun tanning.

Jill: No, no, no…

Mark: I mean, like come on.

Jill: No, no, but it’s still…

Mark: If it’s miserable here it’s pretty miserable there too.

Jill: But it’s…well…I mean…I guess…I shouldn’t even say that’s his biggest reason for not wanting to move because his biggest reason is that where we live now we can walk everywhere and there’s so much to do that’s just right at our doorstep.

Mark: Yeah.

Jill: And that’s the biggest reason why we’d like to stay where we are.

Mark: Yeah, I mean there’s always that tradeoff, but then if you’re in North Van you have more open space, more green space; more space.

Jill: Yeah, exactly, yeah and you have such easy access to all the trails.

Mark: All the trails and mountains and skiing…

Jill:…biking…

Mark:…snowshoeing or whatever. It’s just much closer.

Jill: Yeah, you know, it just depends what you want.

Mark: I mean I’ve never lived over there, but you couldn’t drag me over there.

Jill: Yeah, you know what?

I used to feel the same way until I was about maybe 20…I think it was around when I was 25 that all of a sudden I thought no, I want to leave the North Shore.

Mark: Right.

Jill: I want to move over there for a little while and see what it’s like.

Then all of a sudden I had just a burning desire, I really wanted to get over there.

Mark: Yeah.

Jill: Now I’ve been over there for three years or three and a half years.

Mark: Yeah.

Jill: I mean I love both places.

I love the North Shore and I love where we live for different reasons.

But I have to say that I am sort of partial to over there now.

It really is nice being able just to walk out your door and there are schools within a five-minute walk from where we live, there are parks, there’s the beach, there’s Granville Island, there’s stores, gyms, everything and you just don’t have to drive and it’s quite nice.

Mark: Yeah, oh for sure.

Jill: But, yeah, it’s busier and…

Mark: I mean those are the tradeoffs.

As you’re in more of an urban-type of a setting you have more easy access to all kinds of things.

Jill: But, of course, land is extremely expensive, so to even get any small amount of land is a ridiculous amount of money.

Mark: Right, yeah.

Jill: So, yeah, I don’t know, we’ll see.

Mark: We’ll have to keep posted.

Jill: Yes.

Mark: But this is your last week here at LingQ before you abandon us.

No, don’t worry about us we’ll be fine.

Yeah, you know, I think I can speak for all our listeners that we’ll just have to try and carry on.

Jill: I already feel guilty enough. I do; it’s amazing.

I have certain people that I speak with every week and a lot of them I have spoken to for months or even years now.

They were former Linguist members who I really feel like I have known for years, so it is weird for me to actually think that I won’t be speaking to these people and having contact with these people for a while.

Mark: We’ll do our best to…

Jill: Harass me?

Mark: Aye that, but maybe we’ll let you maybe come back and talk to our members every once in a while.

Jill: Yeah, yeah, do the odd podcast.

Mark: In the future, yeah; do the odd podcast.

We’ll see; we’ll see what the reaction’s like.

Jill: Yeah, how kind of you.

Mark: We’ll ask our listeners.

Yeah, no, but, yeah, you’re due date is…

Jill:…March 30th.

Mark: March 30th.

Jill: Three weeks.

Mark: So you’ve really been working right up until just about.

Jill: Yeah, so four more days to go here.

Mark: Last four days here and then you’re waiting.

Jill: Then I’m waiting and, you know, that’s one of the things that I’m…that’s why I wasn’t really in a hurry to quit working early.

Mark: Right.

Jill: Because, I mean yeah, now you’re just sort of uncomfortable and you’re just kind of waiting for it to happen, so to sit at home for weeks with nothing to do…

Mark: Painting and repainting the baby’s room depending on which sex you think the baby is?

Jill: Yeah, yeah.

Mark: I think I’ll paint it pink today.

Jill: So I just didn’t see much point in that.

Mark: No.

Jill: I know some people take quite a bit of time off and in certain countries they leave work six weeks before their due date or some people even earlier than that.

I think it really depends on how you feel.

Mark: Right.

Jill: Some people have a difficult pregnancy.

Mark: Yeah, that too.

Jill: They’re very uncomfortable or they have some problems and they have to leave work.

As I’ve mentioned before, you know if you’re a nurse and you’re working 12-hour shifts on your feet; very difficult.

But I’ve had a very easy time really, considering, and sitting all day at my desk does not hurt my back.

Mark: No.

Jill: I’m not uncomfortable.

Mark: Right.

Jill: I mean I’m a little bit uncomfortable just because of…

Mark: But no more uncomfortable just because you’re here.

Jill: No, I don’t. And what would I do all day at home, sit there and eat bonbons or something?

Watch Oprah and soap operas?

No, I wouldn’t that would drive me crazy.

Mark: Right.

Jill: So yeah, I wasn’t in a hurry to leave way in advance.

Mark: So now, well I guess the baby should hang on until Friday, but thereafter it’s anytime.

Jill: Anytime.

Mark: You’re ready.

Jill: Yeah, I’m getting ready.

Mark: Or are you?

Jill: Well, I think I’m ready, yeah, ready for this whole part of it, this whole phase of it, to be done and I’m excited.

Mark: For sure.

Jill: We’re ready. We have everything ready and so, yeah, anytime would be good.

Mark: Well, come back and visit us sometime on EnglishLingQ.

Jill: Of course I will.

Mark: I’m sure you will. We don’t have any idea when that might be, but we might just Skype you sometime.

Jill: I would imagine I’d come in to the office anyway to visit fairly soon after.

I don’t know, I know you’re tired after and I probably really have no idea how tired because I haven’t gone through it before, but I can’t see myself holdup in my house for a month after I give birth because I’m just too exhausted to do anything.

Mark: No, I don’t think it’s that you’re exhausted, but it’s just a production to pack up and to go and visit.

Jill: There are so many things you need to bring with you.

Mark: You’re going to be making enough trips without inventing new ones.

Jill: Yeah, yeah.

Mark: But, I think after a certain amount of time then it’s not such a big deal anymore.

Jill: No, no, after that initial probably few weeks or a month.

Mark: I would think, yeah. I would think, I can’t remember.

Jill: Well, I mean you guys are here too on the North Shore and I have so much family and so many friends over here, so I’m going to be coming over here anyway.

Mark: Yeah, that’s right.

Jill: I’m not going to sit at home by myself all day long doing nothing.

Mark: Ah come on, well you won’t be doing nothing.

Jill: Well I won’t be doing nothing, no, that’s true.

Mark: You’ll be waiting for the baby to go to sleep so you can clean up the mess that it made.

Jill: So I can go back to sleep.

Mark: Yeah exactly.

Jill: So I can go have a nap, yeah.

Mark: Actually they’re not too active for the first little while.

Jill: No, no.

Mark: They won’t be getting up to much trouble.

Jill: Hopefully not.

Mark: Hopefully not.

Jill: Hopefully it’s not a screamer.

Mark: Yeah.

Jill: Not a crier who never shuts up.

Chris will be traveling quite a bit or has been and even for at least the first couple months after the baby’s born has quite a bit of traveling to do.

Mark: Yeah.

Jill: I’m just hoping it will be a nice mannered, well tempered child.

Mark: Right.

That’s like Annie, when she was born she was pretty good; for the first three weeks or so she was pretty good.

Then I left and went to Switzerland to play hockey and Kindrey and Annie were going to come…I don’t know whether it was three weeks later, I can’t remember what it was, but they were coming later…so she was alright when I left, but then shortly thereafter got quite colicky and lots of crying in the afternoon until she went to bed.

I still remember going to pick them up in the airport in Zurich…

Jill:…because Kindrey flew the whole way with her alone.

Mark: Kindrey flew the whole way with Annie alone.

Jill: Oh wow.

Mark: Gets off the plane, I saw them walking, you know, you can see into the luggage-baggage claim area there and she had Annie in her little car seat.

Annie was sleeping peacefully…

Jill:…looking like an angel.

Mark: I’m like wow! It looks pretty good.

It looks like things went well.

Jill: Oh…

Mark: Not so.

Apparently she, essentially, cried the whole way.

I think they flew from Vancouver to Toronto and from Toronto to Zurich, I guess, and I think she cried most of the flight from Toronto to Zurich and then fell asleep just before landing type of thing and was sleeping peacefully.

Jill: Isn’t that the way though?

Mark: Isn’t that the way and just lost her mind on that plane.

Jill: And you can imagine how irritated all of the passengers on that plane were?

Mark: Well yeah, everybody on the plane they’re trying to sleep and Kindrey didn’t know what to do.

She’s walking Annie up and down the aisles and she’s like trying to hide in the bathroom.

The stewardesses were chasing her out of the bathroom.

Jill: You have to get your seatbelt on.

Mark: You can’t stand, you know you can’t just…but she was trying to not be too noisy for everybody.

Yeah, I don’t think that was such a good flight.

Jill: No, no, I’m not in a big hurry to do a long flight with a baby.

Mark: No, no, I mean, no.

Jill: If you don’t have to.

I mean I wouldn’t choose to go on a European vacation in the next few months.

Mark: Wise choice, yeah.

Yeah, it’s just funny the differences between kids too.

I think Kyle was…partly because he was much bigger when he was born and he was just always calm and never fussed much.

Jill: I think that’s part of it too.

From what I’ve read and what I’ve heard premature and low birth weight babies typically are fussier.

Mark: Yeah.

Jill: They usually will have colic, whatever colic is and they will just tend to be fussier.

I know that was the case with my sister and my niece who were both premature.

That’s party why I want my baby staying on a little longer.

Mark: Yeah, right.

Jill: Because although I’m only three weeks away, which isn’t that early, I haven’t gained that much weight, so my doctor doesn’t think that the baby is very big.

Mark: Right.

Jill: Not dangerously small or anything, but probably not much more than five and a half pounds right now.

Mark: Like you should stop working and start eating a lot of ice cream?

Jill: Well I already do that. After work and at lunchtime I go for my walks and I get Dairy Queen.

Mark: Yeah, that’s true.

Jill: I’ve been terrible recently.

But that’s partly why I’d like it to fatten up a little bit before because I don’t want a fussy baby.

Mark: Well that’s right; no, I know.

Well I’m sure it won’t be fussy Jill.

Jill: It will be perfect.

Mark: It will be an angel.

Jill: Well, part of me, you know?

Mark: You know? Like how can it not be?

Jill: And we’re still calling it “it” too, which I feel terrible, but I just don’t know if it’s a boy or a girl.

Mark: You could just make up a name.

Jill: Well we were talking in the office the other day and we came up with the name Kelly; one of those names that could be a boy or a girl name.

Mark: There you go. I’m sure Kelly will be an angel.

Jill: Fingers crossed.

Mark: Yeah. Well with that we better wrap it up.

I don’t know if we’ll do another one before you go, but…

Jill: Possibly.

Mark: Possibly, so we’ll…

Jill:…talk to you when we talk to you.

Mark: You bet.

Jill: Okay, bye-bye.

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

Steve: Hi Jill.

Jill: Hi Steve.

Steve: Well, what do you want to talk about today?

Jill: Well, we had a request on the Forum from Rosie in Japan to talk a little bit about the Winter Olympics that are going to be held here in Vancouver and Whistler in 2010.

Steve: Boy, it doesn’t seem so far into the future does it?

Jill: And it seemed like it was so far away when they announced that we won the bid about three years ago now, two years ago?

Steve: Possibly more.

Jill: It was at least three years ago I think.

It just seemed like it was so far in the future and now, really, they have different venues built now.

I think some luge and bobsled tracks up at Whistler and new skating rinks, ovals, for speed skating are already built and done.

Steve: I gather they’re over budget on quite a few things?

Jill: Yeah, yeah, I think.

Steve: We’ve had a bit of a construction boom here in Vancouver in the lower mainland as we call it, so that has driven up the price of building materials, the cost of construction labor.

People are complaining that it’s going to be a very expensive Olympics, more expensive than we expected and the taxpayers will be paying for it for a long time.

Jill: I forget what they said already that we’re…is it $500 million over budget already? I think that was the number.

I might be wrong, but it was a large, large number and that’s just so far.

Steve: Now, of course, not all of this expenditure is sort of a one-shot expenditure just for the Olympics.

This includes a high-speed rapid transit line from the airport into the city.

Jill: Which we need.

Steve: Which we need. It includes improving the highway up to Whistler, which we need.

Jill: Yes.

Steve: And many of the facilities they’re building are going to be permanent facilities for recreation or for housing but, undoubtedly, some of the cost will be spent specifically for the Olympics and there will be nothing to show for it once the Olympics are over.

Jill: Which is making quite a few people angry; especially, I know there’s been quite a few protests lately with different advocacy groups and people who feel that we’re not taking care of our more marginalized people, the people who maybe are homeless or have different problems and that we shouldn’t be spending money on the Olympics, we should be spending more money to help the people who live here.

So, there is quite a debate over the whole thing.

Steve: You know the interesting thing — we’re straying a bit from the Olympics — but the interesting thing about the problem of homelessness.

We do have a significant homeless problem in Vancouver and it’s not only in Vancouver you see it in other places, but I think we’ve got a pretty bad one here for a variety of reasons…

Jill: Yeah, we do.

Steve: …having to do with a milder climate, which attracts people from all over Canada.

But one thing is true, when I lived here in the late ‘70s and ‘80s there was far less money spent on social welfare and we had far fewer homeless people.

Jill: Interesting.

Steve: I know when I lived in Japan in the ‘70s there were no homeless people.

Now Japan has a much more developed social welfare system and you see more homeless people.

Jill: Throwing money at it is maybe not necessarily…

Steve: Well, that’s right; it seems to be a complex phenomenon.

It might have something to do with modern life, with stresses, with breakdown of family, with so many different things.

It’s not obvious to me that just more money is the solution, but it’s a bit like this whole…we often talk about the language learning infrastructure for immigrants.

All of the people who are in that sector are always clamoring for more money because that’s normal.

They want more money for their organization; it’s not clear that they achieve very much, unfortunately.

I saw this study in the United States where they looked at immigrants and compared them sort of from a certain point in time, say six or 12 months later, and looked at those immigrants that improved and the reasons that contributed to the…improved in language, in English.

These are, typically, in the Untied States it’s immigrants from Latin America; legal or illegal for that matter.

The hours of instruction of ESL, you know, English as a second language instruction, was a minor factor.

So, other things that they weren’t able to measure like does this immigrant work with other English speaking people?

Is this immigrant motivated?

Does the immigrant watch Spanish at home on television or does he watch English at home?

I mean there are so many other things, not just how much funding goes into schools.

Jill: Right.

Steve: I think with the homeless thing, which is a big issue…I mean people will be shocked when they come here for the Olympics when they see…

Jill: …how many homeless people are here.

Steve: Now, for some of those people they’re mentally disturbed, for some of them they are drug addicts and some of them seem to choose that as a lifestyle.

Maybe we have a society which is more permissive, more tolerant, of all these alternative lifestyles.

Whereas 50 years ago, you know, if you wanted to go on the street people would say fine, die there.

You know what I mean?

Jill: There weren’t all the people who wanted to help you.

Steve: Well, that’s right; it just wasn’t an option. You didn’t become a squeegee kid.

Jill: Right; a squeegee kid.

Steve: And go out there, you know, and…

Jill: We should explain that a little bit.

Steve: Well, a squeegee kid is…I think there are fewer of them now.

I think they’ve cracked down on them, but you drive to a red light and this perfectly healthy, young person comes up and offers to clean your windshield.

Jill: With very dirty water, generally, and a squeegee like a sponge.

Steve: Yeah.

Jill: And then, of course, they want you to give them money.

Steve: Yeah.

Jill: And…

Steve: The dirty water doesn’t bother me.

Jill: It bothers me when I have a clean car.

Steve: I didn’t ask for that person.

But what really bothers me is I can understand if you are in Calcutta…

Jill: Right.

Steve: …where these people…I mean there’s literally nothing for them; they’re poor.

To me it is almost like making fun of those people.

Here’s a Canadian person who has the opportunity to do other things pretending to be a poverty-stricken person from Calcutta.

They’re not and so I have no sympathy for those people whatsoever.

Jill: Well, I mean, I just think…I do believe that a lot of the people who are homeless have mental illnesses.

It’s very difficult for them and they cannot necessarily hold down a job.

But, like a lot of these squeegee kids, generally, they are very young people.

I’m sure some of them have a lot of problems too, but if you can stand on a street corner all day long wiping somebody’s windshield why can’t you work at a gas station and make $9.00 an hour and do the same thing?

Steve: Everywhere you go in Vancouver you see signs “Help Wanted”.

Jill: There is such a labor shortage right now.

Steve: Such a labor shortage, so don’t tell me you can’t get a job. Every time I go into a little shop or a restaurant all I see is “Help Wanted”.

Jill: It’s true.

Steve: Anyway, we’ve strayed from the subject of the Olympics.

Jill: We’ve strayed, yes.

Steve: You, particularly, wanted to talk about something else that was in the news related to the Olympics.

Jill: …to the Olympics. Well, I heard a couple of weeks ago that the public sector here in…I don’t know if it’s just Vancouver or British Columbia…

Steve: British Columbia.

Jill: I think it’s British Columbia. So province-wide that people who work for… in the public sector…

Steve: The provincial government, but only the provincial government I think.

Jill: Is it only the provincial?

Steve: Yeah.

Jill: Yeah, I think so.

Steve: Yeah, yeah, because the federal government…

Jill: Right.

Steve: They would have to get permission from the federal government.

Jill: Yeah, which is a large number of people; thousands.

Steve: Hundreds of thousands.

Jill: Hundreds of thousands, yeah, that because we need volunteers for the Olympics — that’s fine — they are going to be given or they can choose to volunteer for 14 days.

The Olympics are two weeks, I think, and seven of those days they will be paid by taxpayer money.

Then the other seven days, if they want to take the other seven days, well that has to be out of their vacation time.

But, I was just appalled that all of these people can take a week off, seven days off work to go volunteer, have fun and we pay for it.

Steve: Well, it begs a number of questions.

There’s a good expression for our learners “it begs the question.” In other words, it brings up a number of considerations.

Number one, do those people have nothing useful to do?

You know?

If the whole bunch of them, almost an unlimited number…

Jill: …can just take a week off…

Steve: …all together at the same time and go volunteer, it suggests that maybe they’re not so useful, which I suspect is the case anyway.

Now, people who do have important jobs to do like hospital workers, nurses, emergency response people, I mean those people aren’t going to be volunteering.

Jill: No.

Steve: Don’t tell me that they’re going to be taking people out of our hospitals.

Jill: Right.

Steve: Doctors and nurses are going to go up to Whistler to volunteer?

I don’t think so.

So, it is going to be more of the kind of people who spend a lot of time over at the coffee shop.

Jill: Office workers.

Steve: So that’s the one question.

And then the other question, if that is a legitimate thing to do…like, first of all, the second question is it, basically, devalues the spirit of volunteerism.

Jill: That’s right!

Steve: I’m paid to volunteer? Well I’m no longer volunteering.

Jill: That’s exactly right. You’re not a volunteer anymore.

Steve: No, you’re being paid to go there.

I am sure that the genuine volunteers will work harder and have a more helpful and positive and energetic approach to their task then these volunteers who are paid to volunteer who may show up or spend their whole time in a…I shouldn’t say that, that’s not true.

So, that’s the second question and then the third question is, you know, why can the public sector, with your tax money and mine, do that?

Jill: Yeah.

Steve: When in the private sector…I’m a private sector worker, we both are, but why should your friend who works for the government be allowed to go up to Whistler at public expense and volunteer?

Jill: Have a week off for fun and get paid and I’m footin’ the bill for it.

Steve: I know.

Jill: I just think it’s absolutely appalling.

Steve: Appalling.

Jill: But, such is…

Steve: Are they going to do that?

Won’t they get enough volunteers?

I know when Calgary had the Olympic Games they were swamped with volunteers.

Jill: I know at this point they do still need more volunteers, but it is still two years away.

I would think that they would have more than enough volunteers.

Steve: Oh yeah.

Jill: And the thing is if they don’t have enough volunteers then I understand offering some incentives, but it shouldn’t be just to the public employees.

The incentive should be given to every British Columbian.

Steve: Well, exactly, because I think a lot of people could get time off from their employer.

Jill: That’s right, so are you going to pay my wage?

Steve: So then if they’re going to pay — the government is paying the wages of these public service workers — then you or I could say well I can try and get a week off from work, my boss might agree and then I can get paid to volunteer.

Jill: Exactly.

Steve: That helps pay for my beer while I’m up at Whistler.

Jill: That’s right. Yeah, I just think the whole thing is very unfair.

Steve: I mean let’s not get on the subject, but it’s part of the whole sense of the government employees can do what they want.

They are, obviously, working for the public good whereas people in the private sector are money-grubbing.

There’s a good term for our learners.

Jill: We’re for-profit…

Steve: …for-profit, money-grubbing and so forth and so on when, in fact, as we’ve said very often, it is that money-grubbing, for-profit sector which pays taxes.

Jill: That’s right.

Steve: And not only profit from the companies, but the taxes from the salaries of the people who work in that sector that feed the public sector.

Now, obviously, public sector employees pay taxes as well.

Jill: Yes and are needed as well.

Steve: And then there’s a whole number of services that we’re very happy to have.

Jill: And there’s a lot of public civil servants who do work hard.

Steve: I’m sure.

Jill: So.

Steve: I mean most people are motivated to work hard in whatever job they’re given.

I think that’s generally the case whether you’re in the private or the public sector.

But, the problem in the public sector is the issue of accountability.

If you set up a private company and nobody’s interested in your service…

Jill: …then you go under.

Steve: You go under.

Jill: You can’t make it.

Steve: Or you can’t organize yourself properly so that your revenue at least matches your costs, expenses, you’re out of business.

Whereas in the public sector you come up with a program of we’re going to build something here and, well, rather than having a small, whatever, rec center, we’ll have a big one.

There’s no limit, we’ll just tax people, so…

Jill: We’ll just increase taxes or whatever if we need to pay for it, yeah.

Steve: So, there’s a fundamental problem there.

Now, theoretically, of course, democracy should deal with that and when we see governments wasting our money we should throw them out, but people aren’t that close to it unfortunately.

Jill: No, no.

Steve: Anyway that aside, are you a fan of the Olympic Games?

Jill: You know, I can’t say that I spend too much time watching them.

There are a few events if I’m home I’ll watch, but no, I don’t spend a lot of time watching the Olympics.

Steve: Are you more interested in the Winter Olympics or the Summer Olympics?

Jill: Well, see, I like hockey, which is Winter Olympics, but then I like the swimming and the gymnastics in the Summer Olympics.

I don’t know; I’m not very interested in either to tell you the truth.

When I was younger I really was and I don’t know why…I guess I’m just not interested in sitting at my house watching sports on television.

It doesn’t do a lot for me.

Steve: Right, yeah, no, I tend to agree with you.

Some of the events though are amazing, for example, the skiing.

Now I can’t watch skier after skier, I can’t tell who’s fast, who’s slow, but they are extraordinary, extraordinary and they are skiing on ice you know.

And they’re gripping that ice with their edges and they’re maximizing their speed and they’re taking such tremendous risks.

And, of course, the thighs on those skiers are just…

Jill: I know or speed skaters.

Steve: Or speed skaters.

Jill: You know some of it actually causes me kind of some anxiety, which is why I think I don’t like to watch it because I really do see how fast some of them are going and they’re on ice or snow or whatever and it scares me.

I just…

Steve: It’s a little scary; oh, when they fall, oh, oh yeah, I don’t… Unfortunately, whenever they fall they’ll show that 15 times.

I don’t like seeing someone who’s flying, their crashing, breaking bones.

Jill: No, no.

Steve: And some of the events are quite ridiculous.

Certainly, all of these luge, bobsled, I mean spending millions of dollars to build this structure for how many athletes.

I mean have you ever been in a luge or a bobsled?

Jill: No.

Steve: Never will, so some of those are ridiculous. I agree with you, the gymnastics.

Jill: Oh, they’re amazing.

Steve: Some of the things that those performers do. Some of the men on those…

Jill: The rings?

Steve: The rings. That is just…

Jill: …unbelievable strength.

Those people have unbelievable strength.

Steve: Control and strength.

Jill: Flexibility.

Steve: Flexibility, but all of them; but some are more spectacular.

I agree with you, gymnastics is particularly spectacular just in terms of the human body and what they’re able to do with the human body.

Whereas, you know, what is it shooting events?

Jill: Oh.

Steve: I can’t watch that.

Jill: Oh, yeah, archery?

Steve: Archery?

Jill: I guess. I don’t know if they have archery, but different…yeah, there’s some events that I will never watch.

Steve: Boxing I’m not a great fan of; people pounding each other’s heads in.

Jill: Wrestling and all that, no.

Steve: Wresting, no, I don’t like. Judo I don’t like watching.

Jill: No.

Steve: The running events…

Jill: Yeah, running, track, track and field.

Steve: Yeah, the short ones. Like, you know, and I guess the finish line for the…I mean the marathon is a major event, right?

That’s a big deal I think.

Jill: Yes. I like watching parts of it too.

Steve: Yeah.

Jill: For sure, when people are finishing that’s fun.

Steve: Right, yeah. Okay, well there you have it.

We had a bit of a discussion on some of the issues that come up here locally and, of course, the Olympics is one.

We talked a bit about homelessness and the problem with the growing strength of the public sector and public sector unions and the public sector.

Very often the bureaucrats run things in our supposedly democratic societies and I don’t think that’s a problem that’s unique to Canada.

Jill: No, I don’t think so.

Steve: I think that’s a problem world-wide and, hopefully, one day we can peel back the strength of the bureaucracy.

Okay, thanks Jill.

Jill: Thank you.

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!

Steve: Well this evening I have with me my three grandchildren.

They are, first of all, and she’s giggling, so we’ll go to my grandson.

Kyle: Kyle.

Steve: And what’s my oldest grandchild?

Annie: Annie.

Steve: And Annie; and my youngest grandchild?

Olivia: Olivia.

Steve: Olivia; the three of you. And why are we here this evening?

Annie: It’s grandma’s birthday.

Steve: It’s grandma’s birthday and did we have a nice cake?

Annie: Yes.

Kyle: It was mushy.

Steve: It was a nice cake. What present did grandma get?

Annie: Flowers and an iPod.

Kyle: And we got her cards.

Steve: You guys actually drew the cards yourself, right?

Annie: Yeah.

Kyle: Yeah.

Olivia: Yes.

Steve: Aha and, of course, today is Saturday, so Annie what did you do today?

Annie: I went to the library and I took Gordie for a walk.

Steve: Gordie is your dog?

Annie: Yes, Gordie is my dog and that’s kind of it.

Steve: What do you have planned for tomorrow?

Annie: Well I have a 7:30 soccer game tomorrow morning.

Steve: So that means you have to get up early?

Annie: Yeah.

Steve: Aha, do you like playing soccer?

Annie: Yup.

Steve: Okay. What other sports do you play?

Annie: Well in the spring I play field hockey and I…yeah, that’s about it.

Steve: Field hockey and soccer?

Annie: Yeah.

Steve: And you play tennis? A little…

Annie: Yeah, a little and I ski.

Steve: And you ski. Do you like skiing?

Annie: Yeah.

Steve: Aha, okay and Kylie what about you, did you play any sports today?

Kyle: Yeah, in the morning I had a soccer game and then we had a hockey practice.

Steve: Oh really?

Kyle: Aha.

Steve: What time was your hockey practice?

Kyle: Uhm, 12:45 maybe.

Steve: Aha, and then do you have a game or a practice tomorrow?

Kyle: No, but on Monday night we have another hockey practice.

Steve: Aha, but you have some practices early in the morning too?

Kyle: Yeah, Wednesday morning before school.

Steve: What time?

Kyle: Ah, 6:45.

Steve: Wow! And how about you Olivia, what sports do you like to play?

Olivia: Soccer.

Steve: Soccer? Did you play soccer this weekend?

Olivia: Today.

Steve: Today. How old are you Olivia?

Olivia: Six.

Steve: Six and Annie you are?

Annie: Ten.

Steve: And Kylie?

Kyle: Eight.

Steve: Six, eight and ten, okay.

How about tomorrow Olivia, what do you have planned for tomorrow?

Olivia: I don’t exactly know.

Steve: Aha. I think all three of you go to…what’s the name of your school Annie?

Annie: Pauline Johnson.

Steve: Pauline Johnson. What’s special about Pauline Johnson?

Annie: It’s French immersion.

Steve: And what does that mean?

Annie: We speak French.

Steve: So when you go to school from the minute you start in the classroom everything is in French?

Kyle: Yes, pretty much.

Annie: For me, no. When you start at grade four there’s like a half an hour every day.

There’s an English period, so you kind of…

Steve: …speak English?

Annie: Yeah.

Steve: But, otherwise, all the classes you take in the different subjects are all in French?

Annie: Yeah, except for Music.

Steve: Except for music.

Kylie you were going to say?

Kyle: And for some people in my class, Tuesday afternoons we get to go speak English in a little room to do separate work or something.

Steve: Aha, but otherwise.

So how about you Olivia, this is your first year in French, doing everything in French?

Olivia: Second.

Steve: Second year.

Did you have trouble understanding what the teacher was saying?

Olivia: Nope.

Steve: No?

Olivia: She talks sometimes in English.

Steve: In English, but when she speaks French do you understand what she’s saying?

Olivia: Yes.

Steve: So right away you understand?

That’s pretty good.

Tell me Annie, do you have to sometimes write things in French?

Annie: All the time.

Steve: All the time?

Annie: Yeah.

Steve: Do you sometimes have to get up and speak in front of the class in French?

Annie: Yeah.

Steve: Did you have to speak on a particular subject?

Annie: Well my last one was on the forest industry.

Steve: Oh, so what did you say about the forest industry?

Annie: Well why it’s important and what it does for us.

Steve: And you had to say all of that in French?

Annie: Yeah.

Steve: Aha.

Kylie, what do you do in French?

Do you speak in French in class?

Kyle: Yeah and every Monday morning we have to recite a poem in front of the class.

Steve: Wow, in French?

Kyle: In French.

Steve: Do you have a book full of poetry?

Kyle: No, we have a binder and we have a little section where you put all your poems in.

Steve: Aha. How about you Olivia, what do you do in class?

Olivia: Math.

Steve: Math?

You do Math in French?

Okay and so you sometimes speak in French to the class?

Olivia: Sometimes.

Steve: Aha, okay, but when you guys are with your friends at school, do you speak English or French?

Olivia: English.

Steve: English.

Annie: Well it depends.

Steve: Aha.

Annie: Like at recess we speak English.

Steve: Right.

Annie: And usually we speak English, unless it’s like you really have to or you don’t really like your partner.

Steve: Tell me more, if you don’t like your partner?

Annie: Then you usually just speak in French like you’re supposed to, but if, you know, if you’re friends you just speak in English.

Steve: Aha, okay, but you like school?

Kyle: Yes.

Annie: Kind of.

Olivia: No.

Steve: You don’t? Olivia, little Olivia doesn’t like school? Yes you do.

Olivia: I don’t.

Steve: You don’t, okay.

Olivia: I do lots of things.

Steve: Now tell us a little bit about your dog.

Annie: Gordie.

Olivia: He’s very big and…

Annie: He’s black.

Olivia: I don’t know how much old.

Steve: How old?

Olivia: In eight more days he’s one.

Steve: I beg your pardon, yes?

Kyle: He’s half Lab and he’s quarter Golden Retriever and quarter Flat-Coat Retriever.

Annie: And his name’s Gordie.

Steve: What happened to him just recently?

Annie: He got sprayed by a skunk.

Steve: Wow, was that pretty stinky?

Annie: Yeah.

Olivia: It was nasty.

Steve: It was nasty. What is Gordie’s personality like?

Annie: He’s scared of a lot of things.

Kyle: And he likes to play with puppies.

Annie: And he’s really nice.

Steve: But he’s scared of most things?

Annie: Some things and he’s very protective.

He barks whenever he sees something happening around us.

Steve: Aha, oh really?

Annie: Yes.

Kyle: And he also growls.

Steve: What does he growl at?

Annie: Birds.

Kyle: If he sees the neighbors coming into the gate then the lights go on and he growls.

Steve: I see. But that’s nice that he’s protective, do you think he would be a good guard dog?

Annie: Yeah, he would.

Olivia: Of course.

Annie: Except scared, he runs inside after.

Kyle: He just barks and acts like he’s tough, but then he just runs away.

So they think that he’s tough, but he’s not.

Annie: He’s scared.

Steve: He’s scared.

I understand that the mailman or the lady that delivers the mail is afraid of Gordie.

Annie: Kind of.

Well there’s a newspaper man and since we live on Gordon Avenue he calls him Gordon.

He has dog treats and so Gordie kind of knows him, but he barks at him anyway.

Steve: Aha. He doesn’t treat him nicely even though he gets the dog treats?

Kyle: Sometimes.

Annie: Well after the dog treat he just runs away, but before he growls until the guy gives him one.

Steve: I see.

Olivia: He’s a very naughty boy sometimes.

Steve: A very naughty boy, okay.

Olivia: But just sometimes.

Steve: Alright. And tell me, what book are you reading right now Kylie?

Kyle: The Hardy Boys.

Steve: Uhm, the Hardy Boys.

That’s a very popular series of novels.

What’s it about?

Kyle: The one that I’m reading right now is about people stealing cars and they have to found out who stole the car and stuff.

Steve: So it’s like a detective story?

Kyle: Uhm.

Steve: Annie, what are you reading right now?

Annie: Well I just finished a book.

It was this camp book about a bunch of people at camp and they pulled pranks on each other and it’s kind of funny.

Steve: Uhm, what was it called?

Annie: Well there’s a bunch in the series.

Steve: What’s the series called?

Annie: Camp Confidential.

Steve: Camp Confidential, so what is your next book going to be?

Annie: I just went to the library today and I’m reading Asterisk and Obelisk .

Steve: Do you like Asterisk and Obelisk ?

Annie: Yeah.

Steve: How about you Kylie, you like them?

Kyle: Yeah.

Steve: Do you read them in English or in French?

Kyle: In English.

Annie: There are some at school in French too, so I do both.

Kyle: But we just read them for fun.

Steve: For fun.

Annie: Yeah.

Steve: Olivia, what do you like to read?

Olivia: Junie B.

Steve: Junie B. ?

Olivia: Yup.

Steve: Okay and is that a book that has nice pictures in it too?

Or is it…

Olivia: No.

Steve: No pictures.

Annie: Yeah there’s pictures.

Olivia: Just a couple, but they’re black and white.

Steve: They’re black and white, okay.

You know we’ve had a nice chat here for ten minutes.

I’ve really enjoyed it.

Do you have any questions you want to ask about what we’re doing at LingQ?

No?

Yeah?

Kyle: I do LingQ in French.

Steve: Hey, that’s right, Kylie has been using LingQ in French, but you haven’t done it for a while.

Kyle: No.

Steve: No.

Has Annie ever done it?

Annie: Well I’ve looked.

Steve: Uhm, okay.

Kyle: She was looking at Spanish.

Olivia: I know how to say good evening.

Steve: In?

Olivia: German.

Steve: Well let’s here it.

Olivia: “Guten Abend.”

Steve: “Guten Abend”. Okay, thank you then.

That’s where we’re going to end it and let’s say goodbye; everybody say goodbye.

Kids: Bye!