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Steve: Once again, here we are at the EnglishLingQ Podcast.

This time Jill is going to talk to Mark about some of the basic terms and concepts on the Internet.

Jill, you have the floor.

Jill: Thanks, Steve.

I think that probably a lot of people are like me out there who really don’t know very much about this whole Web 2.0 you were speaking about and blogging and twittering and all of these other…podcasting even, so maybe I’ll just ask you some very basic general questions so that we can find out a little bit more about these…what are they called even?

Applications?

Mark: Yes.

Jill: Okay.

Maybe we should start with blogging.

For me, I know when we started blogging on The Linguist maybe a year ago or half a year ago, to me, it just seemed like a website.

I really didn’t understand what the difference is between having a blog and having a website, so maybe you could tell us the difference, if there is one.

Mark: I mean a blog is a website; however, it’s a specific type of website.

It’s a website usually run by an individual but not always.

A group can have a blog too, but on a blog an individual puts up blog posts on a regular basis.

Often it’s a bit of an online journal whereas a website typically, you know, a company has a website.

Jill: It doesn’t change.

Steve: It doesn’t change regularly.

Like a blog, the content changes regularly.

It’s updated regularly.

It’s, hopefully, up to date.

You know, the last update wasn’t a year ago.

There’s interaction because there’s commenting available on the post usually.

I mean, I don’t know the exact definition of a blog but, essentially, it’s an online journal where an individual just talks about whatever he wants to talk about or whatever the theme of his blog is and then his readers can interact with him.

Steve: We should say his or hers because there are a lot of female bloggers, so it’s certainly not a male domain.

Mark: We should also say that…you said we started blogging a year and a half ago.

That’s when we had the Vox community when you started blogging but, in fact, we’ve been blogging at The Linguist for quite a while.

I don’t know how long The Linguist on language has been going, but probably four years.

I know that when I first heard about blogging I was just like you.

What’s a blog?

I don’t get it.

Why?

The more you use them and read other people’s blogs you just understand what that word means and what type of website it refers to.

I know that you understand that now, but yeah, it was a question I had at the beginning as well.

Jill: What we’re doing right now is a podcast and I know I also didn’t, maybe a year ago, understand what a podcast was.

I might still not understand everything about it, I’m not sure but, essentially, it’s what?

Just people speaking and putting up their conversation or their information onto their blog or website?

Mark: Essentially, of course, the pod comes from iPod.

Broadcast, whatever, iPod broadcast, podcast, I guess that’s how they came up with the name.

It’s essentially…it doesn’t have to be a conversation.

It can be one person talking as well, but it is a, I guess, non-professionally produced audio program, in a way, that you’re putting up on the Web for people to download and listen to.

The way it’s delivered is through a blog, basically, by putting links to MP3 files in a blog format and it’s updated regularly and then people can subscribe to your podcast feed, either in iTunes or with a feed reader.

They don’t have to, they can, of course, download episodes individually from your podcast website but, essentially, they are audio programs produced by individuals.

Jill: It seems to me that most of them are free of charge; most that I have found on the Internet and I’m just wondering why that is.

Why people are putting in all this time and effort into doing something that they’re not receiving any money for.

Mark: Yeah, I mean, that’s a good question.

I mean I think there are a lot of podcasters that use it as an outlet for them to talk and have people listen to them.

Just like a lot of bloggers, it’s an outlet for people to listen to them and comment back.

I mean it’s social interaction.

It’s not a lot different than when we talked about Web 2.0 and the social interaction, I mean, blogging and podcasting are part of that.

You know, the blog post and the podcast are one way, in a way, but then because they’re on blogs there’s commenting and responding and so on that goes along with it so that, for many people, I think, number one: they find it fun to podcast.

Number two: another topic that we’ve touched on in the past is this whole culture on the Web or feeling that things should be free so that people are maybe not willing to pay for podcasts.

Although, I think if the content is good why wouldn’t people pay?

Although, I guess the radio is free too, but you can pay for satellite radio, I believe.

I mean, theoretically, if the content was good enough people would pay, but for whatever reason I too have never seen a podcast that you pay for.

Yeah and for that reason I think a lot of podcasters now who’ve been making podcasts for years are starting to say God, I put a lot of time into this.

You know, I don’t think it’s that easy to find advertisers.

What a lot of podcasters do is have advertising on their podcast, but it’s not that easy.

They may be making a little money but maybe not covering their costs and certainly not getting rich from it.

I think a lot of podcasters start to say, I think, after a while, why am I doing this?

In our case, I should say also that at least in terms of our podcast, we’re doing it because we’re hoping to draw people to LingQ.

We’re not doing it because we want to necessarily communicate with the world; although, certainly, I think our members enjoy listening to our conversations, but a big reason why we put out our podcast is we want to attract new members.

Steve: Can I ask you… I know that you listen to podcasts that are relevant to your work too, relevant to the Web and developments on the Web, new technology and so forth, what motivates these people because these are very busy, well-established people who have podcasts and they are just disseminating lots of useful information free of charge, which is very nice.

I think what we do is very useful for some people too, so that we’re giving back, but maybe describe some of those podcasts that you listen to and what do you think their motivation is?

Mark: Yeah, I must say, I do listen to quite a few podcasts, not for language learning, but just because they’re interesting — in English.

There are a lot of interesting podcasts out there.

One great thing about podcasts is you can listen to them while you’re doing other things.

You know, if you’re out for a run or cleaning up the kitchen or whatever.

That’s why this sort of rise in video podcasting, I’m not as keen on personally, because you have got to sit there and watch it whereas the big attraction for me to the podcast is that you can be listening while you’re doing other things.

Regarding the podcasts that I listen to…I’m trying to think now…one is put out by a marketing guy so, obviously, he’s doing it in hopes that people will come visit his website.

He’s a marketing consultant, I think.

He’s written a book and so maybe he wants to promote his book; promote his business.

There definitely is that, similar to what we’re doing to promote your own activities.

There’s another podcast from CNET and they are some kind of news-tech website, so they are paid, I think, to come on this.

There is advertising on it.

It’s part of their Web presence and it’s what they do.

I assume that it makes money for them or draws traffic to their website or somehow they benefit by it.

I’m trying to think of some others.

I’ve been listening lately to some podcasts from the Stanford Business School or some kind of entrepreneur’s program that they have where it’s basically recordings of visitors to their school that they put up.

People come and give a talk and they record it and put it up.

I don’t know if they are promoting that program or they’re just doing it for the general good.

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Steve: Hi, Jill.

Jill: Hello, Steve.

Steve: It’s another beautiful day here.

We’ve having a great September.

I think we had a fair summer.

I’ve heard people complain but I didn’t think it was so bad, did you?

Jill: Certainly not as bad as I think it was in Europe and some other parts of the world.

I heard on the news that actually statistically it was not an abnormally wet summer or cold summer but the weekends were particularly bad.

I think everybody has the weekend…most people have the weekends off so for them it seemed like it was very bad because their days off were not very nice.

Steve: Yeah, I know. I think people are very sensitive to the climate now.

We had a visitor here, Thomas, who is from Germany, was visiting with us and he was commenting on how strange the weather has been in Germany.

Of course, we are very sensitive to, you know, is this part of all the global warming thing.

Statistically, I mean, we always do have variation.

This summer, in my recollection, was not a particularly bad one.

I thought we had a lot of good weather and we’re sure enjoying our good weather here in September and, of course, I’m on my way to Europe so they better get better weather over there before I get there.

Jill: Yeah, so you’re off to France, I believe, tomorrow.

Steve: That’s right.

Tomorrow my wife and I are flying off to Paris.

As soon as we arrive we are going to rent a car and we are going to drive to Le Havre which is in Normandy where we have a very dear friend and lumber customer.

We are going to spend the weekend there.

Jill: Very nice.

And Normandy, so that’s in the northern part and where are you going to go from there?

Steve: Well, we are going to spend the weekend there and then on Monday we are going to drive down to Paris.

I have a couple of meetings.

I am going to meet with an audio book publisher there and talk about how we can carry some of their books.

They are called Livraphone, they are in Paris and how we can sell their books across LingQ so that people can enjoy listening and reading to some of the classics of French literature.

I’m also going to visit…I don’t think it will be that successful but I’m going to visit with Assimil which is a leading producer of language learning material mostly for French speakers learning other languages but they also have Assimil for English speakers and I think for Spanish speakers.

They have a tremendous range; literally any language you can think of.

Their system consists essentially of text and audio with a small amount of grammar which I think is good.

They don’t overdo the grammar and the grammar exercises.

So, if we could sell their product across LingQ that people would be able to download chapter by chapter the Assimil for Chinese, Russian, Spanish, Swahili, it doesn’t matter, if they could make the sound and the e-text available across our site – sell it, of course — then our learners could use that to get started in the system.

They would use the Assimil content, they would study with our system and if they wanted to buy the Assimil book for the additional grammar explanations then they would still do so and I think many people would do so.

I’m going to try to persuade Assimil that it’s in their interest to A: sell, you know, chapter by chapter, to offer their system across our system because right now they target primarily French speakers so this should open up a larger market and then many of those people may still buy the book from Assimil so that’s a meeting that I have planned in Paris.

I have one more meeting in Paris, your good friend Marianne.

Jill: Yes, long-time Linguist learner, now LingQ learner, in Melun, I believe, outside of Paris; 40 minutes maybe outside of Paris.

Yeah, she does a lot for us; does French translations and very keen member, LingQ member; very nice lady.

I’m jealous that you get to meet her.

Steve: Well, you know, it’s like so many of our learners.

We speak to them on Skype, we get to know them and, I mean, I think you’ll agree one of the pleasures of being involved with LingQ is the people that we’ve gotten to know in different countries.

It must be something about the LingQ system that we only get nice people.

Jill: Generally.

Steve: Generally.

Jill: Generally.

Steve: Well, no, but overwhelmingly; overwhelmingly. I’ve had many conversations with Marianne.

She works at a school so I’m also going to visit her school and talk to some language teachers there and then I am just going to get to know Marianne a little bit and so that will be fun.

Jill: And then after Paris where are you planning on going?

Steve: From there we are going to join…I will hand my car in; I’ll just have the car for three days…and then I belong to a group of former Canadian diplomats, typically retired diplomats, ex-ambassadors or trade commissioners, who gather once a year to play golf.

In the past we’ve always done it in Canada.

One year it’s in Eastern Canada and one year in Western Canada.

So, for example, one year it was at Mont-Tremblant which is very nice; we played there in September.

We did it in Victoria, British Columbia which is also beautiful.

This year we are doing it in Loire Valley.

This year we are making an exception.

We are actually bringing “da wives”.

Normally, we exclude the wives because this is sort of your male bonding thing, okay.

We sit around and we tell rude jokes.

But this time we figured the wives probably would not sit back and accept the idea that the men were going off to France to play golf and eat nice meals and do all of that kind of thing and drink good wine and that the women would have to stay home.

We’re meeting up in this pub that’s called the Great Canadian Pub in Paris.

We are meeting there at 3 o’clock on the 19th in the afternoon – no, the 18th, actually.

We are all getting in a bus and we’re driving down to wherever the first hotel is.

I tell you, someone else has made all the arrangements and I haven’t even looked at it.

There are meals; there are this…all kinds of things included in it.

I’ve just paid and we are going to show up and just go with the flow.

Jill: Oh, that will be so great.

I know Carmen, your wife, is a very avid golfer.

I think she enjoys golfing more than you do, actually, so she’s probably very excited.

Steve: Oh yeah, she’s very excited.

Some of the ladies coming are also keen golfers; some of whom she knows and some she doesn’t know.

So, she’s going to have a great time and we’re going to eat and so forth and so we’ll spend a week playing golf, visiting Chateau, eating.

We are going to visit the City of Toole which is a very, you know, lovely old town.

Then after that we are going to drive down to a place called Pau which is in the Basque Country in France and there we’ve rented a villa.

It’s a house of some kind; not very big.

It’s 500 Euro per week which is quite reasonable.

I think it has two small bedrooms.

It’s not a very big place.

We’re going to stay there for two weeks.

My older son and his wife and two children are going to come out and visit from London because they live in London, England.

They are going to spend maybe three or four days with us and then we’re just going to visit around.

Pau is near the Spanish border so we can visit around in France.

We can go to the ocean at Biarritz, St.

Jean De-Luz, which are very famous ocean resorts.

We can also drive into Spain.

Pamplona where they run the bulls is not very far away so we’re just going to explore.

Jill: Wow, that sounds so great.

Are you not then going to London this trip?

Steve: No.

We much prefer that they come to visit with us.

I mean London is a spectacular city and there is so much to do but it’s a bit stressful.

Flying into Heathrow they’ve got four or five terminals.

I never know where I’m coming in and where I’m leaving.

You are forever lined up in security and then it takes forever to get in and it takes forever to get out so London is stressful to me.

I mean, you know, they live in a house which by London standards is in a nice area but, I mean, it’s extremely cramped.

If my wife and I go there we’re really on top of my son and his wife and their kids and it’s just…we’re used to having a little more space.

Which, I mean, we love going there but it’s more fun, I think, if they come to Pau and then with the little kids and we can visit around and see things and enjoy, you know, a different experience.

Steve: That’s right, so we’re not going to go to London this time.

Jill: So, you’re gone for five weeks, I think, and you’re spending the whole five weeks in France and maybe a little bit in Spain?

Steve: Exactly.

We do have some other days free in there and so I might travel…when we finish our golfing I might go to Avignon, Aix, and work my way that way to Pau because when I was a university student in France I used to hitchhike around that area and so I like that area.

I’m also going to maybe try and contact…there’s a very big sort of hospitality industry-school, hotel-restaurant-school, at Aix.

I know someone who goes there and, of course, language instruction is a big issue for people in the hospitality industry; the hotel industry and the restaurant industry.

I might just go there and see if we can interest them in LingQ because, again, I think it’s an excellent way for people to learn languages.

I’m going to try to mix a little bit of business but mostly pleasure, absolutely.

Jill: Fabulous! We look forward to hearing all about it when you come back.

Steve: Alright, I will. I am going to try to maintain my blog when I’m over there.

Yeah, it should be fun.

I might even take this little microphone along and interview some people in French and maybe put that up as French content in LingQ.

So, you know, we always say this, I know we have a lot of people who listen to our podcast, the EnglishLingQ podcast, we never get any feedback.

So, you know, LingQ.com, we can come there; thelinguist.com.

I have my blog thelinguist.blogs.com.

We would be very happy to hear how you enjoy these; what kinds of discussions you prefer; free-flowing discussions like this or, you know, slower ones for beginners.

Tell us what you would like to have.

Isn’t that right, Jill?

Jill: Exactly right.

Steve: Okay, thanks for now.

Jill: Bye, bye.

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Steve: Hi, Jill.

Jill: Hi, Steve.

Steve: We have with us again and we know he’s very busy and he’s going to go back to his desk here at KP Wood but we want to ask him very briefly to describe the nature of his work now, the different projects that he’s involved in, what things there are on the environment, you know, on the horizon rather, things that he has ahead of him.

Tell us a little bit about your work.

Stephen: Actually, my work is very interesting right now because what I have been spending most of my time on the last few years is working with our lumber suppliers in Sweden to develop products for Japan and then working along with our staff in Tokyo, Japan to sell those products to Japan.

So, I get a chance to work on the supply side and the sale side so it’s quite interesting.

And in the more recent last six months or so I’ve been involved in our software division also where we have developed software for companies like ourselves that are trading lumber and also for sawmills in their production and sales of lumber.

That business is quite interesting because it’s new and any new project is fun.

Jill: Yeah, I was just going to ask you, how do you find it different than the wood industry?

The software industry, is it a different, you know, is it a different sales pitch?

How do you communicate with your clients, your potential customers?

Stephen: Well actually the potential customers are people that we’ve been dealing with for years or at least the type of people, people in the sawmill industry.

So, I think we know how to relate to them quite well and we know what their needs are but it is a different product.

Lumber and software is quite a different product so I’ve had to learn a lot about software and I still have to learn a lot more about software — not programming but software use — in order to sell it.

And also until now most of my sales have been selling lumber to Japanese customers in Japan where now I’m selling software to Swedish customers in Sweden and, of course, the cultures are totally different but that’s interesting too.

Jill: Yeah, I was just going to ask you, what is the difference in cultures?

What’s the main difference you notice between dealing with Japanese customers and Swedish customers?

Stephen: Actually, of course, they don’t look alike but other than that I find a lot of similarities surprising enough.

Both Swedish people and Japanese people are generally very punctual, quite formal in their business and then they like to have fun after business hours, which is the way I conduct myself.

When I’m doing business I’m quite formal and then after business with customers or suppliers we like to have fun.

They are also – both Japanese and Swedish – quite serious when they are working.

I guess I mentioned that before but detail-oriented, serious, punctual, neat and formal.

So, actually, there are a lot of similarities between the two.

Jill: As we know from a previous podcast you spent years living in Japan and I think you may have some plans to spend some time in Sweden.

Stephen: Yes.

I don’t think they want me back in Japan again.

No, just joking.

So, actually, now I’m planning to move with my wife and children to Sweden for a few years.

KP Wood has had an office in Sweden for a while but I’m going over there to work in that office and I’ll be involved in both the lumber side of the business and the software side of the business so that should be exciting.

Jill: And do you have plans to learn Swedish now that you’re moving there?

Stephen: Yes.

Actually, I’m using LingQ right now.

I’ve only been on it for a short amount of time but I’m progressing quite well.

I mean I listen to a lot of Swedish radio when I’m driving in my car in Sweden.

I also have my iPod which I listen to my Swedish tapes and review it on LingQ and surprisingly enough in just a few short months I can follow a lot of Swedish conversations now.

Steve: And the interesting thing, of course, you talked about the comparison between Swedish people and Japanese people.

One thing I find interesting is Sweden is kind of a peninsula.

It’s not exactly a peninsula because Norway sits on top of them but it’s the Scandinavian Peninsula.

They are kind of separated from Continental Europe and, of course, Japan is a group of islands.

So, I also find that the Swedish society is a little insular like the Japanese are a little bit insular.

They are both very international, very internationally-minded but they are also…both societies I find close knit.

Do you find that?

Stephen: Yes, I do.

They are quite homogeneous.

Only recently Sweden has had more immigration and now 15 percent of their population are immigrants but those are mostly in the larger cities.

So they are quite insular but lucky for me that everywhere I go when I speak English, if I go into a restaurant or somewhere a gas station and I speak English, they always ask me where I’m from and when I answer Canada they’re quite friendly, so.

I’ve had only good experiences in Sweden as I did in Japan too.

Steve: And one of the major differences though would be that in Sweden just about everybody speaks English which is not necessarily the case in Japan.

Stephen: That’s right.

Actually, in Tokyo a lot of people do speak a limited English where you can have simple conversations but not detailed conversations.

In the countryside of Japan it’s very hard to find someone to speak English which is one of the reasons I left Tokyo after two years and moved to the countryside to force myself to learn Japanese.

Where in Sweden a lot of the Swedish people speak better English than I do.

Steve: And where did you move to in Japan just before we finish here?

Stephen: I moved to the Island of Shikoku to a city called Matsuyama which is a very, very small city in Japanese standards.

It’s only 450,000 people.

I guess that would be the second largest city in Sweden.

Steve: Yeah, could be.

I don’t know how big Tabori is but…okay, well listen, thank you very much for dropping by.

It’s been very interesting.

Thank you Jill.

Jill: Thank you.

Steve: Thank you Stephen.

Stephen: Thank you for having me.

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Steve: Hello, Jill.

Jill: Hi, Steve.

Steve: Today we have a special guest and maybe you can introduce him.

Jill: We have Mr. Stephen Coyle with us, who is a very funny guy, gets people laughing around the KP Wood/LingQ office and he’s going to talk to us today about his experience living and teaching in Japan.

Steve: We might just explain that KP Wood, of course, is a company involved in the international trade of lumber, wood products, with offices in two Canadian provinces, in Sweden and Japan.

Stephen Coyle is responsible for sales to Japan and purchasing in Sweden so he travels a lot to both Japan and to Sweden.

In fact, you are going off to Sweden next week but in his previous career he was a teacher in Japan.

So, let me go back Stephen to there you were…tell us when it was and what your feelings were as you went out to Japan for the first time.

Stephen: A couple of years after graduating from university I decided to move to Japan partly to teach English and partly to study Japanese language and culture and business.

So in April of 1990 I arrived in Japan which was right near the end of the “Bubble Economy” in Japan so times were still good those days.

Teachers got paid a lot of yen.

There were a lot of after-work dinner parties, etc.

and we had a fun time.

Steve: And what were your expectations?

I mean you had grown up in Canada and perhaps I think traveled around in North America, maybe elsewhere, but you hadn’t been to Japan before; Asian country.

What did you expect and how was your experience there different from your expectations?

Stephen: Yes.

I had grown up in seven or eight different cities throughout North America and I traveled around the world mostly Australia, Europe.

In Asia the only places I had been to were Thailand and Hong Kong so I thought that Tokyo would be similar to Hong Kong.

When I got there I was surprised to see that actually it’s quite a different place than Hong Kong; a little more organized and the pace is different.

Steve: And you went there with the intention on teaching English.

Did you have a job before you went there or how did you get your job?

Stephen: Yes.

I was hired by a company GEOS Language Systems in Japan which at the time was the world’s largest English academy.

They have a branch office in Vancouver where I was interviewed and trained and hired and they sent me to Japan.

My prerequisite for the job was that I wanted to live in Tokyo.

I did not want to live in the countryside because my stereotype or image of the countryside was that it would be quite backwards.

Little did I know it was far from the truth.

Steve: Now did you study…I know, Jill, you took a course in teaching English as a second language.

How long was that course and what did that amount to?

Jill: I think it was, wow, maybe one to two months.

I can’t remember.

I think it was everyday.

It was Monday to Friday I believe for one month so four and a half weeks or something like that.

And it was…really there were only a few native speakers, English speakers in the class, myself any maybe three other people and the rest of the class were Japanese; Japanese and Korean I think were the two main groups.

Steve: Yeah, you know, I have seen some of these people who have these degrees in teaching English as a second language and I’ve often felt that many of them could benefit by joining LingQ and improving their English.

That’s not to be unfair and I know myself when I studied French in our school system our French teachers at school couldn’t speak French.

So, there is nothing unusual about a language teacher teaching a language that they’re not really fluent in.

But did you Stephen have to take a course in any kind of specialized English as a second language teaching methodology?

Stephen: No, I didn’t.

Actually in those days in 1990 there was such a demand for teachers in Japan that basically anybody who had a university diploma could get a Visa and find a company to hire them quite easily in Japan.

In those days we were more entertainers than we were teachers.

We had to look good which when I was a younger man I was a little more handsome; a little bit thinner.

We had to look good, we had to smile and we had to keep the students entertained.

That’s what we were told to do.

Entertain them so they would keep renewing their memberships and continue to study English.

Steve: But, you know, that’s not an entirely bad philosophy rather than trying to teach them the dry rules of grammar.

That’s what we ask Jill to do on her chats with people and so that people want to come back and chat to Jill and they come and visit Jill and so forth so it’s all about entertaining.

But seriously though, we do believe at LingQ that if you’re having a good time, if you’re enjoying the language, you’re more likely to learn.

If you make it a very onerous burden people will just not do it which brings me to another question.

You had learners in the class and maybe you can tell us a little bit about the kinds of learners you had and I’m just curious if they studied outside the classroom or if most of their learning took place when they were with you?

Stephen: Actually most of my students were between the age of 18 to 30; university students trying to improve their English so that they could get hired by an international company or people, young businessmen, young businesswomen, that wanted to use English in business.

They were all quite busy and the only time that they really studied English was in the class with me once or twice a week.

You have to remember in 1990 to 1993 there was no Internet so it was very difficult to find English materials to study other than books or going to watch a movie or renting a video.

Steve: And did your students improve?

I’m sure many of them did.

What percentage…how many of the let’s say out of 10 typically would do well?

How many would not progress at all?

I don’t know, Jill, if you want to comment on this.

I see you want to get a comment in.

Jill: No.

I was just going to say how many stayed the same?

You know, were with you for a year and after a year basically their level hadn’t changed at all.

I would assume that would be quite common.

Stephen: Well, I was quite proud of my efforts there.

I mean, I did prepare a lot for my classes to make them entertaining as well as educational but no matter how hard I prepared it all depended on the student.

And especially in Japan where a lot of people, especially the men are quite shy to speak a foreign language, some people progressed quickly and some progressed slowly and some didn’t progress.

Typically the young women progressed much faster than the men because I think they didn’t have as much pride or embarrassment.

So it really depended on the student but I would say 60 to 70 percent of the students in a one-year period you could notice a definite improvement.

Steve: How many were there in each class and how much were the students paying per hour for their session?

Stephen: Well, we had some students taking private lessons which, of course, is only one student per class.

At the time it was $9 to $10,000 yen an hour which would be about $100.00 Canadian.

It was quite expensive so I really tried my best to prepare for those classes because I felt bad that the students were paying that much money.

Of course they weren’t paying to me they were paying to the school.

In the group lessons we would have anywhere from four to eight students.

Steve: Now you then came back to Canada after some years and then, perhaps, tell us a little bit about your second career.

Stephen: Well, when I returned to Canada…you have to remember before I went to Japan I was working for the Canadian government in the trade division which spurred on my interest in international trade which was the main reason I moved to Japan to study Japanese and do trade with Japan.

So when I returned to Canada I was lucky enough to find a company that was trading lumber to Japan which is the company I’m with now KP Wood Ltd.

http://www.kpwood.com and I’ve been here ever since.

It’s been 14 years now trading lumber with Japan.

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Steve: Hi, Jill.

Jill: Hi, again.

Steve: You know, I want to talk a little bit about public speaking.

I mentioned this on my blog but last night I was at a dinner.

It was the annual meeting of the Japan-Canada Chamber of Commerce and I didn’t realize this but we had our meeting from 6 to 7.

The Chairman of the Chamber had arranged for the Consul General, the Japanese Consul General, to come and speak at 7 o’clock to the members and then at 7:30 the barbeque was going to begin on the garden terrace of a very nice hotel.

Sounds like a nice evening?

Jill: Sure does.

Steve: Alright.

Our Chairman managed to keep the Consul General waiting for half an hour which to me is unbelievable; unbelievable that you would invite the Consul or anyone…invite them to speak to your group and keep them waiting while you dealt with internal matters. It’s just not done.

I don’t care if it’s your general meeting or a meeting where you are having coffee at home with your friends you just don’t invite someone and keep them waiting.

Jill: No.

Steve: Common courtesy.

Jill: Right.

Steve: That’s an expression.

Jill: Common courtesy, yes.

Steve: Common courtesy. You can also talk about common sense.

Jill: Which a lot of people don’t have.

Steve: So, we’re now a half hour late. At this point, I’m hungry. Okay?

It’s 7:30 and suddenly I’m told we have the Consul General here to talk to us.

I had invited my wife and another couple to the barbeque because this was open to other people so now they have to wait for the Consul General to give his speech.

So the Consul General then came and spoke in Japanese, which is fine, with English slides and he spoke for 45 minutes.

So, what I’m leading to is I came across on the Internet a blog post, which is also in YouTube, by a person called Guy Kawasaki.

Have you heard of Guy Kawasaki?

Jill: No, no I haven’t.

Steve: Guy Kawasaki is very famous.

He writes books on how to make money and how to be successful and how to do everything you ever wanted to do.

Jill: I don’t read those kind of books.

Steve: Okay.

No, I don’t either but I found this and he gave a…in fact, I saw this YouTube and what he said basically was that if you are ever giving a presentation you have the 10-20-30 rule.

Ten is the maximum number of PowerPoint slides.

No more than 10; very, very good suggestion.

The 20 refers to 20 minutes.

Never speak longer than for 20 minutes and the 30 refers to the 30 point, you know, fonts – font points – whatever; make it big.

Two advantages: 1) there’s less for people to read and 2) they can read it.

Jill: They can see it.

Steve: So as I sat there listening to this Consul General drone on about things that were of no interest to anyone I just kept on saying to myself 10-20-30.

So, that’s my first comment.

What is your reaction to all of that?

Jill: I don’t know what I would have done.

I would have been starving and you probably didn’t eat until 9 o’clock.

Steve: 8:30.

8:30; the sun had gone down.

We were going to have a nice sunset barbeque and we ended up with a barbeque in the dark.

Jill: See, I wouldn’t be too anxious to go back to another one of those meetings.

Steve: So, I think the thing about public speaking is…a couple of things that sort of stuck with me there: one is the need to simplify and so 20 minutes is max.

Unless you’re a member of the communist party of some country where you can talk for six hours 20 minutes is max.

The second thing I noticed was in that YouTube of Guy Kawasaki and others that I’ve seen on the Internet I find that I only remember what they said at the beginning.

Have you had that experience?

Jill: Yeah.

I mean I even think back to university courses where the teachers are up there lecturing and your attention span only lasts so long.

That’s why a lot of the classes were 50 minute classes which is still a long time but then you get into the two hour classes and sure you get a five minute break or something but most people I think are thinking about other things.

Steve: You know, I think too if you are in class you know you have to learn about what the professor is talking about because you have to write an exam.

Jill: Except for you also know that with a lot of professors they are just basically verbatim repeating what’s in your textbook so you know you can just go read your textbook and find out all the same information.

Steve: But it made me think, you know.

I sat there listening to the Consul General for 45 minutes.

I mean, I was a prisoner, right?

I couldn’t leave.

He had me.

We’re captive.

I don’t have to listen.

I probably could close my eyes but that would be impolite so I’m stuck.

But if I go on the Internet and I’ve now got this Google Reader set up so I’m getting these feeds from different blogs and podcast and whatever…say I’m reading something or I can look at a YouTube like Guy Kawasaki or Seth Golden who is another one of these gurus of marketing or anybody who has anything to say — Steve Kaufmann talking about language learning – it doesn’t matter, if I don’t like him or her she’s gone; she’s gone.

I am not a prisoner of that person.

That person has to try to capture my attention early,

Jill: …right away;

Steve: probably has to say it fairly soon because after three minutes — even if she’s good — I’m gone, probably.

You know, what else is there out there?

I’m not going to spend my whole afternoon listening to one person.

So, that’s a totally different discipline and it enables you to…like I can now with Google Reader I can get feeds from people that I think have something to say whether it be in writing or a video.

They may not have something useful to say everyday and the day they are not interesting I just shut them off and I go to someone else.

That’s an awfully good discipline.

The public speaker has an audience.

The audience is not going to go away; however, the audience can turn their mind off.

I can check my BlackBerry.

I can start doodling about new ideas for The Linguist so I can make Mark’s life more difficult.

So, I think it is very…I just came away from that…first of all, Guy Kawasaki’s idea stuck in my mind: max 20 minutes; max 10 slides; maximum.

When I say max it’s maximum 10 slides; maximum 20 minutes; large font; a few points on the PowerPoint.

Don’t write a book on the PowerPoint.

People can’t read it and they start losing it.

So those are some simple ideas.

So, I think, you know, if we’re in a sales presentation or any other sort of presentation I think the idea of having a few simple ideas that are delivered early and that you keep it short I think these are good ideas.

Now, let me ask you, were you required at university to make speeches or presentations?

Jill: Yeah, I was.

I think mostly in…I’m just trying to remember now…in my French classes for sure.

In all the French literature classes there was always at least one presentation per class per semester.

Steve: What would your presentation be on?

Jill: You know, I can’t even really remember.

Some of them were group present projects; presentations.

Others were things, you know, something I had to prepare on my own and I honestly…obviously it didn’t stick with me very long but I can’t even really remember what sorts of things I talked about.

I wasn’t really that interested.

So, I did have to do them.

I had to do them for my psychology courses as well which was more interesting to me because you’ve got theories you can talk about and, you know, you learn about different things.

So, those ones I actually enjoyed them.

I mean in one of my psychology courses we had a choice between writing a paper…which I hate; I hate writing…so, we could write a paper or we could do an oral presentation.

And I think out of the however many people were in my course, myself and maybe two other people, chose to do the presentation because most people are afraid of public speaking.

And I thought are you kidding me.

All I have to do is go up and stand up there for ten minutes and…sure you have to prepare, you have to think, you have to know what you are going to say but I don’t know, whatever…I was up there for maybe 10 minutes maybe 15 minutes as opposed to having to write a 10 or 15 page essay and I thought that was just the greatest thing.

I was so happy to have that option.

After having done so many presentations and in French which is so much harder than doing it in my native language that was just a piece of cake for me.

And I think that we were graded easier too because there were only a few of us that were brave enough to do this.

So, I never really had a problem with public speaking but I haven’t done it now for a long time so I think to do it now would probably cause me a little bit more anxiety.

Steve: Well that’s interesting. Why?

Because maybe we’ll have to get you to do some presentations on The Linguist.

Why would you have greater anxiety now than you had as a student?

Jill: Because I’m out of practice.

I’m not used to speaking to groups of people anymore.

So for a period of time there, for several years, I had to do it quite often; every year.

I haven’t had to do it for quite a few years now so I’m not so comfortable anymore.

Steve: Okay.

But, again, as you say it’s probably just a matter of getting used to it like so many things and maybe when you do you’ll be guided by the principles of Guy Kawasaki.

And, you know…well, I’ve said before that I don’t necessarily believe in all these 10 best ways to do this and 8 ways to be happy and so forth but there is a lot of good information on the Internet.

You have to sort through it but there are some people with some very useful advice and it’s free.

You don’t have to buy a book; it’s free.

And I think if I wanted to look up public speaking or presentations I could probably find a lot of free and very useful information by people who have other motives like Guy Kawasaki.

He likes to promote his blog and his podcast.

I don’t fully understand the business model but he sells books and he’s a public speaker and whatever.

It doesn’t matter but as part of that he offers a lot of information free.

We at LingQ also off a lot of ideas, information, content and a whole bunch of stuff free as part of our whole business model because in the long run we would like more people to find out about us; to come and see for themselves and hopefully sign up and study with us.

Okay.

Well, that was just a brief chat about public speaking.

Again, given that people only remember the first little bit I’m not sure what people will take from this discussion but there you go.

Thanks, Jill.

Jill: Thanks.

See you soon.

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Steve: Hi, Jill.

Jill: Hi, Steve.

Steve: You know, I thought we would try an experiment today. We’re going to speak for about ten minutes. We are going to talk about something of interest.

We can talk about the LingQ and the things that we are going through now and we’ll speak at normal speed just as if, you know, we’re talking.

We’re not making any special allowances for the fact that some of the people listening are not native speakers.

When we finish this we are going to have another discussion where we are going to make a special effort to speak very, very slowly and we’re going to try to talk about the same subjects.

This is an experiment.

It may not work.

If it doesn’t work the second discussion will never show up anywhere.

Are you agreed?

Jill: Agreed.

Steve: Alright.

So, let’s talk a little bit about LingQ.

Now, I am by nature very impatient.

Are you a patient person?

Jill: Well, it depends. It depends on the circumstances. Certain things I’m patient for and other things not.

Steve: Alright. I am, of course, impatient by nature and it’s taking forever to get LingQ up and running but we are close. There are a number of issues. The whole project is so complex.

First of all, we have the complexity of the structure of the system and the software and what’s difficult is to try and make complexity simple because if this complexity in our system becomes complexity that our learners have to deal with we’re just going to discourage them.

We have to make it simple and easy and fun so that’s the first challenge.

I think the general reaction we get is that LingQ is simpler, more pleasant than The Linguist and I think you’ve been using it as well.

Jill: Yeah and I agree.

I think that the people who are Linguist members seem to have more problems with LingQ because they are used to how everything was on The Linguist and some of them seem to be having a hard time figuring out how to use LingQ but the people who were never Linguist members I find don’t really have any problems using LingQ.

So, I think Linguist members just sort of need to put it out of their head how things worked on The Linguist.

Steve: You know, that almost reminds me of The Linguist manifesto where we tell our learners to forget everything they learned in school, forget all the rules, the tests or the times they made mistakes and approach the language with a new attitude.

And it is true, people get used to things, any routine.

You know what it’s like.

If you use a certain software program and I come along and say here Jill, this is better.

Why don’t you use this?

What’s your reaction going to be?

Jill: Usually, well, why?

Why?

Why do I need to?

Why do I have to change?

I don’t want to change.

Steve: Right.

But I still think even amongst The Linguist members the majority have said they prefer the increased functionality and the greater simplicity of LingQ.

So, one element of complexity is the system itself and getting all of our functions.

Even now the functions that we have up represent maybe 60 percent of what we want to put up there and yet we don’t want to increase the complexity we just want to make it better.

So, there’s a lot of work for our programmer and there’s just so much stuff for him to do so that’s one level of complexity.

The second level is that a big part of what Mark has designed in the system is to increase the opportunity for interaction between people in order to take advantage of the Internet.

So, this is where we don’t have our Forum up so people can’t talk to each other.

Learners can’t talk to learners, can’t talk to teachers, they can’t ask questions, they can’t ask people for, you know…we can’t have a discussion on what would you like to see in LingQ and so forth so the Forum not being up is a problem.

You go to the old Linguist Forum or you used to go there quite often, right?

What kinds of questions did people normally ask?

Were they language related or system related?

Jill: Most often they were language related.

They were related to content items; words and phrases they didn’t understand.

Some people would go…we had an area I think for content, sharing content because members couldn’t upload their own…well, they could.

They could import content into their own account.

They couldn’t share it with other people in The Linguist so there were a few people that would go in and copy and paste whole articles into our Forum so if other people were interested they could go and copy and paste and import it into their account.

And then there were some system questions, you know, questions about The Linguist but the majority were actually about words and phrases.

Steve: So, I think you’ve touched on one thing there.

The fact that it is now A: easier to import and two: that you have an ability to share anything that you import and I think three: the fact that we will now have people in different languages so therefore it’s easier for people to share stuff from their own native language with other people so that’s going to be exciting.

The other thing that Mark has built in now is that we have thelinguist.com website which is going to be this ever-growing repository of content with audio files and text so anyone learning Spanish, Chinese, French, English, you name it, can go there and find an increasing supply of good content with audio and text and that is difficult to find today on the Internet.

You can find audio and you can find blogs or, you know, newspaper sites or whatever but to go to one place where you can find an increasing number of languages, content that has both audio and text, I think is going to be very useful and it’s going to be free for everybody.

Jill: Right.

Steve: But that site isn’t working properly yet so there’s another level of complexity.

It will be interesting to see, you know, with the Forum what we want to do is if you identify a blog in Spanish let’s say, say a podcast that you are listening to and you say gee, I really like this, could someone please transcribe it for me?

Because you understand maybe 30-40 percent of it if someone would transcribe it for you then you are going to be able to learn from it.

So then someone may volunteer to transcribe it which they can charge for so they can earn points for doing that and you won’t be the only person downloading it so there will be a whole interactive thing there that happens.

In your discussion with our learners because you talk to them everyday, what is their level of understanding or awareness of this whole thing that we’re trying to create?

Jill: What do you mean exactly?

Steve: Do they understand that we’re going to have this opportunity to share content?

That one person can say I found a blog, would someone record it in German please?

I found a podcast, can someone transcribe it please?

Does anyone out there have easy content in French on cooking?

— That there’ll be this whole level of interaction?

Jill: Yeah, I don’t think that most people know that’s happening.

We don’t really talk about it anywhere on the site so I have not had anybody specifically ask me about that.

I’ve mentioned things to certain people who have maybe written saying you know, I found this site, there is only text, can you please record the audio?

I write back and say well, we’re not going to record it but in the future, hopefully in your future, people will be able to record it for you and maybe some people will do it for nothing and probably most people will want to earn points for doing it.

Transcribing and recording could take a while, especially transcribing, so most people will probably want to earn points for it.

So, there are a few people who know because I’ve told them but I don’t think most people know.

Steve: And, you know, we may have some people who are not at all language learners but they’re typists.

I mean they are stenographers and so here’s an opportunity that if there’s an item, let’s say a very popular podcast, and they can come and pick and choose and they say this looks like a really popular podcast — one of the leading say French or Japanese podcasts — I’m a stenographer if I transcribe it and put it up there every time someone downloads that I’m going to make whatever it is – 50 cents.

So, if that is downloaded 100 times all of a sudden it’s worthwhile transcribing that content so that’s going to be interesting to see how all of that functions.

Another thing that I think will be interesting is, you know, like I’ve been listening to The Linguist manifesto in Russian; a male voice, a female voice; one fast, one slow.

I think it will be interesting for people to come along and say look, I’m listening to this, it’s a male voice, I’d like to hear it in a female voice or I’d like to hear it slow and so we could have some of the same content read by different people and they can put it up and as long as people want to download it then…or they may say, you know, I live in Australia.

This is all in a North American accent.

I want to hear it in an Australian accent or I want it in a Quebecois accent or I want it in an Osaka accent and so I think this is all going to be fun as we go forward and that’s where the impatience comes in because we have so many things that we think are going to be fun and it just seems to take forever to get it up there.

That’s kind of where we are suffering.

We are hoping that early in September we will be in a position to, you know, have our payment system…which raises another question.

We put up on the LingQ Central blog a description of our new payment system, what kinds of questions have you been getting about it?

Jill: A lot of people still seem to be confused, again, I think former Linguist members who were used to paying a certain amount per month and then they were given X number of discussions, speaking events and words of writing.

So, a lot of people don’t seem to understand that’s not how it is going to work.

I’ve had emails from some people more than one time even after I’ve explained to them that no, you’re not given a certain number anymore you are given points so whatever you pay is equivalent to a certain amount of points, number of points and speaking events are 500 points and words of writing is 3.33 points per word.

That’s just how it worked out.

And so you have a certain amount of points and you use them however you like and once they are gone you either can purchase more or once your month, your new period starts and you are charged again, you are given those number of points again, that number of points again.

So, it’s a little bit difficult I think for people who were used to the old way to get used to it.

But other than that I think some people have wondered what happens if they have a whole bunch of points in their account and they don’t have time to use them or they haven’t used them and they continue to accumulate.

Basically, I mean you have your points for as long as you want so if you don’t want to use them all, if you have to go away for three months or you are tired of learning English or whatever language, you can come back into your account — it is not going to be closed — and use those points.

If you don’t want to continue accumulating points then you just need to downgrade yourself to the free membership level or the $10.00 membership level where you’re not accumulating points anymore.

Steve: Right.

The thing too is it’s a new concept.

I mean we are dealing with – call it a virtual school whereas normally if you signed up for a class if you don’t show up it’s gone.

Jill: That’s right.

Steve: So, you can’t carry that hour.

You know, you signed up to be there Tuesday at 11 o’clock and you decided for whatever reason that you’re going to go away for two weeks, all those classes you’ve signed up for they’re gone.

Whereas in our system you can actually carry that class forward or you can…this month you’re going to spend more time in writing class, the next month you are going to spend more time in speaking and you can also go from Spanish to French to Chinese to English so there’s a lot of flexibility and I think people once they get used to it they will see that there is more flexibility.

It’s possible that someone in the old system who every single month absolutely used all of their speaking and writing that that person may feel, especially if they are at that $39.00 level, that they were better off in the old system.

However, when you consider that they can look at different languages, that they can carry it forward if they go off for one month even, they can save their points.

If they have accumulated too many points they can drop down.

I mean there’s just so much flexibility that I really think that it’s just a matter of understanding it and getting used to it.

And what you mentioned initially and that is that people don’t like to change.

Jill: Right.

Steve: So, yeah.

Jill: And I think too once…next week, hopefully, when the payment system and the membership levels are all in place…I think once people can actually see it it will be more real to them; they’ll understand it.

It’s still sort of hypothetical for them right now.

We are just explaining it in an email; English isn’t their first language.

Although, we did translate one of the emails but I think people often need to see something before they can truly understand it.

Steve: Yeah and I think people try to imagine cases that in fact may not materialize and a lot of people don’t realize that a majority of our learners, the vast majority of our learners, in the old system did not maximize month after month so they would, in fact, go a month without using it or if they didn’t write or they didn’t read then…it just wasn’t a fair system.

But, I mean, yeah, the main thing is we want to get up, get started and the main thing too is that we want to have fun.

We think the new system can be more fun because of all the interaction between people, different languages and so forth, which gets me back to my first point about my great impatience and I think maybe you’re equally impatient here.

So, hopefully, the next time we have this discussion things will already be up there and people will be using it.

But I think one of the really gratifying things is that we are starting to get more and more people to give us content.

We heard from Brazil.

We hadn’t had many learners from Brazil.

We got some Portuguese from people in Brazil which is excellent.

We got some things in Spanish and some French, Japanese and so forth, so.

I think even with the limited amount that we’ve actually — because we really haven’t been promoting the site – we’ve had some pretty positive response.

Okay, thank you very much Jill.

Jill: Thank you.

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: You know, I thought we would try an experiment today. We’re going to speak for about ten minutes. We are going to talk about something of interest.

We can talk about the LingQ and the things that we are going through now and we’ll speak at normal speed just as if, you know, we’re talking.

We’re not making any special allowances for the fact that some of the people listening are not native speakers.

When we finish this we are going to have another discussion where we are going to make a special effort to speak very, very slowly and we’re going to try to talk about the same subjects.

This is an experiment. It may not work. If it doesn’t work the second discussion will never show up anywhere. Are you agreed?

Jill: Agreed.

Steve: Alright. So, let’s talk a little bit about LingQ. Now, I am by nature very impatient. Are you a patient person?

Jill: Well, it depends. It depends on the circumstances. Certain things I’m patient for and other things not.

Steve: Alright. I am, of course, impatient by nature and it’s taking forever to get LingQ up and running but we are close. There are a number of issues. The whole project is so complex.

First of all, we have the complexity of the structure of the system and the software and what’s difficult is to try and make complexity simple because if this complexity in our system becomes complexity that our learners have to deal with we’re just going to discourage them.

We have to make it simple and easy and fun so that’s the first challenge.

I think the general reaction we get is that LingQ is simpler, more pleasant than The Linguist and I think you’ve been using it as well.

Jill: Yeah and I agree.

I think that the people who are Linguist members seem to have more problems with LingQ because they are used to how everything was on The Linguist and some of them seem to be having a hard time figuring out how to use LingQ but the people who were never Linguist members I find don’t really have any problems using LingQ.

So, I think Linguist members just sort of need to put it out of their head how things worked on The Linguist.

Steve: You know, that almost reminds me of The Linguist manifesto where we tell our learners to forget everything they learned in school, forget all the rules, the tests or the times they made mistakes and approach the language with a new attitude.

And it is true, people get used to things, any routine. You know what it’s like.

If you use a certain software program and I come along and say here Jill, this is better. Why don’t you use this? What’s your reaction going to be?

Jill: Usually, well, why? Why? Why do I need to? Why do I have to change? I don’t want to change.

Steve: Right. But I still think even amongst The Linguist members the majority have said they prefer the increased functionality and the greater simplicity of LingQ.

So, one element of complexity is the system itself and getting all of our functions.

Even now the functions that we have up represent maybe 60 percent of what we want to put up there and yet we don’t want to increase the complexity we just want to make it better.

So, there’s a lot of work for our programmer and there’s just so much stuff for him to do so that’s one level of complexity.

The second level is that a big part of what Mark has designed in the system is to increase the opportunity for interaction between people in order to take advantage of the Internet.

So, this is where we don’t have our Forum up so people can’t talk to each other.

Learners can’t talk to learners, can’t talk to teachers, they can’t ask questions, they can’t ask people for, you know…we can’t have a discussion on what would you like to see in LingQ and so forth so the Forum not being up is a problem.

You go to the old Linguist Forum or you used to go there quite often, right?

What kinds of questions did people normally ask?

Were they language related or system related?

Jill: Most often they were language related.

They were related to content items; words and phrases they didn’t understand.

Some people would go…we had an area I think for content, sharing content because members couldn’t upload their own…well, they could.

They could import content into their own account.

They couldn’t share it with other people in The Linguist so there were a few people that would go in and copy and paste whole articles into our Forum so if other people were interested they could go and copy and paste and import it into their account.

And then there were some system questions, you know, questions about The Linguist but the majority were actually about words and phrases.

Steve: So, I think you’ve touched on one thing there.

The fact that it is now A: easier to import and two: that you have an ability to share anything that you import and I think three: the fact that we will now have people in different languages so therefore it’s easier for people to share stuff from their own native language with other people so that’s going to be exciting.

The other thing that Mark has built in now is that we have thelinguist.com website which is going to be this ever-growing repository of content with audio files and text so anyone learning Spanish, Chinese, French, English, you name it, can go there and find an increasing supply of good content with audio and text and that is difficult to find today on the Internet.

You can find audio and you can find blogs or, you know, newspaper sites or whatever but to go to one place where you can find an increasing number of languages, content that has both audio and text, I think is going to be very useful and it’s going to be free for everybody.

Jill: Right.

Steve: But that site isn’t working properly yet so there’s another level of complexity.

It will be interesting to see, you know, with the Forum what we want to do is if you identify a blog in Spanish let’s say, say a podcast that you are listening to and you say gee, I really like this, could someone please transcribe it for me?

Because you understand maybe 30-40 percent of it if someone would transcribe it for you then you are going to be able to learn from it.

So then someone may volunteer to transcribe it which they can charge for so they can earn points for doing that and you won’t be the only person downloading it so there will be a whole interactive thing there that happens.

In your discussion with our learners because you talk to them everyday, what is their level of understanding or awareness of this whole thing that we’re trying to create?

Jill: What do you mean exactly?

Steve: Do they understand that we’re going to have this opportunity to share content? That one person can say I found a blog, would someone record it in German please? I found a podcast, can someone transcribe it please?

Does anyone out there have easy content in French on cooking?

— That there’ll be this whole level of interaction?

Jill: Yeah, I don’t think that most people know that’s happening. We don’t really talk about it anywhere on the site so I have not had anybody specifically ask me about that.

I’ve mentioned things to certain people who have maybe written saying you know, I found this site, there is only text, can you please record the audio?

I write back and say well, we’re not going to record it but in the future, hopefully in your future, people will be able to record it for you and maybe some people will do it for nothing and probably most people will want to earn points for doing it.

Transcribing and recording could take a while, especially transcribing, so most people will probably want to earn points for it.

So, there are a few people who know because I’ve told them but I don’t think most people know.

Steve: And, you know, we may have some people who are not at all language learners but they’re typists.

I mean they are stenographers and so here’s an opportunity that if there’s an item, let’s say a very popular podcast, and they can come and pick and choose and they say this looks like a really popular podcast — one of the leading say French or Japanese podcasts — I’m a stenographer if I transcribe it and put it up there every time someone downloads that I’m going to make whatever it is – 50 cents.

So, if that is downloaded 100 times all of a sudden it’s worthwhile transcribing that content so that’s going to be interesting to see how all of that functions.

Another thing that I think will be interesting is, you know, like I’ve been listening to The Linguist manifesto in Russian; a male voice, a female voice; one fast, one slow.

I think it will be interesting for people to come along and say look, I’m listening to this, it’s a male voice, I’d like to hear it in a female voice or I’d like to hear it slow and so we could have some of the same content read by different people and they can put it up and as long as people want to download it then…or they may say, you know, I live in Australia.

This is all in a North American accent.

I want to hear it in an Australian accent or I want it in a Quebecois accent or I want it in an Osaka accent and so I think this is all going to be fun as we go forward and that’s where the impatience comes in because we have so many things that we think are going to be fun and it just seems to take forever to get it up there.

That’s kind of where we are suffering.

We are hoping that early in September we will be in a position to, you know, have our payment system…which raises another question.

We put up on the LingQ Central blog a description of our new payment system, what kinds of questions have you been getting about it?

Jill: A lot of people still seem to be confused, again, I think former Linguist members who were used to paying a certain amount per month and then they were given X number of discussions, speaking events and words of writing.

So, a lot of people don’t seem to understand that’s not how it is going to work.

I’ve had emails from some people more than one time even after I’ve explained to them that no, you’re not given a certain number anymore you are given points so whatever you pay is equivalent to a certain amount of points, number of points and speaking events are 500 points and words of writing is 3.33 points per word.

That’s just how it worked out.

And so you have a certain amount of points and you use them however you like and once they are gone you either can purchase more or once your month, your new period starts and you are charged again, you are given those number of points again, that number of points again.

So, it’s a little bit difficult I think for people who were used to the old way to get used to it.

But other than that I think some people have wondered what happens if they have a whole bunch of points in their account and they don’t have time to use them or they haven’t used them and they continue to accumulate.

Basically, I mean you have your points for as long as you want so if you don’t want to use them all, if you have to go away for three months or you are tired of learning English or whatever language, you can come back into your account — it is not going to be closed — and use those points.

If you don’t want to continue accumulating points then you just need to downgrade yourself to the free membership level or the $10.00 membership level where you’re not accumulating points anymore.

Steve: Right. The thing too is it’s a new concept.

I mean we are dealing with – call it a virtual school whereas normally if you signed up for a class if you don’t show up it’s gone.

Jill: That’s right.

Steve: So, you can’t carry that hour. You know, you signed up to be there Tuesday at 11 o’clock and you decided for whatever reason that you’re going to go away for two weeks, all those classes you’ve signed up for they’re gone.

Whereas in our system you can actually carry that class forward or you can…this month you’re going to spend more time in writing class, the next month you are going to spend more time in speaking and you can also go from Spanish to French to Chinese to English so there’s a lot of flexibility and I think people once they get used to it they will see that there is more flexibility.

It’s possible that someone in the old system who every single month absolutely used all of their speaking and writing that that person may feel, especially if they are at that $39.00 level, that they were better off in the old system.

However, when you consider that they can look at different languages, that they can carry it forward if they go off for one month even, they can save their points.

If they have accumulated too many points they can drop down.

I mean there’s just so much flexibility that I really think that it’s just a matter of understanding it and getting used to it.

And what you mentioned initially and that is that people don’t like to change.

Jill: Right.

Steve: So, yeah.

Jill: And I think too once…next week, hopefully, when the payment system and the membership levels are all in place…I think once people can actually see it it will be more real to them; they’ll understand it.

It’s still sort of hypothetical for them right now.

We are just explaining it in an email; English isn’t their first language.

Although, we did translate one of the emails but I think people often need to see something before they can truly understand it.

Steve: Yeah and I think people try to imagine cases that in fact may not materialize and a lot of people don’t realize that a majority of our learners, the vast majority of our learners, in the old system did not maximize month after month so they would, in fact, go a month without using it or if they didn’t write or they didn’t read then…it just wasn’t a fair system.

But, I mean, yeah, the main thing is we want to get up, get started and the main thing too is that we want to have fun.

We think the new system can be more fun because of all the interaction between people, different languages and so forth, which gets me back to my first point about my great impatience and I think maybe you’re equally impatient here.

So, hopefully, the next time we have this discussion things will already be up there and people will be using it.

But I think one of the really gratifying things is that we are starting to get more and more people to give us content.

We heard from Brazil.

We hadn’t had many learners from Brazil.

We got some Portuguese from people in Brazil which is excellent.

We got some things in Spanish and some French, Japanese and so forth, so.

I think even with the limited amount that we’ve actually — because we really haven’t been promoting the site – we’ve had some pretty positive response.

Okay, thank you very much Jill.

Jill: Thank you.

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

It’s an especially interesting time right now for conspiracy theories as the world navigates the COVID pandemic. In episode one of the new LingQ English Podcast Steve and Jahrine talk about some of the most pervasive theories.

Jahrine: Hello everyone. And welcome to episode one of the English LingQ podcast. So Steve and I today we’ll be talking on a pretty interesting topic. I think, uh, conspiracy theories. So Steve, would you mind actually, would you mind defining conspiracy theories for us? G

Steve: Oh geez, you’re going to make me think. So, first of all, I should say, Jahrine, this is a great idea to have these conversations and we’re going to talk about topical subjects and maybe people have a subject that they want us to talk about.And we’re happy to do that. Uh, the objective is not for us to have a soap box, as we say in English, you know, but it’s to have a sort of a, intermediate level type of content, talking about a wide variety of subjects that hopefully people find interesting and can listen to and then read on LingQ and improve their language and so forth.Conspiracy theories, I think conspiracy theories, um, you know, the, the word conspiracy suggests that there’s a plot. Okay.So typically in a conspiracy theory, there’s a suggestion that what you see what appears to be the situation is not true because secretly, uh, there are people involved in a conspiracy in a plot that, uh, you know, results in some, something other than what you think is in fact, the situation.Uh, for example, apparently in the United States, there are something like 40% of the people believe that 9/11 was an inside job or was not committed by the people who identify as the perpetrators. In other words, The people from Saudi Arabia primarily. And I think one from Egypt, I can’t remember which countries they were from, but they, they went to the United States.I mean, there’s a whole description of the process that the investigator discovered, that they had been to the United States, they took flying less, flying lessons and that they, you know, committed this dastardly deed. But for whatever reason, 30 or 40% of the people believe, no, this was a, you know, the CIA or it was George Soros or whatever, they got all kinds of other theories.So that’s a typical conspiracy theory.Jahrine: That’s high. I didn’t realize it was so high that 30 to 40% of Americans…Steve: It’s this whole idea of not believing what appears to be the standard accepted explanation.Uh, and, and throughout history, you know, it’s become more of an issue today because these weird conspiracy theories can spread so much more quickly using social media, but throughout history, there have been conspiracy theories, theories.You know, the family on the edge of the village, uh, who just moved in and whose daughter is a, you know, a cripple, therefore must be some evil spirits in her. They poisoned the well and pretty soon the whole village is over there, burning down their house. People are very susceptible to, to this kind of thing. The witch trials, you know, the whole witching controversy, you know, that there is no evidence of people having witchcraft powers.There’s no evidence of that at all.And yet massively people believed in this stuff to the point of, of persecuting these women and, and, uh, whatever, burning them at the stake and so forth. So it’s not a new phenomenon. But it’s kind of, uh, picked up, uh, power and the ability to spread more quickly because of social media.Jahrine: Mmhhmm, most definitely. I think, um, right now, of course there seem to be tons of conspiracy theories with everything that’s going on in the world. I wonder what you think about some of the theories surrounding COVID especially. I mean, there are so many with the masks and the vaccine, big pharma, and wow.Steve: Obviously I think a lot of people feel sort of powerless.Uh, you know, you have government, this kind of big and powerful, big corporations are big and powerful. I have no power, so probably they’re doing something bad. Uh, th th that kind of feeling is quite widespread. Uh, I, you know, and, and I, I was reading somewhere that, that apparently this guy Rush Limbaugh, who is a, uh, radio, uh, host in the U S said that the four sources of information that you must avoid are the government, scientists, the media…and what was the fourth? Scientists? You don’t listen to them. You don’t listen to the media, you don’t listen to government. And, uh, there was a fourth one, uh, at any rate.Whereas to me, I prefer to listen to the experts. That’s not to say that the experts are always 100%, right. And it’s not… the scientists change their mind on things, science by definition.And most explanations are theories. Theory suggests that if someone comes up with a better theory, then that will become the new science, but it’s always open. They’re supposed to be relying on evidence. So in the case of COVID, for sure there have been, you know, initially it was thought it was this way or it was that way, or it came from a bat or something else.There is no evidence that COVID was, you know, the, the, uh, Americans suggest that it was cultivated in this lab in China, the Chinese suggest that it was a, the CIA or the American army that did it. Uh, you know, there’s all kinds of stuff, but I I’m a great believer in our comes Occam’s razor. Occam, Who was a famous, I guess, philosopher, monk in the whatever 14th century in Britain.He said, you know, basically you should use the simplest explanation. That’s most likely to be correct because the more complicated explanations usually have so many rabbit holes that you can’t really… pursue it to determine whether it’s true or not. Whereas a simple explanation, you go there and you look at the evidence behind the simplest explanation.That’s where you go first. And the likelihood is that you’ll find that that’s the correct explanation. So on this COVID thing, I totally accept the idea that… that, uh, you know, I’m not a scientist, but it did come out of China. Uh, people were aware of it. It, you know, not just in China, but if they were aware of it in Taiwan, late December, early January, they were aware of it in every country.They knew about it. And it wasn’t done deliberately. And, uh, and as far as the masks are concerned, uh, there was maybe eight studies that say that masks are effective, and two studies that say they’re not very effective.But, but again, you have to look at the information like the study that says they’re not very effective.When was it done? How widespread was COVID at that time? Are they talking about the ability to protect you or are they talking about the ability to prevent you from spreading it to others? You have to look at the actual information that’s there. So I think there’s a lot of conspiracy theories out there based on,you know, information, that’s not very verifiable. So if you get back to Occam’s razor, complicated explanations, but you can’t actually go there to prove or disprove any of these suggested explanations. Whereas the simpler, the simpler explanation, uh, is easier to track down.So in the case of masks, okay, there’s been Google, uh, you know, scientific studies on masks and you’ll find eight go on way and two go the other way.So then read them carefully and make up your own mind. But most of the people that are saying masks don’t work, they haven’t done any of that work.Jahrine: Exactly. I think there’s a lot of distrust in the fact that a lot of governments, the Canadian government being one of them, at the beginning of this whole thing said that masks weren’t effective.You don’t need to use a mask. Um, Maybe… there’s talk now of that being maybe because there weren’t enough masks to go around, there were… weren’t even enough masks for healthcare providers at the time.So maybe that has something to do with it, but then maybe there’s that distrust and the government from then onwards and then maybe confirmation bias.I feel like too, you know, there are certain groups of people who, like in America, the whole movement “it’s my freedom”. “It’s my body”. “I shouldn’t have to wear a mask”. And so those people kind of seek out sources of proof that the masks don’t work and they latch on to that. Even if, like you say, there is way more information saying the opposite that they actually do work.So. It’s interestingI mean, uh,Steve: I remember in March we were in Palm Springs, my wife and I, and we flew home.We both wore masks the minute ever, even in early March, most of the information I saw said that masks are effective. I do remember that our chief, uh, sort of health officer in Canada, and even the messaging here in BC was, well, you can wear one.Uh, it won’t protect you, but it’ll prevent you from spreading it to others. But the most important thing is social distancing, washing hands and so forth and so on. So it was like a soft suggestion to wear a mask. And that reflected the position of the World Health Organization. Subsequent to that, there were a lot more studies done, particularly in Hong Kong and Taiwan.Where they’re used to wearing masks. It’s culturally there, they have, they have a cold, they wear a mask.So as not to spread their cold, so it’s much more acceptable there. Uh, but then they have very, to my mind, uh, persuasive studies showing that masks actually worked both ways. In other words, the suggestion was that if you wear a mask, you’re going to catch 70% of what you might spread to another person you’ll catch 30% of what another person is going tospread to you. So if you combine the two, it’s actually quite effective. If, if the infected person has a mask and the non-infected person has a mask, right, you’re significantly reducing the spread. But if you’re all standing together, they’re, uh, in a crowded space and the air isn’t moving, uh, chances are, it’s not a hundred percent.And I think that was part of it.And I think you’re right, that they were afraid when there was a run on these surgical masks and there weren’t enough surgical masks for healthcare workers. They didn’t want, you know, like these long line ups at Walmart to buy toilet paper, they didn’t want there to be a run-on surgical masks, but the fact that they’ve changed their position, I don’t see why that’s… people change.They learn more and as they learn more, they provide different advice.Jahrine: Mmhhmm… mmhhmmSteve: Yeah, go ahead.Jahrine: I was going to say nowwith the, uh, these vaccines. So I think we have, is it two or three that on the horizon that are 95% success rates, which is great.And now you read or I’ve been seeing more and more people saying that, Oh, I definitely won’t take it. I think. Three. I don’t remember the statistic.I actually think I read this earlier, but people are unsure and it makes sense for many reasons. One and I, I have to say I’m in this camp too, you know, it has it, it’s quick, it’s quicker than usual. So there’s a little trepidation there, but then you hear of people saying that, you know, Bill Gates is putting nanotechnology in the vaccine to track,track us or he’s, someone’s making money. The person who started the whole thing is making money on this vaccine.And so I won’t, I won’t buy into that.

Steve: So, so. If we compare, if we look at that, Bill Gates did this on purpose to put nano technology in our brains. So is there any proof of that? Has anyone ever nanotechnology inside anyone? Uh, any proof that Bill Gates all by himself managed to orchestrate this pandemic on all continents? Like that is just such a totally implausible explanation. The simpler explanation, an explanation then can be tracked down to this, you know, market in China. Deal with that one first, if you can disprove that fine, but don’t bring on this other extraneous stuff. The, um, yeah, I think unfortunately in the States I think something like 40 or 45% of the people, uh, are willing to take the vaccine in Canada 60 or 70%. That’s partly because of the messaging from political leaders. And I think it’s very damaging, uh, to, you know, uh, spread, uh, well again, in the States, it’s kind of a, you know it kind of goes both ways. On the one hand, uh, the political leadership is saying that the, the, uh, coronavirus is a hoax. Don’t worry about it. There’s this guy, Scott Atlas, who is the advisor to president Trump said, have it, cause it’s American Thanksgiving this week, go and have Thanksgiving with your grandparents cause it might be their last Thanksgiving. I mean like, what kind of reasoning is that? Make sure it’s their last Thanksgiving. You know, go to your grandparents’ house. I mean, it’s just unbelievable. Uh, so on the one hand, it’s a hoax, but on the other hand, Trump is trying to claim credit, like as if he’s single-handedly discovered the vaccine or as if he was the only, uh, the US government was the only government in the world that put money into vaccine development. Every government has put money into a vaccine development. Every scientist has been working as hard as they possibly can. And there are vaccines coming out of Germany, coming out of Israel, coming out of wherever. Even in Canada, we have two or three different projects to find a vaccine. So, um, but my suspicion is that once the vaccine is there and people start taking the vaccine, more and more people will want to take it because they’ll see that people got inoculated. Uh, but it’s, it takes like six weeks before it takes effect, right? Even if you get there’s two shots, three weeks between, and then it takes another week or two for the antibodies to build. But if they start to see now, let’s hope that there are no problems, but if there are no problems and all of a sudden… you’re going to see, uh, I wouldn’t be surprised if you get, you know, establishments saying you can’t come in here unless you show me a, uh, certificate of vaccination. That’s going to get people vaccinated pretty quickly. So asking people theoretically now about a vaccine that is still not yet approved in a situation where no one has taken it, do you want it? I don’t think what people say has that much significance. We’ll see when it’s out here, we’ll see what’s happening in February. I suspect most people will be aligned up to get it. I think

Jahrine: so. I, I read, uh, Bonnie Henry then, uh, BC top doctor said that realistically here in BC in Canada, we can expect the vaccine this time next year. Which seems a long way off to me. I don’t know if you’ve read that, but I think that’s maybe, you know, it has to, we have to get it. It has to go to maybe healthcare workers first, and then…

Steve: I hope it doesn’t take that long. Canada has been the most aggressive country in terms of pre-ordering the vaccine we have, yeah, we have, I don’t know how many billion doses or whatever the number is, but we have twice as many as the States. So we have by… canada has the biggest position on these vaccines. And they have a portfolio that includes Pfizer, Moderna and so forth and so on. So we will have it available to us. Now whether the manufacturers will give Canada a fair share of whatever they put out, I don’t know. I hope that Health Canada isn’t, as Canadians typically are, so bureaucratic that even after every other country has approved it, we’re still sitting in committee trying to figure out if we’re going to approve it for Canadians. That could happen, but I, I hope that doesn’t happen. So I would think that, you know, Dr. Fauci and the States said, uh, you know, by May, we would be, you know, close to living as normal. Time will tell, time will tell. But Dr. Bonnie Henry has been very, I would say moderate, moderate in what she says. And so she’s, uh, and she’s not also not, you know, we haven’t had the hard lockdowns here in BC. And her messaging has been very good and encouraging people to be patient. And so she’s done a good job. And if she says that she’s certainly knows a lot more than I do. So hopefully it doesn’t take that long.

Jahrine: So Steve, are there any conspiracy theories that you see a shred of truth in?

Steve: Mm, well, none comes to mind right now, but perhaps there are, but when you say a shred of truth, um, in all the conspiracy theories, there are… elements that are possibly believable, but, uh, the question is, are they verifiable? And, um, so I can’t immediately think of something. You might have some in mind where, where there is, you know, taking something that’s conceivable, possible. Uh, but not verifiable, uh, you know, I can’t think of any. It’s like, I’ll give you an example. So, uh, the, uh, President Trump’s legal team put on a, with Rudy Giuliani and this, uh, What was her name? Sidney Powell, put on a press conference where they talked about this machine, you know, technology developed by Hugo Chavez and the communist party of China and all this kind of thing. And I tweeted something to the effect of this is this is amazing that, uh, the legal team of the president is spewing such nonsense. And somebody came back and said, well, you know, it’s quite possible. Uh, look at the stats. So like, so, so then what can you go there and verify? You know, the, the point being that so many people in Detroit voted for Biden instead of Trump, that’s not possible, or when the votes came in was past a certain point. And there are actually very valid explanations of why that is. In fact, fewer people, the support for Trump in Detroit went up compared to the previous. But so, so that’s not so anything that’s put forward as a, as a reason why it might be the case. You know, if it is verifiable, you chase it down. If it’s completely unverifiable, I just dismiss it. So I don’t know. Maybe you can give me some examples of somewhat believable conspiracy theories.

Jahrine: Just speaking from… personally the recent one, the Jeffrey Epstein suicide in prison. Um, I mean, we can’t prove that it wasn’t a suicide. He was supposed to be on suicide watch and the camera was mysteriously not working. And the guy who was supposed to be watching him was asleep or something. It’s all very suspicious. Of course, the conspiracy theory being Jeffrey Epstein can ruin the lives of many, many powerful and rich people in the world. And so they don’t want him to get his chance and his day in court, they don’t want him to reveal them. So they had him killed.

Steve: I think that is, uh, that is I think possible because it’s very strange that those cameras were not working. It’s very strange that such a high profile prisoner was allowed to take his own life. Very strange. That… th… you know, there, you have a situation where the conspiracy theory, you know, it’s not possible to prove it not true. And the explanation that he just, yes, the guard was asleep. Yes. It just so happened the cameras weren’t working. Uh, and I apparently there’s more in terms of the bruises on his neck and stuff. So I think there, the official explanation has as many question marks in it as the conspiracy theory. So it’s not a, an open and shut, uh, situation, you know, it’s not completely implausible. I mean, in a way. Uh, but yeah, so I would say that there, yeah, I would say that, uh, I’d be looking to find… you know, I think there should be an inquiry, a proper inquiry, and I suspect they could find certain things. It’s like, you know, whether Lee Harvey Oswald is actually the person who shot Kennedy. I find that. Yeah, that your why? Maybe, maybe, but I think that those things, but I wouldn’t immediately, I wouldn’t go out spreading the theory that actually he was shot by someone else, nor would I go out and say with regard to Epstein that it was either Trump or Clinton that had him killed. I don’t have any evidence of that. But I would take with a great deal of skepticism, the official explanation that he just happened to commit suicide, and everybody just happened to be asleep. And the cameras weren’t working, I find that difficult.

Jahrine: Yeah, me too. Yeah, for sure. I

Steve: mean we have every right to be skeptical. We have every right to question. And, but in order to avoid going down, but then now the popular term “rabbit holes”, you know, I prefer to deal with explanations that where there’s some possibility of, of, uh, verifiability. And I wouldn’t go out and spread rumors based on essentially no evidence. Yeah. So…

Jahrine: Like the whole, that flat earth thing. That to me is… when I thought of the topic “conspiracy theory”, for me, the most recent, there have been many wild conspiracy theories out there, but it is amazing to me that in today’s age of science that something so… we, we know that the earth is not flat. We’ve known it for a very long time, but there are groups of people, and if you watched documentaries and look online, there seem to be quite a few people who truly believe that the earth is flat and they were all being lied to. For what reason? I’m not sure. It’s amazing.

Steve: Well, I mean, that’s a good example of how conspiracy theories work. In fact, the Ancient Greeks and probably the, the Egyptians, uh, 3-4,000 years ago, knew that the earth was round. Uh, they had a sense of, uh, our galaxy. They had a sense of, they, they devised a calendar based on these things 4,000 years ago. Uh, however, there are people who feel, you know, that, that sort of what they really don’t want you to know. Like I know, but everyone else is pulling the wool over your eyes. So it almost doesn’t matter what the issue is. People find a sense of, of, um, self-worth. In, in taking these positions. So they, the conspiracy theory is almost like a, you know, it’s, it’s a, there’s a psychological need to appear to be a, you know, someone who is smarter than the herd, you know, “I’m not lied to. I think for myself”.

Jahrine: Right. Yeah. And then they find community with other people like that. That is yeah.

Steve: The flat earth. Yes.

Jahrine: There’s a very interesting. I think it’s a Vice documentary. If you really want to, they go deep into that world into a, they go to a convention and…

Steve: Flat earth convention?

Jahrine: Yep. Yeah. Somewhere in the States. It’s a really interesting documentary, but yeah.

Steve: Well, I mean, people will believe all kinds of stuff. You look at religion, all these different religions that claim that, you know, the world was created, uh, at such and such a time. And, uh, uh, mankind, uh, lived at the same time as dinosaurs and stuff, or, I mean, there’s stuff that has… science has proven to be incorrect and people, that’s why I say Rush Limbaugh said, don’t listen to science. Oh, that was the one Rush Limbaugh said, don’t listen to academia. Don’t listen to the media. Don’t listen to government and don’t listen to science.

Jahrine: Who should you  listen to then?

Steve: Not that any of those sources of information are infallible. We are all human and we all make mistakes. And, and within any of, with every group, there are better actors and not so good, you know, so they, and they may make, make mistakes. And I agree with you. I have a criticism of our health officials here in Canada, who didn’t move quickly enough, who could have prevented the loss of life. But I mean, who’s perfect? You know, every profession has some people who perform better than others and people who make mistakes. And, and then some people admit their mistakes or change their opinions. So the fact that they, you know, to me, that’s not a con… to me, th that doesn’t justify a conspiracy theory around masks. They’re just trying to control us and you can’t control me. The whole mask anti mask thing to my mind is, is so irresponsible. Uh, you know, I I’m okay. You know, look at me. I’m okay. Um, and almost suggesting that anyone who gets sick from COVID, you know, must be sick or had a preexisting condition, or is…was just about to die anyway. And, and yet the reality is in our hospitals, our, our medical, um, professionals and nurses and doctors and stuff, they’re overburdened. They’re not going to make it. If we continue to increase the number of admissions to hospital for COVID, there won’t be enough people to look after these people. And there won’t be enough doctors and nurses for people who have cancer and heart attacks and everything else. So, so you would sort of… exerting your right to not wear a mask, you’re actually condemning other people to death. So that’s not freedom. I don’t have the freedom to just plow through a red light, uh, because chances are I’ll survive. Yeah. But there’s also a good chance you’ll hit someone. So to me, that is just a perverted sense of freedom. Now we’re straying from the subject too conspiracy theories, but it’s, you know, you can’t tell me what to do. You can’t tell stuff to me. I’m smarter than that. I know the earth is flat. All of this kind of thing is yeah. And people who don’t think that, that, that the hospitals are full of COVID patients. We’ve had that here, they go to the hospital and say, show me where, you know, the emergency room is empty. It’s all a hoax.

Jahrine: Yeah. I read that in the States that doctors have reported that COVID patients are dying and telling them even as they’re dying of COVID, that COVID is a hoax. I heard that…

Steve: we have some of those here in Canada, but we haven’t had as much of that kind of messaging. We don’t have a doctor Atlas spewing nonsense about, about the thing. The reality is, you know, vaccine is around the corner. The more lives you say between, save between now and say June the better. So if we save 10,000 lives, a hundred thousand lives, that’s pretty good. That’s pretty good. So why wouldn’t you… now, unfortunately, the government is telling people to shut down their business and not providing them with enough assistance. So that’s another thing. If you’re going to force this on people, that the restaurant owner has to sacrifice for the good of the rest of the community, then the rest of the community should support the restaurant owner. You know, or, or the, the, the waitress who’s lost her job. Like you can’t just force sacrifices on people without any support or, or compensation. That’s just not just not on. But, but the total number of dead from coronavirus is going to be right up there with, if we look at the United States, the United States lost about 450,000 people in World War II, and they’re on track to lose 450,000 people to coronavirus. So if you look at.. The sacrifices that people made during that period of World War II, not just the soldiers who went to war, who risked and in fact did get killed, but also on the home front, the people who worked in factories, uh, you know, uh, a tremendous, tremendous effort. And people are not prepared to do that now? That’s, uh, not, uh, all in the name of some conspiracy theory. That’s pretty sad actually.

Jahrine: Well, we did veer off the topic a little bit, but that’s okay.

Steve: We will see what sort of reaction we get and, uh, see what people want us to talk about. We may get the, uh, anti-maskers are coming at us full… we’ll see.

Jahrine: Yeah.  anti-maskers, anti-vaxxers, we’ll see. Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Steve.

Steve: Ok, I enjoyed it.

Jahrine: Yeah, we will, uh, for anyone listening and watching we’ll have, uh, different speakers every week, different topics. If you have an idea for a topic, please drop it in the description. Um, sorry, drop it in the comments. And, um, yeah, we can talk about anything interesting that comes up. And

Steve: there will be transcripts available at LingQ, right? Yes.

Jahrine: There will be a transcript and lessons created on LingQ, uh, with the transcript too. So. Great content for learning English.

Steve: Thank you.

Jahrine: Thanks. Steve.

Steve: Thank you for listening. Bye.

Learn English: English LingQ Podcast Episode 1 with Steve Kaufmann! (2)

Steve: So, so

If we compare, if we look

at that, Bill Gates did this on purpose to put nano technology in our brains. So is there any proof of that?

Has anyone ever nanotechnology inside anyone? Uh, any proof that Bill Gates all by himself managed to orchestrate this pandemic on all continents? Like that is just such a totally implausible explanation. The simpler explanation, an explanation then can be tracked down to this, you know, market in China.

Deal with that one first, if you can disprove that fine, but don’t bring on this other extraneous stuff. The, um, yeah, I think unfortunately in the States I think something like 40 or 45% of the people, uh, are willing to take the vaccine in Canada 60 or 70%. That’s partly because of the messaging from political leaders.

And I think it’s very damaging, uh, to, you know, uh, spread, uh, well again, in the States, it’s kind of a, you know it kind of goes both ways. On the one hand, uh, the political leadership is saying that the, the, uh, coronavirus is a hoax. Don’t worry about it. There’s this guy, Scott Atlas, who is the advisor to president Trump said, have it, cause it’s American Thanksgiving this week, go and have Thanksgiving with your grandparents

cause it might be their last Thanksgiving. I mean like, what kind of reasoning is that? Make sure it’s their last Thanksgiving. You know, go to your grandparents’ house. I mean, it’s just unbelievable. Uh, so on the one hand, it’s a hoax, but on the other hand, Trump is trying to claim credit, like as if he’s single-handedly discovered the vaccine or as if he was the only, uh, the US government was the only government in the world that put money into vaccine development.

Every government has put money into a vaccine development. Every scientist has been working as hard as they possibly can. And there are vaccines coming out of Germany, coming out of Israel, coming out of wherever. Even in Canada, we have two or three different projects to find a vaccine. So, um, but my suspicion is that once the vaccine is there and people start taking the vaccine, more and more people will want to take it because they’ll see that people got inoculated.

Uh, but it’s, it takes like six weeks before it takes effect, right? Even if you get there’s two shots, three weeks between, and then it takes another week or two for the antibodies to build. But if they start to see now, let’s hope that there are no problems, but if there are no problems and all of a sudden…

you’re going to see, uh, I wouldn’t be surprised if you get, you know, establishments saying you can’t come in here unless you show me a, uh, certificate of vaccination. That’s going to get people vaccinated pretty quickly. So asking people theoretically now about a vaccine that is still not yet approved in a situation where no one has taken it, do you want it?

I don’t think what people say has that much significance. We’ll see when it’s out here, we’ll see what’s happening in February. I suspect most people will be aligned up to get it.

I think

Jahrine: so. I, I read, uh, Bonnie Henry then, uh, BC top doctor said that realistically here in BC in Canada, we can expect the vaccine this time next year.

Which seems a long way off to me. I don’t know if you’ve read that, but I think that’s maybe, you know, it has to, we have to get it. It has to go to maybe healthcare workers first, and then…

Steve: I hope it doesn’t take that long. Canada has been the most aggressive country in terms of pre-ordering the vaccine we have,

yeah, we have, I don’t know how many billion doses or whatever the number is, but we have twice as many as the States. So we have by… canada has the biggest position on these vaccines. And they have a portfolio that includes Pfizer, Moderna and so forth and so on. So we will have it available to us. Now whether the manufacturers will give Canada a fair share of whatever they put out,

I don’t know. I hope that Health Canada isn’t, as Canadians typically are, so bureaucratic that even after every other country has approved it, we’re still sitting in committee trying to figure out if we’re going to approve it for Canadians. That could happen, but I, I hope that doesn’t happen. So I would think that, you know, Dr.

Fauci and the States said, uh, you know, by May, we would be, you know, close to living as normal. Time will tell, time will tell. But Dr. Bonnie Henry has been very, I would say moderate, moderate in what she says. And so she’s, uh, and she’s not also not, you know, we haven’t had the hard lockdowns here in BC.

And her messaging has been very good and encouraging people to be patient. And so she’s done a good job. And if she says that she’s certainly knows a lot more than I do. So hopefully it doesn’t take that long.

Jahrine: So Steve, are there any conspiracy theories that you see a shred of truth in?

Steve: Mm, well, none comes to mind right now, but perhaps there are, but when you say a shred of truth, um, in all the conspiracy theories, there are…

elements that are possibly believable, but, uh, the question is, are they verifiable? And, um, so I can’t immediately think of something. You might have some in mind where, where there is, you know, taking something that’s conceivable, possible. Uh, but not verifiable, uh, you know, I can’t think of any. It’s like, I’ll give you an example.

So, uh, the, uh, President Trump’s legal team put on a, with Rudy Giuliani and this, uh, What was her name? Sidney Powell, put on a press conference where they talked about this machine, you know, technology developed by Hugo Chavez and the communist party of China and all this kind of thing. And I tweeted something to the effect of this is this is amazing that, uh, the legal team of the president is spewing such nonsense.

And somebody came back and said, well, you know, it’s quite possible. Uh, look at the stats. So like, so, so then what can you go there and verify? You know, the, the point being that so many people in Detroit voted for Biden instead of Trump, that’s not possible, or when the votes came in was past a certain point.

And there are actually very valid explanations of why that is. In fact, fewer people, the support for Trump in Detroit went up compared to the previous. But so, so that’s not so anything that’s put forward as a, as a reason why it might be the case. You know, if it is verifiable, you chase it down. If it’s completely unverifiable, I just dismiss it.

So I don’t know. Maybe you can give me some examples of somewhat believable conspiracy theories.

Jahrine: Just speaking from… personally the recent one, the Jeffrey Epstein suicide in prison. Um, I mean, we can’t prove that it wasn’t a suicide. He was supposed to be on suicide watch and the camera was mysteriously not working.

And the guy who was supposed to be watching him was asleep or something. It’s all very suspicious. Of course, the conspiracy theory being Jeffrey Epstein can ruin the lives of many, many powerful and rich people in the world. And so they don’t want him to get his chance and his day in court, they don’t want him to reveal them. So they had him killed.

Steve: I think that is, uh, that is I think possible because it’s very strange that those cameras were not working. It’s very strange that such a high profile prisoner was allowed to take his own life. Very strange. That… th… you know, there, you have a situation where the conspiracy theory, you know, it’s not possible to prove it not true. And the explanation that he just, yes, the guard was asleep. Yes.

It just so happened the cameras weren’t working. Uh, and I apparently there’s more in terms of the bruises on his neck and stuff. So I think there, the official explanation has as many question marks in it as the conspiracy theory. So it’s not a, an open and shut, uh, situation, you know, it’s not completely implausible.

I mean, in a way. Uh, but yeah, so I would say that there, yeah, I would say that, uh, I’d be looking to find… you know, I think there should be an inquiry, a proper inquiry, and I suspect they could find certain things. It’s like, you know, whether Lee Harvey Oswald is actually the person who shot Kennedy. I find that.

Yeah, that your why? Maybe, maybe, but I think that those things, but I wouldn’t immediately, I wouldn’t go out spreading the theory that actually he was shot by someone else, nor would I go out and say with regard to Epstein that it was either Trump or Clinton that had him killed. I don’t have any evidence of that.

But I would take with a great deal of skepticism, the official explanation that he just happened to commit suicide, and everybody just happened to be asleep. And the cameras weren’t working, I find that difficult.

Jahrine: Yeah, me too. Yeah, for sure.

Steve: mean we have every right to be skeptical. We have every right to question.

And, but in order to avoid going down, but then now the popular term “rabbit holes”, you know, I prefer to deal with explanations that where there’s some possibility of, of, uh, verifiability. And I wouldn’t go out and spread rumors based on essentially no evidence. Yeah. So…

Jahrine: Like the whole, that flat earth thing. That to me is… when I thought of the topic “conspiracy theory”, for me, the most recent, there have been many wild conspiracy theories out there, but it is amazing to me that in today’s age of science that something so… we, we know that the earth is not flat. We’ve known it for a very long time, but there are groups of people, and if you watched documentaries and look online, there seem to be quite a few people who truly believe that the earth is flat and they were all being lied to. For what reason? I’m not sure. It’s amazing.

Steve: Well, I mean, that’s a good example of how conspiracy theories work. In fact, the Ancient Greeks and probably the, the Egyptians, uh, 3-4,000 years ago, knew that the earth was round.

Uh, they had a sense of, uh, our galaxy. They had a sense of, they, they devised a calendar based on these things 4,000 years ago. Uh, however, there are people who feel, you know, that, that sort of what they really don’t want you to know. Like I know, but everyone else is pulling the wool over your eyes. So it almost doesn’t matter what the issue is.

People find a sense of, of, um, self-worth. In, in taking these positions. So they, the conspiracy theory is almost like a, you know, it’s, it’s a, there’s a psychological need to appear to be a, you know, someone who is smarter than the herd, you know, “I’m not lied to. I think for myself”.

Jahrine: Right. Yeah. And then they find community with other people like that. That is yeah.

Steve: The flat earth. Yes.

Jahrine: There’s a very interesting. I think it’s a Vice documentary. If you really want to, they go deep into that world into a, they go to a convention and…

Steve: Flat earth convention?

Jahrine: Yep. Yeah. Somewhere in the States. It’s a really interesting documentary, but yeah.

Steve: Well, I mean, people will believe all kinds of stuff.

Learn English: English LingQ Podcast Episode 1 with Steve Kaufmann! (3)

You look at religion, all these different religions that claim that, you know, the world was created, uh, at such and such a time. And, uh, uh, mankind, uh, lived at the same time as dinosaurs and stuff, or, I mean, there’s stuff that has… science has proven to be incorrect and people, that’s why I say Rush Limbaugh said, don’t listen to science. Oh, that was the one Rush Limbaugh said, don’t listen to academia. Don’t listen to the media. Don’t listen to government and don’t listen to science.

Jahrine: Who should you  listen to then?

Steve: Not that any of those sources of information are infallible. We are all human and we all make mistakes. And, and within any of, with every group, there are better actors and not so good, you know, so they, and they may make, make mistakes. And I agree with you. I have a criticism of our health officials here in Canada, who didn’t move quickly enough, who could have prevented the loss of life. But I mean, who’s perfect? You know, every profession has some people who perform better than others and people who make mistakes.

And, and then some people admit their mistakes or change their opinions. So the fact that they, you know, to me, that’s not a con… to me, th that doesn’t justify a conspiracy theory around masks. They’re just trying to control us and you can’t control me. The whole mask anti mask thing to my mind is, is so irresponsible.

Uh, you know, I I’m okay. You know, look at me. I’m okay. Um, and almost suggesting that anyone who gets sick from COVID, you know, must be sick or had a preexisting condition, or is…was just about to die anyway. And, and yet the reality is in our hospitals, our, our medical, um, professionals and nurses and doctors and stuff, they’re overburdened.

They’re not going to make it. If we continue to increase the number of admissions to hospital for COVID, there won’t be enough people to look after these people. And there won’t be enough doctors and nurses for people who have cancer and heart attacks and everything else. So, so you would sort of… exerting your right to not wear a mask, you’re actually condemning other people to death. So that’s not freedom. I don’t have the freedom to just plow through a red light, uh, because chances are I’ll survive. Yeah. But there’s also a good chance you’ll hit someone. So to me, that is just a perverted sense of freedom.

Now we’re straying from the subject too conspiracy theories, but it’s, you know, you can’t tell me what to do. You can’t tell stuff to me. I’m smarter than that. I know the earth is flat. All of this kind of thing is yeah. And people who don’t think that, that, that the hospitals are full of COVID patients. We’ve had that here, they go to the hospital and say, show me where, you know, the emergency room is empty. It’s all a hoax.

Jahrine: Yeah. I read that in the States that doctors have reported that COVID patients are dying and telling them even as they’re dying of COVID, that COVID is a hoax. I heard that…

Steve: we have some of those here in Canada, but we haven’t had as much of that kind of messaging. We don’t have a doctor Atlas spewing nonsense about, about the thing. The reality is, you know, vaccine is around the corner. The more lives you say between, save between now and say June the better. So if we save 10,000 lives, a hundred thousand lives, that’s pretty good.

That’s pretty good. So why wouldn’t you… now, unfortunately, the government is telling people to shut down their business and not providing them with enough assistance. So that’s another thing. If you’re going to force this on people, that the restaurant owner has to sacrifice for the good of the rest of the community, then the rest of the community should support the restaurant owner.

You know, or, or the, the, the waitress who’s lost her job. Like you can’t just force sacrifices on people without any support or, or compensation. That’s just not just not on. But, but the total number of dead from coronavirus is going to be right up there with, if we look at the United States, the United States lost about 450,000 people in World War II, and they’re on track to lose 450,000 people to coronavirus.

So if you look at.. The sacrifices that people made during that period of World War II, not just the soldiers who went to war, who risked and in fact did get killed, but also on the home front, the people who worked in factories, uh, you know, uh, a tremendous, tremendous effort. And people are not prepared to do that now? That’s, uh, not, uh, all in the name of some conspiracy theory. That’s pretty sad actually.

Jahrine: Well, we did veer off the topic a little bit, but that’s okay.

Steve: We will see what sort of reaction we get and, uh, see what people want us to talk about. We may get the, uh, anti-maskers are coming at us full… we’ll see.

Jahrine: Yeah. anti-maskers, anti-vaxxers, we’ll see. Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Steve.

Steve: Ok, I enjoyed it.

Jahrine: Yeah, we will, uh, for anyone listening and watching we’ll have, uh, different speakers every week, different topics. If you have an idea for a topic, please drop it in the description. Um, sorry, drop it in the comments. And, um, yeah, we can talk about anything interesting that comes up.

Steve: there will be transcripts available at LingQ, right?

Jahrine: There will be a transcript and lessons created on LingQ, uh, with the transcript too. So. Great content for learning English.

Steve: Thank you.

Jahrine: Thanks Steve.

Steve: Thank you for listening. Bye.

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

Steve: Hi Jill.

Jill: Hi Steve.

Steve: Today, you know, I want to talk about the way people socialize today. We are all part of the new, you know, Internet inter-connectivity, the way we connect with people whom we have not met. We know people through the Linguist and the LingQ that we feel we know quite well. We probably communicate with them more than with a lot of people that we know face to face. It’s a new world.

Jill: Yeah, it certainly is. It’s very easy to communicate with people all over the world and people you don’t know and I think a lot of people make friends, meet their future husbands and wives that way.

Steve: I know I saw a statistic that some remarkable percentage, I don’t know if it was Canadians or people in what country, meet their future partner on the web. Like, it’s like 30%-40% so you don’t have to go to the church dance anymore or hang out at some bar or go join the hiking club.

Jill: That’s right. I mean I know quite a few, I know at least three young girls who are, young women who are on these different Internet dating sites and I know somebody who married her husband who she met through one of those so it’s very common now.

Steve: And, you know, I’m trying to understand it, because I have a blog and I don’t really know how to use the blog. The ideal situation for me would be that there was a lot of feedback from people commenting on my blog. Either that they agree with what I say, which is nice or that they have constructive criticism or different opinions. But, of course sometimes you get the kind of person who just wants to come and throw dirt at you so that’s okay too, at least there is some reaction out there. But, through the blog you know, we can, one of the reasons why I blog is to try to connect with more people. And, do you have a blog?

Jill: I have one through the Linguist, the old site, but I don’t have my own personal blog. I wouldn’t, I’m not really that interested.

Steve: I mean, I must say if it weren’t for the fact that I think it’s somehow beneficial to our effort to introduce LingQ and the Linguist to people I don’t think I would do it. And, today we had a consultant come in and give us some advice on what to do. It’s, there’s a whole different culture out there and I’m doing my blog the wrong way. I’m doing it the wrong way, because I’m sending out these messages on how you should learn languages so, it’s me drawing on my experience and saying here’s a good way to learn languages. Apparently I shouldn’t be doing that. It’s got to be more of a cooperative, oh I saw this interesting post on someone else’s blog and so then I quote that on my blog. That someone else, whose blog post I quoted, he’s then happy and maybe he’ll quote something from my blog. The whole thing is one of you know, we’re all in it together and you scratch my back and I scratch yours and I shouldn’t be sort of up on a pedestal like …

Jill: Promoting your own.

Steve: Well A. not promoting my own and B. not pretending to be some kind of an expert. I should be more of I happened to hear. Then part, have you heard of Twitter?

Jill: Very briefly I looked at it for a couple of minutes to see kind of what goes on and so I know a little bit.

Steve: You know, we, I once submitted a YouTube of myself speaking ten languages to a very popular French blog run by a guy called Loïc Le Meur. And, then I subscribed to his. Now I get daily emails with all these Twitter messages. I got up, I had a cup of coffee, so and so had a cup of coffee. His friend went to you know, Lyons, and I’m trying to understand who would possibly read these things, but apparently it’s big. Have you heard about this?

Jill: I have heard. I’ve gone, I went to one. I don’t know what the URL is, but I just put Twitter in the search engine and it took me right to a page where you could see, I don’t know there were maybe eight posts right on that front page. One line mostly, maybe a couple of lines, mostly five words, ten words of people just saying yeah, I got my new phone today. Another person saying I took my wife for lunch. I’m on time for a change. Just different things like this and I guess people kind of do that throughout the day, just put what they’re doing at the moment on their Twitter, I don’t even know what it’s called.

Steve: Very strange phenomenon, but, I mean, yeah. If this can help people find out about us, because fundamentally yeah, we work here and we would like more people to be on our site, but we also believe, fundamentally believe that our site is a tremendous solution. But, if I say that then immediately everyone is suspicious that I’m promoting my own thing. So, you’re not allowed to do that. So, we won’t do that. But, in the same vein, in the same vein of you know, how we can participate, I think people like participating in other people’s lives to some extent without any commitment. And, so that some of the content that our learners are creating for us is really very good. You had a look for example at what Paco did. What was your impression of that?

Jill: Oh it was great. It was in Spanish and it was short. Very good for the beginner and I mean, even an intermediate person or low intermediate person. Just really, I had an image in my mind. I could see him doing this, you know, getting up and having to turn off his alarm clock twice and starting his day with a latte, because he’s really not awake until he’s got his coffee and brushing his teeth and all the different things he does. And, I think he goes for a jog or something at some point and it was neat. It was like I was in a day in the life of Paco.

Steve: You know, it’s true. First of all his, I think first time around it would be difficult for a beginner, because he speaks quite quickly. Maybe one day we’ll have control so we can slow it down. But, I must say I’m interested to see the next episode. Paco gets up, whatever, he has his coffee, he does that then he goes off to work. I want to hear what happened to him in the rest of his day. But, that’s not Twitter.

Jill: That’s what I was going to say. That, to me is different. It’s almost like a little story. I’m really not interested in hearing five words even from people I know. I don’t care what they’re doing every hour of the day, if they’ve stepped out to grab a sandwich. I don’t care so I really don’t have a lot of interest in what strangers are doing from moment to moment.

Steve: Right, but what is interesting and this is where it connects with language learning, is that Paco lives in Spain. So, he’s getting up in Spain and he’s speaking Spanish and he’s talking about his daily routine. And, if we had maybe, we had a lady in Japan who gets up in the morning and she makes her rice or whatever she does in the morning and she sends her kids off to school or she goes off to work or whatever, and if this is done in short episodes like this it’s very interesting. And, of course all of the words that we use in our daily lives are there. And, of course it’s short. It’s a minute, two minutes long. You can listen to it over and over again. The first time you hear it it’s difficult to understand. You save the words, the phrases, you read it, you listen to it and pretty soon you’re able to talk about these daily things in a way that’s pleasant. And, I think others, Irene has done some great stuff, Marianne, and we’re only going to get more and more of this, so, that kind of sharing about where you live, about what you do in two minute, three minute bites, I can see that. And, of course everything relates to language learning. But, the Twitter I don’t really see, but it’s popular.

Jill: Yeah, I think it’s, well it seems to be really popular. So, I don’t know, I don’t personally know anybody who does it, but when I went there it seemed like there were a lot of people on this site I went to chatting back and forth so I guess it’s popular.

Steve: I mean, we do have to, there’s so many, many people blogging and there are people who are addicted to blogging. There are people who run multiple blogs. They spend their whole day blogging. Amazing. But, it’s there and I think it’s connected to this other phenomenon we have of, particularly young people, spending so much of their time text messaging each other. Do you know people who do that?

Jill: Yeah, yeah, I do. A lot of people I know do that. And, I find it annoying. I would rather just pick up the phone and call somebody to tell them what I need to tell them than sit on a little keypad on my phone typing words. I just, I don’t get it, but everybody I know does it.

Steve: Well, I guess it’s something we’re going to have to learn more about and maybe it’s the fact that the people who are most involved in this are of this sort of new generation of…

Jill: Like technology.

Steve: Like technology and so forth and so on. But, you know what we might do one of these days is to try, not to Twitter, but maybe have a short dialogue where we talk about the daily things of life in very simple language. Maybe that’s what we’ll do next. And, maybe we’ll end our discussion here today. Thank you.

Jill: Thank you.

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

Steve: Hi Jill.

Jill: Hi again.

Steve: We’re going to try to have an easy discussion. We’re going to talk to each other and we’re going to talk about the things that we do every day in our daily lives. So, could you begin or do you want me to begin? You begin and take us from when you wake up until 10:00 in the morning. Jill: Okay, so, on a recent podcast Mark and I discussed our daily routines a little bit, but I don’t think it turned into beginner content. I think it was probably, at least intermediate by the end of it, so I’ll try to go a little slower this time. When I get up in the morning, I usually get up around 6:30 and unlike Paco I don’t turn my alarm off several times. I get up right away. I usually take about an hour to have a shower and of course, doing something with my hair seems to take about 20 minutes and, I know, it’s frightening. You know, having some breakfast and what not. So, I guess I get up, have a shower, do something with my hair, put on some make up, brush my teeth, usually grab some breakfast as I’m heading out the door. Then, that’s usually about 7:30 and then I drive to work. It usually takes about 25 minutes so then I’m here by 8:00. Sometimes I chat with a couple of people in the morning first thing; sometimes not, check emails and that basically takes me to about 10:00 A.M.

Steve: Now, when you say chat, you’re referring to chatting on Skype with some of our learners?

Jill: Right.

Steve: Okay. Now, it’s my turn. I wake up about 6:30, quarter to seven and my wife doesn’t wake up until about 8:00, so I normally sneak out and go to the computer and look and see what happened over night. I might post something on my blog. Sometimes I actually have a discussion, a Linguist or LingQ discussion at 8:00. I don’t schedule them at 7:00, because if I want to sleep a little later than 7:00 it’s just a little bit hectic. If I have a discussion at 8:00 then I might have one cup of coffee at 7:30 just to make sure I’m awake. Then when my wife gets up and inspects her flowers and all this kind of stuff, I, meanwhile, we have an espresso/cappuccino machine at home and we really, both of us really enjoy our cappuccino. So, when my wife is up then I will go and make the cappuccino. First of all she will cut some fruit. We always begin our breakfast with fruit. It could be grapefruit, it could be right now berries, berries mixed with peaches are delicious. So, sometimes we’ll put the berries in the peaches and a little bit of yogurt and sprinkle some granola on it and so we start with something like that. Then I will cut the bread and I like you know full grain, you know tasty bread, which we might toast in a little toaster oven and meanwhile I’ll make up the coffee and it’s cappuccino so we have the, and my wife and I have two different settings on the machine in terms of the strength of the cappuccino or the coffee. Then I will make the milk, froth the milk up in the little container and I pour the milk. If I get it right then the bubbles are just the right size. Sometimes it’s too bubbly, sometimes it doesn’t work, many things can influence it: milk, how old the milk is, things I don’t understand, temperature, I don’t know. Then we enjoy, oh and I also forgot to mention that before breakfast I run out and get the newspaper. So, we chat for a while and my wife likes to do Sedoku, which is something I would never, ever do and I read the newspaper. When we’re done with that then I’ll go back up to my computer and I’ll do some more work on the computer, because after I’ve had my nice cup of coffee and my nice bread I just can’t brush my teeth right away. So, then at 10:00 I’ll go brush my teeth and yeah, might have a shower and shave and then the day continues. What do you do, let’s take the end of the day, when you leave and what happens. Take us into your evening.

Jill: Okay. Usually I leave work about, between 4:30 and 5:00 and I try most days after work to do some sort of exercise after having sat all day long. Sometimes I’m tired and I really don’t want to, but I always feel better after I do so I’ll try at least three days out of the week to, in the summer usually go for a run or a hike outside when the weather is nice. In the gym, or in the winter I will often go to the gym, because it’s raining here a lot. Sometimes I’ll still go for a run depending on how cold it is, but often I’ll go to the gym. Sometimes maybe do a class at the gym, because I find I have a hard time spending a long time at the gym. I can go hiking for hours at a time, but I can’t go on a treadmill for hours at a time. So, that’s what I usually will do right after work. Then by the time I do that and get home its usually at least 7:00 if not 7:30 and then I eat something. Often I don’t make anything very elaborate, because it’s already so late. Often Chris and I actually end up picking up sushi or just Greek food or we eat out, we actually we out too much, but it’s, because we just don’t find that we have any time. So, then we eat and usually it’s 8:00 or 8:30 by the time we’re done eating and you know, then we do the dishes if there’s dishes. Then maybe I need to have a shower after I’ve exercised and basically it’s 9:00 o’clock at night. So, then maybe I spend an hour or so watching a show on TV and then usually by about 10:00 maybe 10:30 at the latest I go to bed and sometimes I read for 15 minutes if I’m not too tired. And, usually by 10:30 every night my light is being turned out. And then that’s it until 6:30 the next morning.

Steve: Okay, well in my case I’ll often work in the morning at home in my home office. Then I come into the office in the afternoon and continue to do things that mostly relate to the Linguist, but also sometimes on our wood business, which is an important part of what we do. Then I’ll normally drive home and I should point out that I’m lucky. I’m about 10-15 minutes away so at 5:00 I’ll drive home. And, of course, while I’m driving home I’m listening to Russian. Sometimes I will work out or run or exercise in the morning in, which case I’ve done my exercise. If I haven’t then when I come home I’ll work out or I’ll go for a run. I’m like you; I feel, even if I feel tired, if I go for a run I’ll actually feel less tired after my exercise. And, I am able to exercise and listen to my language at the same time. Then, my wife is a great cook and so sometimes I will offer, I will say Carmen, you know you’ve been cooking so much recently. Let’s go out. She says okay, okay. Then I say, but you know what? You’re food is much better than anything we’ll get at a restaurant and I’ll open up a nice bottle wine and why don’t we just eat at home. Yeah, you’re right. Let’s do that. So, there’s a bit of a ritual that we go through. We occasionally go out, but increasingly it’s just so much more pleasant to sit at home. And, I’m fortunate in that Carmen, my wife who likes to golf, but once she comes home from her golf thing she’s quite happy to cook up a nice meal and we’ll normally have an Hors d’euvres and a salad and we’ve got the vegetables and we’ve got the this and that. It turns out to be really a very nice meal. And, so we will normally sit down around 7:00 o’clock. The other thing that we’re able to do, because we live right by the ocean, in the summer we’ll go for a swim. So, once the, Carmen has the food more or less ready to go and I wait for her, then we go in for a good swim, which is very refreshing especially if I have been exercising, because then the ocean is you know, 17 or 18 degrees so you don’t stay in for a long, long time. But, it is very, very refreshing. Then we have our meal and then after the meal I’m not, I don’t watch that much television unless, I like foreign movies although now recently, I have bought some Russian CDs and I really like Russian movies, especially movies from the Soviet period. They’re so much more low key and there’s no great violence, car chases, you know Star Wars, space wars, whatever. None of this hyper stuff that I can’t stand; very low key. So, I enjoy those. Or, I might read or I might study some Russian or if there’s a good program on TV we’ll sit down and watch TV. I’ll normally go to bed about 11:15 and if I read a little bit, I think it’s probably about 11:30 or 40 before the lights go out and the next day starts again. So, there you have it. Two days in the lives of two people. Have you anything to add?

Jill: No, I think that we covered it.

Steve: And, again, if any people listening are members of LingQ or intend to become members of LingQ we would love to hear stories about your days in your native language and this can then be learning material for other people. In English, if you’re native language is English, or in Spanish or in Chinese or Japanese or Arabic or whatever language. We may not be offering that language right now, but we will be interest he future and we would love to hear from you. Thank you.

Jill: Thank you.