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Steve:Hello, this is Steve here with…

Jill: Jill.

Mark: And, Mark.

Steve: Mark, we are going to do a little brainstorming and the subject of our brainstorming, and maybe we’ll have Mark tell us what it is because it was his idea that we do it. What are we going to talk about?

Mark: Well, we’re actually in the process of designing a T-shirt, a LingQ T-shirt just because I think we would like to promote our site a bit and I think some of our members would like it and it’s kind of a fun thing to do. And, while looking at the T-shirt we thought we need some kind of tag line to put on the T-shirt to let people know in a brief tag line what our site’s all about. So, that’s basically what it’s all about.

Steve: Should we have like a cheeky tag line? Jill?

Jill: Well, you wonder if people will understand it. That’s the only thing. People who don’t speak English as their native language might not get it. So, I think we have to figure out, find something that’s catchy but simple, that you know, people who don’t necessarily speak English fluently will still understand.

Steve: But, there’s another thing. Are we going to have it in just one language? Are we going to have it in many languages? Are we going to have a universal one? What do you think we should do there?

Mark: In a way, it depends on what we can do with maybe with the T-shirt because we’re designing it online. There’s a site that lets you design a T-shirt and then post a link to it on your website and then people can buy that T-shirt directly from that site, both pay for it and have it shipped by that site. So, there are certain restrictions on the types of T-shirts you can make and what you can put on them but one thought I had was maybe we have the English tag line on the front of the shirt and on the back we could have it translated into I don’t know, how many different languages all down the back of the shirt. It might be kind of fun.

Steve: You know, one thing I once did see, very, very long time ago when we were developing sort of a logo or look for the Linguist, one person came up with a design which was the word I like me, Je, whatever in umpteen languages. So you had that word on, as part of a design. I don’t know. The thing is do we want a, essentially a single colored T-shirt and we also have to decide on the color or colors. We could have different colors and with the different colors we could have different language.

Mark: Yeah, I mean there’s nothing to preventing us from making as many T-shirts as we like. At some point, for sure we should have a different T-shirt for each language but initially we need one.

Jill: Yeah.

Steve: Yeah, but I don’t think the cost, you know if you have a run of 50 or 500, if there’s not a significant difference in cost.

Mark:That’s not what we’re doing though. We’re not making any. We’re designing it and it’s a print or deliver on demand, made to order so really, there is no restriction. We can create as many as we’d like. We don’t, nobody pays anything until they order one and they don’t make them in advance.

Steve: Well then I think we should have different languages if it’s just as easy as making one. Once we decide, once we decide what the little logo should be then we just offer it in ten languages. What’s the difference?

Mark: Okay let’s do that.

Steve: Right, well I know. It’s an issue. Are we going to have a unilingual or multilingual? I think we should go for a multilingual one. Now, what do you think should be the logo or the message?

Jill: Well, I think we’ll probably stick with our LingQ logo. It’ll be on there somewhere I would think- the logo that’s on our site and then our URL, http://www.LingQ.com. Then as a matter of putting that, you know, do we put it on the front of the T-shirt, on the side, in the back? Then, like what we’re going to talk about here is trying to come up with just a, maybe a few words and maybe three, four or five words that say something about our site.

Mark: So, why don’t we start doing that then and figure out the details later? One, to get the ball rolling, I thought maybe the world of language was a potential tag line. Any thoughts? Any other ideas?

Steve: That gets us started. What were we before? The power of language? And, I think it helps to know that it will be in different languages so we don’t have to worry about whether it’s comprehensible. I mean just for the sake of argument, what if we only had the logo and the URL?

Jill: That’s what the, I mean the person designing it right now, that’s sort of what he’s sent us, is the logo and the URL. But, I was just kind of thinking that it’s not obvious what that site is so if there are a few words that just connected it to language somehow, that people might be more, you know, would go there.

Steve: You know I personally think the world of languages is not bad. And, as I’m thinking in my mind I think it translates well. And it tells you what it is. And languages is different from language. I mean world of language or the power of language is one thing but once we’re saying the world of languages of the languages of the world, you know and we’re talking about many languages.

Mark: Yeah, but the world of languages or languages of the world is kind of, it’s not catchy. Like, it’s got to be a little catchy somehow. This site teaches language learning. It’s just not, even just adding that‘s makes it a little too, sort of too accurate, too literal. It’s kind of hard to come up with any possibilities on the spot. LingQing the World Through Language, spelling “link” our way. No?

Steve: That’s not a bad idea. I noticed that the last message that went out to our users explaining the different new features we put up, there was the last little greeting there was happy LingQing which – that was kind of good. What about Happy LingQing? The trouble with that is it doesn’t tell people what it is.

Mark: You’ve got to have language in there. We have to have language in there somehow because that’s the one word that can convey at least a better idea of what we’re doing. The one word we kind of have to have in there.

Steve: I mean, if we look at what’s unique about the site, it’s enjoyable. It’s enjoyable language learning, it’s portable, it’s wherever you are. It’s sharing languages. It’s hopefully entertaining. It’s effective. I mean, sharing, share languages, I don’t know. Learn languages, world of languages, language exchange. What?

Jill: I like Mark’s idea the world of language actually. I think that’s quite good.

Steve: I’ll go for it. I think it’s good. I mean, when we get bigger we can be the universe of language but for the time being start small. The world of language, I’ll go for that.

Mark: The more I look at it I’m kind of liking LingQing the world through language but …

Jill: It’s longer.

Mark: It’s longer. That’s a drawback for sure. But, it A. let’s people pronounce or gives them an idea of how to pronounce our name better maybe.

Steve: I guess I’m hung up on this idea of making it universal. So, no, I know you’re not but I think that the world of language translates, no problem. We could have LingQing the world through language, what was it?

Mark: Yes.

Steve: LingQing the world through language for our English one and we start out and just have an English one and we may get ideas from other learners about what to do for the other languages and as you say it’s easy enough to start up a Spanish one or Chinese one, so.

Mark: Yeah, I was going to say that. We don’t have to have the same tag line in every language. We just, we want something catchy in every language. So, it doesn’t necessarily have to be the same. And, probably we aren’t the ones to be creating tag lines in other languages. We should ask our members once we have an English tag line to suggest other language tag lines.

Steve: You know the other thought is that if we want to leave it open for the tag line to be easily translatable, once we have the word LingQ up there we could be connecting through language. But, you want to actually be LingQing through language, right? Yeah.

Mark: Yeah, I mean the whole point is to use LingQ in that way and that obviously then makes it not translatable but I don’t think that’s that big an issue as we just said, we can have different tag lines in different languages. Ideally all the tag lines would include the word LingQ somehow but it’s less meaningful because LingQ is an English word. But if we start by focusing on the English one and then asking other people’s opinions, maybe that’s the way to go.

Steve: Okay, I agree. What do you say Jill?

Jill: I agree.

Steve: So, our brainstorming session number one results in a decision. At least as of Friday.

Mark: I was going to say there’s still lots of time to come up with further refinements and in fact, if any of you people out there, any of you listeners out there have any suggestions we’re more than happy to take them. And, with that I think we’ll move on to something else.

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Steve: Hi Jill.

Jill: Hi Steve.

Steve: You know, we’re of course, very much involved in getting LingQ up and running and you know, I’ve been in business a long time and a number of different businesses but I must say that the level of complication, difficulty, frustration, no not frustration, it’s not frustration but certainly patience on my part to try to get all the pieces of this thing working, it is tremendously complex. And, of course you’re the one who has to deal with all the complaints and questions and stuff that we get from our users. How are you finding that?

Jill: Ah, so, I guess, yes, there are a lot of problems with the transfer of data, problems we didn’t anticipate, didn’t foresee with people getting their data and correct number of points and things like that so that was a source of frustration I think for some of our members. Not for all.

Steve: I should point out we’re talking about LingQ.com, which is the website that we have now started up in beta version where at the present time you can learn other than English, is of course the main one but, German, French, Spanish, Italian now and we will be adding other languages including Japanese and Chinese and so forth. But, in getting it set up and in transferring our existing the Linguist members who are learning English and transferring them over to the new LingQ there were a lot of problems that we didn’t foresee. So, justifiably our users say what’s going on here? How come this doesn’t work? How come that doesn’t work? And, of course they contact you.

Jill: Mmm hmmm.

Steve: What were some of the major concerns?

Jill: I think initially a week ago when we made the switch, initially the major concern was just have people, getting their data, their words and phrases and the correct number of points. I think we’ve mostly resolved those issues now. I hope so anyway. But, other than that we just are getting a lot of questions about different functionality, maybe stuff that we had on the Linguist that we don’t have on LingQ right now and I just, you know, want to assure people that we are continuing to add functionality all the time to LingQ. It’s just it doesn’t take one day to add something. It takes a lot of time to build all of this in to make sure, we’ve got to test it, make sure it works properly before we put it up, there’s bugs that need to be fixed, there’s lots of things that need to happen and none of it’s quick. So, you know, people would really like to see the forum and Ask Your Tutor function working again which is a priority to us and should be working within the next week we hope. And, other things like there is no Pronounce section yet. I think that maybe a ways off, maybe like a month off. I don’t know if that’s a priority right now but it’s coming.

Steve: And, we should point out that I think a lot of people would agree that what we have put up in LingQ is an improvement over the Linguist so that the Writing section is improved, the Events section is improved, the Reading, the Listening, the Vocabulary. Everything has been improved and in the same way that Pronounce section will be improved so yeah, we apologize for the delay but when we finally do get these things up they will be improved.

Jill: Right. And, certain things right now, that maybe you don’t think are improved in the Event section for example, it’s a big, long list of all of the events which is quite confusing. It’s not going to stay that way. We are going to add filters so you can just see the discussions for a particular day or with a particular tutor. We’ll have it paged like it was in the Linguist so there’s only certain amount per page and you have to click on the arrows to see more pages so it won’t be a big, long list so that’s going to be improved. You’re going to be able to receive a recording of your corrected writing submissions along with your corrections which we never had in the Linguist.

Steve: In other words, the corrector will record, the native speaker will, after doing the corrections will record the corrected text which I think is tremendously important for you to review, to read again and then to listen again to something that you thought through but didn’t necessarily express quite correctly and it’s now been turned into basically native speak or English or eventually other languages and you now get it back and that’s very rich for you to work with. It’s very useful for you to work with.

Jill: So you can continue to read it and listen to it and work on it. And, just lots of little things like the audio player staying at the top of the screen so if you’re reading a long content item and you’re scrolling down and you’re reading and listening at the same time and you want to stop it, it’s right now not very good. You have to go back to the top of the page but that is going to change. It’s going to move with you as you scroll down the page. All of these things are, we know they’re concerns to our members and we have them in a big, long list of things to do, for our programmer to do so they’re coming and just please try to be patient.

Steve: And, we have added some more programming you know, resources to try to resolve these problems. We are not Microsoft. We just don’t have an army of developers. We should point out though that most people have told us that even with the problems, the shortcomings, the functionality that isn’t there, some of the things that maybe weren’t designed properly to begin with, or things that we didn’t anticipate which we only now see when people start using the system, despite these shortcomings most people are happier in the new environment than in the old environment. So, even with the problems we have upgraded people’s learning environment. So, I very much, we all appreciate the cooperation, the patience of people to try these things out, to point out the problems and we can respond to the comments that we’re getting but we don’t feel that we’ve harmed anyone. If anything we have now given them, in fact, a better environment in which to learn languages.

Jill: And, certainly that’s always been our main goal. I mean, we made a new site because there were problems with the Linguist that we just couldn’t overcome so you know, we’re hoping not to have those same problems in LingQ and we’re going to have more functionality plus you can learn more languages. So, overall, it’s just going to be much better. And, I think, like you said, the majority of people are happy. And, I think those who are not, given time will become happy. They’re just not used to the new system; they’re used to the Linguist and it’s hard to change. I know, I’m the same way. It’s hard to change to something new but I think once they give it a little bit of time they’ll be happy too.

Steve: Of course it doesn’t help that all of the interface language is English. We have no instructions, we have limited help. I mean, really it’s not ideal but by the same token, given our limited resources we simply can’t afford to write a new help manual every month and translate it into ten languages. So, because things are changing, as people use the system, and as they point out that this is not convenient, this would be better, some other way, so we want to wait until version one has more or less settled down. But, people should also realize that we are committed to continuing to develop. We have lots of ideas, we think that our learners will have ideas; we want to continue to develop so this is just going to be a better and better and better place for people to enjoy languages. Were there any other specific areas where you, people have expressed impatience or concern?

Jill: Ah, I’m just trying to think now. I guess really, the points, the changing from being charged a monthly fee and being given a certain amount of events and a certain number of words for writing, the change from that to points I think is a little bit confusing for some people. And, because you are being charged points every time you sign up for an event or submit writing it seems like to most people or to a lot of people that they’re being charged every time they use something which is the case but it was the same in the Linguist. You were charged a certain amount which equated to a certain amount of service. And, we are providing very similar service in LingQ for the same amount and we will have membership levels, probably in September. They’ll still be a free level, they’ll be a few other levels, where you pay a certain amount and you get points with that membership level. So, I think people just need to get used to that too. And, the one thing I will mention with LingQ is that your points don’t expire so we may, we may put an expiration of six months, expiration at some point but right now they don’t expire where as in the Linguist if you didn’t use all your discussions or you didn’t submit all your writing in one month it was gone.

Steve: You know, it’s funny, people are going to say I’m being charged for this, I’m being charged for that and that’s fine that they should be concerned about how, you know, what they have to pay and so forth. But, from our perspective, in fact, in many ways the Linguist was unfair. A person goes away for a month or they’re traveling on holiday, on business, or whatever it might be, they can’t study and they get charged the same. This way if you do something, you know, ideally people, it’s going to be in their interest to buy a batch of points and to hold those points and gradually use them up and then go and buy another batch of points and use them up. And, I think it will end up being very similar in cost to what was happening before. But, in particular for those periods of time when you’re not doing anything, when you’re not writing and you’re not speaking to people you’re not going to get charged. So, I think on balance it’s going to work out fairer. In particular I know we had learners who never, ever spoke or wrote and they only basically used the basic functionality so they, in a sense were paying for other people. So, yeah, I think it’s going to work. It’s very difficult, this whole period, it’s difficult for us. If we had the resources, if we had ten programmers everything would have happened much more quickly. We don’t. We have to live within our means and I think you feel, we appreciate everyone’s cooperation.

Jill: Yeah, exactly and of course, keep sending us suggestions. It doesn’t mean that we’re going to be able to implement everybody’s suggestions. There’s things that we are just not going to do or not able to do but we are going to do our best to keep everybody happy and have all the functionality that we think all the members want to see.

Steve: Okay, I think that covers that subject. Bye for now.

Jill: Bye, bye.

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Steve: Hi Jill.

Jill: Hi Steve.

Steve: I was reading at LingQ.com where our members are starting to contribute content. There was one content item submitted by one of our members who happens to live in Germany. She submitted a content item that was called Speak White. It’s mostly in French with a few English words in it and it’s a poem by a Quebecois, that is someone from Quebec, a French speaking person from Quebec in Canada and it’s available on LingQ so people can download it and listen to it in French but basically the theme is one that English represents colonialism and that the, of course, from the perspective, or let’s put it this way, the mythology of the Quebecois is that they are somehow a colonized people. And, I think historically that’s true but today if you look at the statistics French speaking Quebecers earn as much, more money in fact. Bilingual Quebecers earn more money than bilingual; excuse me, bilingual Francophones in Quebec have a higher average income than bilingual Anglophones in Quebec. Monolingual, unilingual Anglophones in Quebec earn more than unilingual Francophones but on average they do just as well. So, I think today, I don’t think the Quebecois really are in a, in reality they run their own province, and run their own affairs but historically of course, the French were defeated in a battle in the year 1763 and as a result Quebec became part of the British empire so there is this whole we were colonized by the English and therefore, of course, in this very kind of, deliberately inflammatory language, speak white to see how all the sort of colonialism, racism, whatever. Fine, she’s a poet. She can do what she wants. But, in reading that of course, we believe at the Linguist and the reason we’ve developed LingQ.com is because we think everybody should learn other languages. I agree that the overwhelming influence of English is a form of cultural imperialism. It doesn’t have to be deliberate but the fact is that English is so convenient. People speak it in India, they speak it in the Middle East, they speak it in Africa, even in Europe it’s become the dominant language for a variety of historical and economic reasons. One of our goals and I set this out in my book that I wrote five years ago, that anyone can be a linguist. Anyone can learn more than one language. In some ways Anglophones have an advantage in that other people have to learn their language but they are at a disadvantage because they are not as motivated to learn other languages because they don’t need to. So, that’s all a lead up Jill, to a hopefully an embarrassing question and that is, you are an Anglophone but you speak French and you have dabbled in Spanish. But, would it be fair to say that today you’re not tremendously motivated to either improve your French or to work more on your Spanish or on another language?

Jill: Yeah, that’s fair. I think there’s part of me that would really like to improve my French. I mean, I really haven’t used it for five or six years, since I’ve been out of university and I love the language. I think it’s a beautiful language and when I listen to it I really like hearing it and I wish that I was completely fluent in it. After the many years that I spent learning it, over 20 years, I have to say that I still would not consider myself fluent. I have a good grasp for sure of the language and I want to learn it better but I think I’m like many people who say they want to learn English or they want to learn a language but when it comes to actually putting in the effort, and I hear this all the time from people on the Linguist and now LingQ. Not everybody because some people are very motivated but from some people they say you know, I just don’t have time. You hear that from a lot of people. I know that I sort of, I would use the same excuse. You know, you’re busy. You work all day, you have time to spend, you have to have time to spend with your family, you might have to make dinner, you might have a long commute, whatever, but again, I could listen on my way to and from work just as almost everybody could. But, you know, when it comes down to it I’d rather listen to music on my way to and from work. That’s more relaxing to me. So, when I say that I would like to improve my French, I would, but I’d really like it to be very easy. I don’t really want to put in a lot of effort and I think that’s a lot of people.

Steve: Now, for me, because I’m, of course, a language fanatic, I enjoy it. I would rather listen to Russian now than to music. If I go running I listen to Russian. If I’m in my car I listen to Russian. One thing I do believe is that, you know, different people have different interests. I am not into gardening. I don’t know one flower from the next. I‘m not that keen on golf. My wife is very keen on golf. Yeah, people have their interests and I don’t think there’s anything more noble about being interested in languages as opposed to being interested in cooking. In fact, cooking, I’m not into cooking but I sure enjoy eating other people’s cooking. So, yeah, you’re interested in what you’re interested in, absolutely. One thing I would say though is that a lot of things are a matter of habit. So, once you get into an activity, motivated by whatever, like if I told you Jill, that we were opening an office in Paris but the condition for us to send you there is that you have to improve your French, tell me what you would do

Jill: I think I would do it. I think I would. I’d be over the moon, I’d be excited, I’d want to do it and I’d want to be better when I went there. I wouldn’t want to go there either without having a better working knowledge and so, yeah, I think I would be more motivated.

Steve: And, I think there that once you got into it you would start to enjoy actually learning it. But, yeah, you need something to kick-start that interest. This is true. And, it can be a friend, it can be a trip, it can be an interest in the culture, it can be a, whatever, any of those things. So, yeah, the question is how do we get that started with people? I think we are lucky at the Linguist and at LingQ because many of our learners are motivated party for professional reasons or for their education or because they need to pass a test but many of them out of pure interest and they enjoy it. And that’s, you know, somebody came up in schools, what do you do in schools? What do you do with kids who have to be there? You know? They don’t have, they’re sitting in a classroom and now it’s French. Any ideas there? How do you get a 14 year old boy or girl, it doesn’t matter, what can you do to make say French or any language? Would it matter if they were able to choose the language or is it just for someone living in North America, English speaking North America, basically other languages don’t matter? Do you think that’s part of it?

Jill: Yeah, I don’t know. Probably part of it is that, that it’s just so easy to get by with only knowing English and I think that’s probably why most North Americans or Canadians and Americans only speak English is because yeah, you can go anywhere in the world and probably get by with your English which is, I think a bit sad because I think there is a lot, I think it’s very interesting to learn another language because you learn a lot about the culture and that was always my favorite part. I hated the classes that focused on grammar. I just couldn’t stand going to them even in university. You know, I never, I don’t think I improved from probably grade five to my fourth year of university in terms of my grammar in French. You know, even after having so many classes that were focused on grammar and university courses focused on grammar, I hated going to them. They were so boring, so dry and it didn’t help me. And, I think that the classes that I loved were the ones where we got into the cultural stuff and not, and other people are different. Some people, I guess, maybe like grammar and maybe aren’t so interested in festivals and cultural norms and things but for me, I’m very interested in that which makes the language more interesting to me.

Steve: But then, getting back to the level of a 14 year old, you know, in countries like Sweden or Holland where all television shows are in the original language they learn their English through television. But, there again, we get back to our original discussion and that is the sort of cultural imperialism of English speaking culture. Everybody in the world has heard of some of these start of Hollywood or the pop stars and whoever they all are. I don’t even know their names myself but we don’t know who are the leading Arabic singers or Chinese singers or French even. We don’t know who they are so it doesn’t have the same attraction. I guess there’s not much we can do there.

Jill: Yeah and with young people, going back to young people I think so many kids and teenagers are too young to see the benefit of learning another language and it’s just something that’s work and I think some people do enjoy their French class or whatever class, whatever language they’re learning in school because some people are more inclined towards artsy type classes. But, I think there are some people that may never enjoy learning a new language. Not everybody wants to learn a language.

Steve: You know and this is where, what I would do in schools because a lot of people take music from the age of let’s say five to 12 and then they, after much, many tears and scenes they’re allowed to quit. That was my case. But, when kids are very young they’ll do whatever you tell them to do. And, I think what they should do is they should have language in the early years and it should not be limited to one language like in Canada, it’s French because it’s national language. It should be, let them try out a variety of different languages, let them listen to stories and you can do it in a variety of ways. You can listen to a story in the language and read it in your own so you get used to the sounds. And, just expose kids to language through the first five, six, seven years of schooling and then if they want to continue, fine. If they don’t want to continue fine. Once they’ve had that exposure to the language, if at age 20 they decide to learn a language they will be better language learners. And, I think all you need to do is to prepare their brains so that at that point when they become motivated to learn that they will learn more quickly. They’ll have an easier time pronouncing, their brain will be more flexible, that’s all. But, what we do right now, at least in the Canadian school system, 95% of the kids who study French in the English language school system end up not being able to speak at all so it’s completely useless. They’re far better off to have this early exposure just as, you know, a boy might play the violin or a girl play the piano and then at age 12 he or she is allowed to quit and that’s the end of it. But, if they ever do decide to go back to it they have something there that they can really, you know, that’s going to help them.

Jill: Right.

Steve: Maybe one day we’ll set up LingQ Junior. It’s my next project once we get all our problems resolved here. Okay then. Thanks Jill.

Jill: Thank you.

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Steve: Hello, this is Steve here and sitting with me are …

Jill: Jill.

Mark: And Mark.

Steve: I would like to sort of pretend that I’m a newspaper reporter here and I want to ask you about how you are managing to get the new LingQ system up and running. And, of course we have two different perspectives.

One is the perspective of Mark who is sort of the overall you know, Brigadier General who’s trying to make this thing work, who’s designed it, who’s working with the programmer who’s talking to Jill about customer issues and I think not everything goes according to plan always.

So, let me start by asking Mark to talk a little bit about what it’s been like for him trying to get this thing put together. Then I’m going to ask Jill about some of the reactions that we’ve had from some of our users and customers.

So, Mark what has been the most difficult thing in trying to get LingQ up and available for our users?

Mark: I don’t know if I can identify the most difficult thing.

You mentioned um, making sure or getting the system built the way I want it built or we want it built. That’s obviously a big part. And, but at the same time we’re converting our existing Linguist members over to LingQ and that all, there’s a variety of factors involved there and Jill, who’ll be more involved in that aspect of it as well, but there’s quite a few things that have to fall into place for us to be able to meet that August 1st deadline which we’ve set for ourselves because quite frankly, we’ve been at this quite a while and it’s time.

it’s a matter of sort of combining the need to get things built as we want them built, the need to get members transferred over and everything that has to happen in terms of ensuring a smooth transition into place and of course doing both these things by the time line that we’ve set which is a launch of August 1st. So that combination is what probably the answer is.

Steve: Have you had to scale down some of your specifications, some of the functions that you wanted in LingQ in order to meet the deadline? Do you kind of, sort of try and simply down to a bare minimum at least to get it up?

Mark: I mean, absolutely, and I think we’ve been trying to do that you know for months now and it’s not always that easy.

But, I guess it was Mike, our lead developer who put us onto a book called, I can’t remember what the book was called actually but it was by the people at 37Signals and they’re basically a book talking about how to get software built efficiently and in a reasonable time frame. And, one of the things they say is get a deadline and shed features to make that deadline so you get something up and then continue to refine after the fact because it’s, as a web product you can continually refine it after you launch so there’s no real reason to wait until you have everything perfect before launching.

So, I know there’s a lot of people out there that are asking for this and asking for that and there will be people who come over from the Linguist asking or wondering why don’t you have this, that you had it on the Linguist, you don’t have it on LingQ and a lot of those things we plan on having but they’ve had to be put aside in order to meet our deadline. So, just be patient and I’m sure what’s there you’ll enjoy.

Steve: Now, we have a number of our learners have been transferred over to LingQ for some of their activities and I know Jill you’ve been talking to some of them. What has been the reaction? What have been some of the issues of problems or the reactions that you’ve had from our users?

Jill: I think that most of the reactions have been positive. A lot of people haven’t even tried it because they’re familiar with the Linguist so they have sort of stuck with the Linguist and will continue to do so until they’re forced to switch to LingQ but there have been some people who have, who started using LingQ and basically quit using the Linguist right away because they like it so much and even up until just, I guess Monday or maybe last week we didn’t even have speaking built into LingQ yet or the Write section is still not ready so these people have only really had access to certain features and they still use it all the time. And, I mean they’ve used the Speak and the Write section in the Linguist because they’ve had to but they use everything else in LingQ.

And, a lot of people are actually choosing not to have their Linguist data transferred over. Even long time members who have thousands of words in their accounts and a lot of data that they’ve worked hard to get and they’re choosing not to have it transferred over because they want to keep their LingQ data. And, I was actually kind of surprised by how many long time Linguist members have chosen to do that.

Steve: And, the members of course, we have a transition planned. I think the idea is that when we formally switch over people have a choice of maintaining their, or having their Linguist data transferred over or else, in which case they would lose their LingQ data or else they keep their LingQ data.

Mark: I just, I just wanted to mention that right now we’re talking about data transfer.

We’re only talking about words and phrases, saved words and phrases and imported content. We have not yet looked into transferring over the other data but there is a chance we’ll be able to extract other data like writing samples, like more statistics but there is not guarantee and that is unlikely before the transfer or the August 1st switch over but it may happen in the future. So, for those of you who are wondering about your data we may be able to get more of it transferred over in the future.

Jill: I would just like to add, because a couple of people have written to me asking whether their writing will be transferred over and as Mark said, we’re going to try but it may not happen so if anybody’s wondering they should save the writing in a word processing program like Word so they’ll always have it. Steve: What happens to imported content?

Mark: Well, as I just said, that imported content and saved words and phrases are the two things that we will transfer over on August 1st.

Steve: Now this has been a long struggle. What have been some of the biggest difficulties in terms of, I mean I know a little earlier we heard that there were some functions that worked in one browser and didn’t work in another browser.

It just seems like there are so many variables and uncertainties. Is this a new experience for you?

Mark: Yeah, I mean when we developed the Linguist site, probably Fire Fox was not as popular. Certainly everybody here was using Internet Explorer to develop on and so we tended to have problems with Fire Fox and not with Internet Explorer. But, for whatever reason we seem to all be on Fire Fox, especially of course Mike who’s doing most of the programming so that now we have had problems with making it work in Internet Explorer and almost not realizing, whoops, we forget to check that, which maybe I shouldn’t be telling everything but, you know.

My understanding is Internet Explorer is not necessarily that easy to work with so, but since 65%-70% of web users use Internet Explorer obviously it’s got to work for Internet Explorer. Yeah, that’s been our challenge. I wouldn’t say an overwhelming challenge but it has been a challenge.

Steve: Now, of course if we talk about Internet Explorer and Fire Fox and we’re talking about all these computer terms how many of our learners are actually not very familiar with the computer, maybe don’t even know that there’s another web browser? I mean you talk to them. Do you get a lot of people who are sort of neophytes who are not at all familiar with the computer or are most of our learners very familiar with the computer?

Jill: There are some people who aren’t familiar at all and for sure have never heard of Fire Fox but there are some who are already using Fire Fox and, or if they’re not, if you tell them to download it they’re happy to do it. It’s a free download. It’s very easy and it really does work a lot better than Internet Explorer. And, you know me, I don’t like change and so, I always used Internet Explorer and I really resisted using Fire Fox for whatever reason and I would not go back now.

But, I think a lot of people don’t know about Fire Fox because just with our tutors we were having some issues in our, in LingQ with Internet Explorer, for them to be able to post discussions and so I told, I suggested that they all get Fire Fox and almost every one of them wrote back saying they’d never heard of Fire Fox and would it interfere with Internet Explorer and this and that. And, I explained that no, you can actually have both browsers. I have both on my computer and I still use Internet Explorer sometimes, mostly to check out site but, so I think a lot of people are not familiar with it.

Mark: I don’t know, absolutely I think that’s the case. Statistics tell us that 65%-70% at least Internet Explorer.

The percentage of Fire Fox users has been growing steadily. And, what I’m definitely am starting to see on the Internet, in my opinion, that many sites seem to work better in Fire Fox because I think computer people, developers use Fire Fox and so they end up making it work for Fire Fox and then having to tweak it to get it to work for Internet Explorer so that very often things seem to appear better in Fire Fox to me. That’s just an observation.

Steve: Well at the risk of making this seem like an ad for Fire Fox, I must say that I have gone to Fire Fox and have never looked back and my computer seems to crash less often and I just couldn’t be happier. But, I’m sure there are people who are very happy with Internet Explorer.

But anyway, that’s been an interesting little discussion about LingQ and I think we can perhaps have some more.

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Steve: Hello there. This is Steve again with …

Jill: Jill.

Mark: And Mark.

Steve: Today we’re going to get a little controversial and it may even seem self-serving but one of the things that we come across very often is this idea that all the world that let’s say Mike does as a programmer, all the ideas that we have or that reflect what we’ve learned and all the hours and hours that we put into finding a better way to learn languages that all of this should be free, that anything on the Internet should be free. I saw on one post on language learning someone said you know ideas should be free and I thought to myself well, there isn’t a product that doesn’t begin with an idea so you won’t pay for the engineer, you won’t reward the inventor but the person who turns the screws or you know paints it or whatever, that the manual labor you’ll pay for but the idea you won’t pay for. And, there’s a lot of this thing. I don’t know where it comes from but personally and it’s not because we’re looking to get rich quick or whatever. We’re totally motivated by what we’re doing. We enjoy what we’re doing. We believe in what we’re doing and we have employees whom we pay who believe in what they’re doing but they’re doing work and we have to pay them and we think we should pay them. And so, therefore we are forced to charge somewhere along the line. That seems to me normal. But, on the Internet there’s a whole different mindset that everything should be free. Mark, presumably you don’t disagree with me.

Mark: I would never disagree with you and on this issue I absolutely agree. I mean I find it extremely irritating that basically you’re encouraged, it’s better to beg for money than to charge money for a service. Like, you’re better off to have a tip jar and give something away for free so basically equivalent to standing on the corner with a cup full of pencils is better than providing a good service and expecting a fair price for it. You know I, if we’re building something here which is of value to people why shouldn’t those people pay for it? If those, if the complainer comes to my house and cuts my grass he’s going to expect to get paid. He’s not going to do it for free so why should what we do be considered or forced to be free? I don’t understand really the mindset.

Steve: And, you know it’s even more than that. First of all the idea that you don’t pay for intellectual work, you know for ideas, I just don’t know where that would come from. The idea as well that people can decided whether or not they wish to pay. In other words if we take that tip jar analogy to the shoe store then I just go to the shoe store and I can choose whether to pay for the shoes or not to pay for the shoes and choose to leave however much money I want to so yeah, I really like these shoes. Here’s $200. I really like these shoes. Thanks very much. Good bye. Equally good, you know?

Jill: It’s not realistic.

Steve: It’s not realistic because what you’d have to do, I mean you’d hope to be getting $1,000 from someone to compensate for the other people who don’t pay anything so it’s really not fair.

Mark: Not at all.

Steve: Not fair. Everyone who likes that pair of shoes should have to pay the same amount of money for that pair of shoes, at least it seems to me. But Jill, maybe you have a different, what’s the woman’s perspective on this?

Jill: No, I totally agree with you guys of course. Like you both said we provide a service. We have, we put in our time. We have to pay other people to put in their time and they’re not just doing it out of the goodness of their hearts because they want to help the millions of people out there who want to learn English. They do want to and we do as well but you know, we have families, we have to make a living and it’s not something that we can just do for free. So, yeah, I completely agree.

Steve: Now, this can sound sort of self-serving and I’m sure there’s people out there and I’m sure we’re going to get into trouble for even having this discussion, but it really does, it really does great. I think it’s, anyone who is saying this, in most cases, they either have a job themselves therefore they are getting paid for what they do or they’re parents have a job. You know, somebody has a job.

Mark: Or they’re on welfare.

Steve: Or they’re on welfare.

Mark: But somebody’s putting bread on their table.

Steve: So it’s, you know fine that someone has a job and then they spend their evenings helping people do stuff. Great. Volunteer. There’s nothing wrong with that, absolutely nothing wrong with that. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with volunteering. If somebody puts up a sign that says this is for free, just enjoy it. Great.

Jill: Like Wikipedia.

Steve: Wikipedia, great but don’t have a tip jar there because in other words you would like to get money but you don’t really want to charge people. If you want to say I wanted this, I am Bill Gates or I am not Bill Gates. I make, you know $5,000 a year but I’m going to spend all my savings to put up a nice site so that people can have a good time, good for you. Love it but don’t have a tip jar if you’re not looking for compensation. I think in particular, like it was on a website where people were talking about audio books. Where can you get free audio books? I don’t want to have to pay for an audio book? I even came across a site where they were offering Portuguese audio books, Portuguese language audio books which I’m interested in and it was called the Democratization of Sound or something. In other word s to make it free is to make it democratic or free or whatever. Why? I know a person who lives in Italy, who runs a site called Il Narratore, he’s totally devoted to putting Italian literature on the web. He lives in a very modest house with his wife and daughter. Why should he work for free? He does an excellent job. He’s an absolute, you know craftsman and I love listening to his audio books and I would rather pay him $12 or $15 or $20 Euros for one of his audio books done professionally and I love it, rather than have some volunteer quite frankly come in and read. Or, they have projects now where 20 different people, each person reads a chapter. There’s nothing wrong with doing that. That’s good, for those who want that, that’s fine but I don’t feel that there should be any implied criticism of someone like Il Narratore who does it for a living and that’s the hypocrisy that I find surrounding this issue.

Mark: Well, I think part of it has to do with this mindset that’s kind of been promoted at people by you k000now, the media and the universities and it seems prevalent in at least Western society that, at least here in Canada that somehow business is bad, for-profit is bad. The only things that are good are environmental organizations and not-for-profits. But people are, not-for-profits don’t work for free so actually that’s a complete hypocrisy. Volunteers are volunteers, not-for-profit employees are no different than anybody else. In fact, many not-for-profit employees make a lot of money so in my opinion not-for-profits in many cases are just a scam.

Steve: Well, I think that’s a big strong but I don’t disagree with you. I have seen so many examples of not-for-profits, because not-for-profits are able to get funding where a for-profit is not so that if a major say, fund, charity fund that might be funded by for-profit corporations who for whatever reason set up this fund and then they will say okay, here’s money for example in literacy in language learning. They would never give it to the Linguist but if we set up the Jill, Mark and Steve not-for-profit literacy organization and then decided we were all going to make $80,000 it wouldn’t matter. As long as we’re a not-for-profit organization we can go in there and as long as we were able to demonstrate that we had something good. In other words if the Linguist were not-for-profit but we all paid ourselves nice salaries we could then probably attract this funding. And, I have seen so many examples where the not-for-profits are totally motivated by how they can access funding so they will skew or spend a lot of their activity in how they can access this or that funding whether or not the activity that they get funding for actually benefits someone is secondary. How do they attract funding to feed their organization is the primary concern which is understandable. That’s their revenue model. That’s the revenue model which is okay too. I just want to say that there’s many different models including the volunteer model but there is nothing wrong with the model that I have a service. If you think it is valuable here’s what I charge. If you don’t like it, you don’t pay. If you do like it you, pay. So, I think we’ve kind of beaten this one up a bit and we’ll probably get lots of criticism but I just, we just wanted to get it off our chest.

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Steve: Hi Jill.

Jill: Hello again.

Steve: Here we are at EnglishLingQ.com and of course LingQ is l-i-n-g-q. com and Jill and I are going to talk about the fact that we are probably what, a week or so away from the, a couple of weeks away from the company outing, and what are we going to do there?

Jill: We are going to have a whole variety of events for everybody to participate in. All of the employees here are going with their families, children, wives, husbands so I think there’s going to be 45 people or something all together at a resort in separate rooms, obviously, but together and spending a lot of time during the day and I guess in the evening together.

Steve: You know, I was thinking we could save money if we all stayed in a big gymnasium or barn so that was my vote to save money but I was voted down so we ended up going to a fancy resort where every family gets their own room. It sure adds to the cost. I don’t know why the barn area, the barn idea didn’t fly but anyway, there we are. It’s more of a kind of a together type experience if we’re all staying in one big gymnasium. We could even have like triple layered bunks, have an outhouse, you know? Anyway, that was not, no one went for that idea. I thought it would save the company some money but I was voted down. So, where is this place?

Jill: It’s on Vancouver Island, about an hour and a half ferry ride from Vancouver and then I guess we drive for maybe 40 minutes after we get off the ferry and it’s right on the ocean, outside of a small town on Vancouver Island.

Steve: And it’s actually a very nice resort. It’s a very nice resort nestled in amongst these large Douglas Fir trees and it’s right on the ocean. There’s a beach there, the children can go down and look for sand dollars and starfish and clams and this kind of thing. And, of course this is also going to be the 20th anniversary of K.P. Wood which is our activity here that’s involved in the wood business and which started in the year 1987 so it’s the 20th anniversary so we’re going for four days. Four days we’ll be shut down here and we will be just having fun over there. What were some of the events again that we have planned?

Jill: I think that we are going to go, there’s some caves around there that you can climb down into, climb around so I think we’re all going caving. And, I think we’ll probably have some volley ball games and some things like that. I can’ remember the other activities. Steve: Well we have golf.

Jill: Oh yeah.

Steve: We have our golf tournament which is whatever it’s called, Texas scramble type of golf. Maybe some volley ball and of course we want to be building that, we want to be doing team building in this thing. That’s my objective here is that people should feel that they can rely on each other in a team so we’ve got to devise some events like blind, like going into the cave blind and relying on someone else to guide you. And then maybe lowering people into a hole where they hold on to a rope and they’re blind folded and everybody’s blind folded.

Jill: Right. I can see you going for that. That’s not going to work.

Steve: Well, so that the person who’s being lowered down, he has to trust the person who’s lowering him and the person who’s lowering him is blind folded so he has to take responsibility.

Jill: Yeah, and then you have a 120 pound girl lowering down a 200 pound guy.

Steve: Mind over matter. Mind over matter you know. If she wants to, you know, I believe if she wants to drop him she can be, she can be 200 pounds and he’s 120 pounds, she’ll drop him but if she is committed to the task, to her job she’ll hang on even if the rope is burning her hands. That’s what I believe. That’s the kind of commitment that we want from our employees.

Jill: You have a lot of faith. A lot of faith.

Steve: Do you think I might be disappointed?

Jill: I think a little bit, yeah.

Steve: Well, there could be some changes to the plan. In any case I’m not responsible for these activities so they don’t allow me to, they don’t let me make these plans and so forth. We’re hoping we get good weather. Unfortunately here on the coast because we’re right on the coast and different weather systems blow in across the Pacific, you know, we can have, it can be 25-30 degrees and sunny or it can be 15 degrees and rainy and we just don’t know which we’re going to get. We know what we got today.

Jill: Yeah, the 18 degrees and pouring rain.

Steve: Pouring rain. What is your favorite sport?

Jill: To play, to do, for me?

Steve: Yes.

Jill: Um, I don’t know. I guess I really enjoy hiking.

Steve: Oh yeah, you’re a hiker and of course we talked about you climbing up, but how about tennis or no? Swimming, are you a big swimmer?

Jill: I was as a, when I was younger I was into swimming. I was diving, I was in synchronized swimming, yeah, so swimming was definitely my favorite sport all through my childhood. We had a pool at my house until I was ten so swimming, I do love swimming but I don’t swim very much anymore.

Steve: How about kayaking?

Jill: Um, I like it but I prefer the two man kayaks where Chris does all the work and I just kind of hang out there with my feet dangling in the water.

Steve: You know one year, one of our outings we had a kayaking experience which was a lot of fun and for many people it was their first time in a kayak and we took off to this island and the weather changed. And, we went over there as a group of about 15 kayaks, many of whom were in a kayak for the first time. Now, everyone had a life jacket on and we had been given instructions but kayaks are not very stable. It’s very easy to tip a kayak. And, so we went out there in a tight group and the weather was okay. We went to this island, we played on the island and then the weather changed. The wind picked up. It was raining, it was dark. We had to go and this was the ocean we’re talking about, this is not a lake and we had to get back home and we were on an island. We had girls or two wives who were in tears and who refused to go back, at least initially. And we had to tell them there was no choice. We had to go back but if we all stayed together it wouldn’t be a problem. And, of course we got back so it was a very important bonding experience. Very good. I didn’t plan that one though.

Jill: Well, I know, I was thinking it could almost be a good thing to have an experience like that. It sure does make you rely on each other and trust each other and help each other out.

Steve: And of course, so typically in those kinds of situations the actual danger is actually very, very minimal. There are so man people. Kayaks float, everyone has the life jacket. If the kayak should flip then you hang on to your kayak. The water is not cold, I mean it’s not warm but it’s not freezing cold. You have your life jacket, you hang on to the kayak, a few people go in and get somebody with a boat, I mean there was really no danger but psychologically if someone has, is not comfortable in a kayak, is not comfortable in water. I mean it’s fine for me to say because I like to swim, you like to swim, I don’t mind the water, getting wet, tip, and it doesn’t bother me but if I don’t like the water and I’m not, yeah, I can see where.

Jill: Oh yeah.

Steve: I think there was some husbands who were in deep trouble that night.

Jill: Well yeah. We’ll see how people do with the caving too. I mean, the dark, enclosed, narrow space. I think there could be some people who, who may have some problems with that too. So we’ll see.

Steve: You know then Jill we’ll have to report back and we’ll see how the 120 pound girl does lowering a 200 pound man down the hole in the cave.

Jill: Blind folded.

Steve: Blind folded. Alright then, that’ll do for now.

Jill: Bye, bye.

Steve: Once again, it’s EnglishLingQ, l-i-n-g-q.com and it’s www, lingq.com and one thing we would like to know is what kinds of discussions do you like? Do you like us to talk about the language? Do you like us to talk about every day life? Would you like us to talk more slowly? What would you like? Please let us know. Wouldn’t you like to know Jill?

Jill: Please give us some feedback.

Steve: Okay. Thanks, bye, bye.

Jill: Bye, bye.

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Steve: Hi Jill.

Jill: Hello again.

Steve: Um, gee, it’s been warm the last little while. It was very warm the other night.

Jill: Well, yeah, Tuesday night and Wednesday night. Wednesday night in particular though, very hot all day, all night. It didn’t really cool down. I think it was still 20 degrees overnight. Not a lot of breeze, very hot in Vancouver.

Steve: Of course, we’re spoiled here. Normally even if it’s 25 degrees or 28 degrees which is considered warm here it’ll be down to 16, 17 at night which is very comfortable. Do you have air conditioning at home?

Jill: Oh no, and, and even 17 overnight is not very comfortable in our condo. Um, condos are very hot and they’re not, it’s not like house where you have doors and windows at each end that you can open and get a breeze going through so ours is better than most because we’ve got a rooftop deck and we can leave that open and windows open but in general even if it’s 20 degrees outside it will be quite warm in the condo.

Steve: But, and of course we are spoiled because I’ve lived in places where it can be 30 degrees at night and there is no relief. No relief, so yeah. I remember once in was in China, I was in Hangzhou, China at the end of June and Hangzhou is meant to be one of the hot places in the summer and they have an artificial lake there which is not very deep and that artificial lake absorbs the heat during the day and it sends it back at night. I can remember that I was in this hotel and this is in the 70’s; they didn’t have air conditioning, and I filled up the bath tub with cold water and I literally got up every two hours and lay in the cold water to cool my body down, lay back to sleep and within an hour or two I was sopping wet, sweating like a pig and I’d go back into the bathtub. I mean it was just so, so hot. So we’re lucky here.

Jill: Very lucky, yeah. And, we can, most people here don’t have air conditioning in their homes because it’s not usually so hot that you need it but I notice the last few summer when we had two, three week periods of really warm weather people have been buying the air conditioners. You know the little, three, four, five hundred dollar portable air conditioners and they’ve actually been selling out of them at some of the bigger home stores.

Steve: And, what so you like to do in the summer?

Jill: I like to be outside except for when it’s too hot like it was a few days ago. I like to, to run and hike and just spend time outdoors.

Steve: You were telling me that you were in a houseboat? What was that like?

Jill: That was great. We went for just a couple of days on a houseboat on a big lake about five and a half hours from Vancouver and you just, you bring food. There’s a barbeque on the boat, bedrooms, bathrooms, full kitchen and a big top deck that’s out in the sun and you can jump off of it into a lake and you can slide down – there’s a little slide that goes into the lake – and you just hang out listening to music, eating all day, drinking and swimming in the lake. It’s great.

Steve: You know, I don’t think, I think I’d get stir crazy. But no.

Jill: You know if Chris and I don’t, and we’re people that don’t really like to stay in one place for very long, but the two days wasn’t enough. We would have been happy with a couple more days because we’re constantly in the water. You know you’re always making drinks for people and you’re always making a snack or lunch or dinner so you just, or you’re playing cards or you’re reading a book. I mean there just seems to be stuff to do and it’s so beautiful there.

Steve: It is a beautiful lake surrounded by mountains. What was the water temperature like?

Jill: It’s quite cool actually. It’s a very deep lake so you know, I find it very cold. It takes me a while to get used to it.

Steve: Is it as cold as the ocean here?

Jill: No, no It’s not. No, definitely not as cold. Once you’re in you can stay in for a long time whereas the ocean I find is, I can’t stay in very long so it’s warmer.

Steve: Well, yeah, I know. I like swimming in the ocean here, not all year mind you but sort of late May, early June on through early September but, and the temperature varies. Sometimes it’s warmer than others. So, alright. Well look, we’ve talked a little bit about summer and summer activities. Yeah. What else can we talk about.

Jill: What do you like to do in the summer?

Steve: What do I like to do? I like to be in Vancouver. I don’t go anywhere in the summer. I like to swim in the ocean. I still go for my run even if it’s hot and then I get nice and warm so that I can come home and then I might do a few things in the garden just to feel better and then I just go into the ocean and I just feel great. Very, very good. And, we have seals in the ocean so, I was quite surprised the first time I saw one. I was doing a crawl, swimming and I stopped and normally when you’re doing a crawl of course you don’t look up. Your head is in the water and then I finished my crawl and looked and there was a seal about three feet in front of my face looking at me. So, I hadn’t realized that there were seals there. At first I was a little, I was, I can’t say I was happy to see the seal. I didn’t quite know what the seal was going to do so I sort of turned around and started swimming back towards shore, just, you know, but he wasn’t interested in me. I didn’t look like his dinner.

Jill: No.

Steve: No. So.

Steve:They eat small fish, yeah. So that was okay. Alright.

Jill: Well, we did great. Thank you.

Steve: Let’s go and enjoy the rest of the summer. Okay? Once again this is EnglishLingQ. Jill and I, sometimes we talk about language, sometimes we just talk about what we’re doing. Jill talked about hanging out on the lake and I talked about swimming in the ocean and the whole idea is to create some natural conversation so that you can get some sense of rhythm and we do transcribe these. We have them available at EnglishLingQ.com, LingQ.com. We would like people to use this content with the Linguist or eventually with LingQ where they can save words and phrases and use this as natural learning material so that they can get a sense for the natural rhythm of the language which helps them in pronunciation and then also accumulate vocabulary. Okay then. Bye Jill.

Jill: Bye, bye.

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Steve: Hi Jill.

Jill: Hi Steve. How are you today?

Steve: Oh I’m good. I’m good thank you. Now do you know what, that just reminds me of something.

I said I’m good. That’s incorrect but do you hear that a lot?

Jill: All the time. We say that all the time. A lot of people say I’m good. Some people say I’m fine, I’m fine thank you, I’m well, but I think most commonly here in North America people say I’m good.

Steve: I’m not entirely sure why that’s wrong but I know it’s wrong.

Jill: I don’t know either.

Steve: Let me just think. Now, if I start to think, like good is an adjective. Fine is an adjective. Well is an adverb. I’m well. I don’t know why you have to use an adverb instead of an adjective, do you?

Jill: Ah, you know, I don’t know even if well is correct, more correct than fine or good. I’m not sure that it is. I think to me well almost implies more that I’m feeling well. I’m well, I’m healthy, I’m doing well.

Steve: Which makes me think in fact that well is an adjective even though it’s very often an adverb. I guess, there are several things that come to my mind as we talk here. One is that grammar is confusing.

Jill: Yes.

Steve: And, the second is that usage is constantly changing and that there is quite a range of acceptable uses so that grammar is not this precise definition of what you are allowed and not allowed to say. Rather there is a sort of usage pattern which we have to learn and it’s a bit of a moving target. Maybe, I don’t know if that’s more true of English than of other languages but it’s certainly true of English. Do you find, for example if you’re asked to explain why this sentence is correct and this other sentence is not correct, it’s very difficult to do it very often.

Jill: Very difficult. I, I have a very hard time giving a rule or an explanation of why it’s right or why it’s wrong. It’s just, it doesn’t sound right, it’s not natural, it’s not how we would say it.

Steve: And, of course I suspect that even if you were a grammatician and gave me a complicated explanation I’m not sure it would help me. It may help. I think it may help. If I think of my Russian learning. If I’ve had enough experience that I’ve heard these kinds of structures so often and then I finally get an explanation and then maybe as we say, the penny drops. Then after the fact the explanation can be useful but …

Jill: Just a beginner, first learning, first hearing these phrases, words, sentences, I think very often, just the explanation is too difficult to understand.

Steve: I agree. And, you know because I speak a variety of languages I’ve often been in a situation where I have to interpret for someone. This person could be, in my career it was either a diplomat or it could have been a business man or something and you would be surprised at how poorly people speak English. Even senior people in government or even worse in the business field because the senior government officials generally speak better but these business people, I mean I had to guess at what they were saying very often and then turn it into hopefully understandable Chinese or Japanese or whatever language I was translating into. Not everyone, not every native speaker uses the language even correctly.

Jill: Great. There’s a lot of people who write and speak poorly in English.

Steve: That’s again, one of the reasons why at the Linguist and now at LingQ we think it’s very important that people write and of course, we tell them write the way you speak, speak the way you write. Most people who teach language will say you know the written language is very different from the spoken language, which is true for the native speaker but the non native speaker, learning the language has a much more limited control of the language. It is very much in their interest to treat the two as the same so if they come to our system and they write something as if they were speaking, then we are able to pick up. It gives us like a footprint of that person’s use of language. Then we can say, alright, there’s a certain latitude in terms of usage but you have now, you’re outside normal usage so this is not correct. So, that’s why, and you have of course corrected people’s writing and it is a good way, don’t you think, of finding out what people’s problems are?

Jill: Oh yeah, of course. When we correct writing and people have a lot of problems with verb tenses or with prepositions, everybody has problems with prepositions and they have just as many problems with those things when they’re speaking as they do when they’re writing. But, it’s very difficult if you never speak with somebody which sometimes we don’t on our site. We don’t speak with everybody or maybe you speak with somebody for 15 minutes once a month or whatever it may be and then they want us to tell them what their biggest problems are. That’s very difficult to do so it is must better if they submit writing, write how they speak and then we give them concrete examples or different phrases they can use and replace things for them so that they can then incorporate that into their vocabulary so they can speak better.

Steve: Well, that’s right. My experience with Russian, I was on Skype the other night in fact, speaking with a person in Russian. I spoke for 30 minutes in Russian. It’s the longest I’ve spoken in Russian ever and I kept on getting the same word wrong. I said how do you say this again and he’d give me but I couldn’t remember it because you know, the sweat was kind of forming on my forehead struggling to speak in Russian. There’s just too much pressure and you’re thinking of other things and you don’t hear it that clearly so that’s no time to correct people whereas if you write something and of course, now in the new LingQ the corrector will also record the corrected version in, therefore a native speaker will be recording, will be reading out the student tried to write which has now been corrected. Then the learner can listen to it over and over again and really pick up on how those things should be expressed so the two should, the writing and the speaking I think are, it’s the instant diagnosis, the writing is, of where the problems are, the weaknesses are in the person’s language. So, I think it’s very good that way but let’s just continue on the subject of speaking. You know, another thing that comes up all the time is how important is an accent and I mean, I think we all have tried to imitate the native speaker. I mean in your French, for example you would like to speak as close to a French accent as possible, correct?

Jill: Of course, yes. One thing with accent though I should mention as was pointed out to me the other day too, that there are often a variety of accents in different languages and I think most people are more concerned with proper pronunciation within a certain accent. You know, I mean there’s a Quebecois French accent or a French Parisian French accent and so I think depending on which accent you prefer you want proper pronunciation in that accent.

Steve: Right. But, and that is the goal so that’s the sort of the ideal that you’re working towards and I think everyone does that. Now, whether they’re as you say, whether you choose to imitate, whether your ideal pronunciation is the Quebec French or a French French or the Spanish in Spain or the Spanish in Mexico, I mean that’s your choice but yeah, you’re trying to imitate that. However, you may not achieve that. That’s your model, that’s your goal; that’s fine but you may not achieve it. As long as you are understood then that’s really good enough. I mentioned to you the example of, we have a Swiss banker friend who has the big pronounced Swiss accent but he speaks phenomenally and he has an assistant who is from England who does not express himself as well in English as my Swiss banker does, so, and my Swiss banker has lived in Canada for 20 years and he has no complexes about his English and nor should he because he speaks extremely well so I say yes. If you want to work to get your pronunciation closer to that of the native speaker, to whatever native speaker you are trying to imitate, fine but you may not make it 100% and don’t worry about it. You had a discussion the other day with some of our learners and there was some difference of opinion on that.

Jill: Yeah. I mean, most of them, they were all fairly advanced speakers whose pronunciation is quite good already and they, to them I was trying to sort of tell them the same thing, you know. I understand you very well. It’s really not that important if you don’t’ sound exactly like me or Steve or whoever but they were pretty, a couple of them at least were fairly adamant about wanting to sound as much like a native speaker as possible. And, I think these are people, they’re keen Linguist members, they work very hard on Linguist and I think they sort of have a passion for English learning so maybe they’re perfectionists to a certain degree and so for them it’s maybe more important than the average person.

Steve: Well and I think maybe we can end on the note that we want people to do what they want to do so people can pursue whatever interests them. It’s just that we don’t want people to feel pressure or to feel unhappy. I’ve heard people say I don’t like listening to myself speak English because I don’t like my accent. What they are really saying is they feel that other people don’t like their accent so they feel badly about their accent and that we don’t want. But, if a person wants to pursue the ultimate in getting to sound like a native speaker, well there’s nothing wrong with that either. Okay Jill, thank you very much.

Jill: Thank you.

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Steve: Jill. Here we are again. We’re going to try to debate something. Let’s try to be controversial. Let’s talk about gay marriage.

Jill: A very popular subject in Canada.

Steve: It’s a big subject. I don’t think it concerns that many people in fact, but it seems to get a lot of press.

Jill: Yes.

Steve: Which side do you want to defend? And, we should say ahead of time that which ever side we choose it doesn’t have to be the way we think.

Jill: Actually feel, yeah.

Steve: No. But it’s just for the purpose of having a debate.

Jill: Right. I will defend the side, I guess I’ll take the side of gay, pro gay marriage.

Steve: Okay, pro gay marriage. Okay what does that mean? So you think gays should get married?

Jill: I think that yes, if two people love each other and want to be married and have the same rights as a married couple, a woman and a man here which means there are certain tax benefits and there’s different things that come along with a legally recognized marriage. And, if, if two men or two women want that then I think they should be able to.

Steve: Now it’s my understanding that the marriage issue is one step beyond getting the same rights. I understand that there is a common law arrangement, that there is a legal arrangement that gays can have because they live in a union. And that, with their partner and therefore they would share many of the same rights, if not all of the same rights as a married couple. But my understanding is what the gays want is they want the word marriage.

Jill: Marriage.

Steve: And, that’s where I draw the line. That’s where I draw the line because I think the word marriage has a lot of cultural significance in it. It has been around for a long, long time. So, what we’re really saying is that, and I think this is the crux of the matter, that the gays want to say our marriage, our union is as natural, as honorable, as wonderful as any other union.

Jill: Right.

Steve: And, that’s what I don’t agree with because the marriage of one man and one woman is pretty fundamental to our society.

Jill: And our survival.

Steve: Now, don’t agree with me. You’re supposed to disagree. So, and I think we have evolved to a situation where we think the marriage of one man and one woman is, can be a fairly equal relationship. One man and ten women, you know or one woman and ten men, we don’t think that’s good.

Jill: No.

Steve: No. One man and one woman, we think that’s kind of healthy. We think that’s good for the children, it provides a role model for sons and daughters. We think that’s good so people like that. They, that’s important to many people. So, I understand that the gays are saying it’s important for us to be recognized as the same as that but in fact, in my opinion it’s not the same. So that’s where I feel that, and the problem is that once it’s recognized legally as the same then the gays will try to force various institutions such as religions to grant them the same status as you know, heterosexual you know, monogamous relationships because it’s now law and it’s their right and so forth and so on. So, I just think it’s not necessary. I think, I have nothing against gays and they can live their lives however they want but I think that by the same token they should just respect this very, very universal and long standing institution of marriage.

Jill: Yeah, yeah, I mean, I can definitely understand that perspective however I think that, I mean the institution of marriage has changed a lot over the years and it’s, I mean people are getting divorced constantly. People are getting married five times and so I think to a lot of people it doesn’t mean very much and they just do it then it’s easy to undo it and I think that there could be gay people who might it might mean more to them than some heterosexual people and they may still want to be parents and they could be very good parents. They could be very good role models. There’s a lot of terrible parents out there that are heterosexual and that are married and have you know raised bad children or not good parents and so I just, yeah, I think that basically they should be given the same opportunity.

Steve: Okay. Certainly, I think there is a lot to what you are saying and that is that the hallowed institution of marriage may in fact contain all kinds of problems and we read some of the worst stories of child abuse and who knows what that happen and spouse abuse and so forth that happens in our traditional heterosexual marriages. And, it is true that divorce is more and more common but I think recognizing gay marriage is just one more sort of stone thrown at the institution of marriage. I also have a problem of the idea of gays adopting children or in the case of lesbians, artificially inseminating themselves. I guess you could have theoretically two pregnant partners.

Jill: Yeah, you could.

Steve: You know, it just gets away from what’s natural. What’s natural is not necessarily always good. There are nasty animals. There are animals that eat their young, you know what I mean? There are gay animals.

Jill: Antibiotics are not natural. I mean there’s lots of things that are …

Steve: No, No but I’m saying even within what is natural it’s not all good.

Jill: No, it’s not all good and,

Steve: It’s not all good and so there’s all kinds, I mean nature is not necessarily moral.

Jill: No.

Steve: It just is. But, to me, I’m a bit of a traditionalist and I always hope that one day the divorce rate will start going the other way, that we’ll have less and less divorce. I think a large part of the high divorce rate is this whole everything for me now kind of attitude that I tend to believe comes from our pop culture and so forth but I can’t prove it. But, so, no, I think that the fact that gays are not persecuted is a good thing. In fact, and ideally people who are gay at work and in very different situations, I don’t ask people who might be my employees or whom I deal with whether they are gay or not. If they happen to introduce me to their partner without happens to be of the same sex then okay. None of that bothers me at all. I just think there is a certain militancy sometimes on the part of gays and maybe that’s normal in any situation where people have been subject to some degree of persecution and you’ll have a sort of a militancy that kind of goes too far the other way. And I see nothing wrong with some kind of a civil union and similar tax breaks for gays as long as there is a commitment, you know to a long term relationship. Now, you could argue that nothing prevents heterosexuals from having a marriage of convenience for any number of tax advantages. A marriage of convenience, a divorce of convenience, all this kind of stuff. Whether it be for immigration reasons, social welfare reasons, I mean there is so much abuse and stuff everywhere so I’m not suggesting that heterosexual people are better than gays but I just think the institution of marriage to me, although if I’m perfectly honest, it doesn’t matter or bother me at all.

Jill: You’re just taking that side.

Steve: No, no, no, I’m saying I do believe the institution of marriage is important. Now I’m saying whatever you feel but the fact that gays are allowed to call themselves married doesn’t affect in any way how I feel about my own marriage.

Jill: No, exactly.

Steve: No impact. But it does, I just kind of feel somewhere that in our society, I just feel that the institution of marriage should be kind of

Jill: Sacred.

Steve: Buttressed a little bit. Helped along a little bit and shouldn’t be so easy to divorce, you know and all the different things that go on.

Jill: Well I agree with you there for sure, yeah.

Steve: You know? I think it was Napoleon that said you know, Jill we always end up agreeing at the end. You ought to get something.

Jill: Get a topic where we really do disagree.

Steve: Totally disagree. We’ll find something that’s nastier. But, what were we talking about? Oh yeah, Napoleon once said that if you allow women to, if you allow divorce, divorce will happen. I mean there’s something to be said for that. If it’s just not an option or it’s very difficult to get a divorce people will find,

Jill: People will work it out.

Steve: They’ll find other solutions. So. We’ll talk about that next time. Hey, listen we forgot to say that this is EnglishLingQ.com so those of you who are hearing this you can also go to the website EnglishLingQ.com where you will find a transcript. And, if you’re really clever you will join the Linguist so that you can learn the words and phrases that will help you when you have to argue with someone in English. And, hopefully your argument will be more heart felt than the one I’ve just had with Jill.

Jill: Yeah.

Steve: Where we always agree. Okay.

Jill: Alright. Bye, bye.

Steve: Bye.

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Steve: Jill. Here we are again. We’re going to try to debate something. Let’s try to be controversial.

Jill: Hi Steve. How are you?

Steve: Not too bad. Boy it’s blowing outside. What a miserable, miserable day.

Jill: Yeah, nice summer day for us in Vancouver.

Steve: There’s no difference between June the 29th and I don’t know, November.

Jill: November.

Steve: November the 15th. This is terrible.

Jill: I mean it’s definitely warmer but it’s not very nice.

Steve: It’s very unpleasant. You know Jill, one of the things that bothers me is whenever we talk here we always agree but in life, you often disagree with people.

Jill: Of course.

Steve: I think it’s an important language skill to be able to disagree, present your views without offending the other person. Very often if you’re in a foreign language where you don’t have all the words at your disposal and you feel strongly about something it’s very easy to say it in such a direct way that first of all, you’re not going to convince anyone. Of course, we can never convince anyone anyway, but that’s another story. You’re not going to convince them and you may well offend them.

Jill: Right.

Steve: So, what we’ll do today is I want you to pick a subject and I want you to tell me which side of the argument you’re going to defend.

Jill: Okay.

Steve: And I will defend the other side and we’ll try to have a polite, civilized debate.

Jill: Okay.

Steve: What do you want to talk about?

Jill: So, actually we’ve been talking about this a little bit recently because we have a lot of learners in Europe and it being the summertime a lot of them are taking vacation and most countries in western Europe anyway seem to give everybody five, six weeks holiday per year, and in Canada legal requirement for a full time employee is only two weeks and many employers give three weeks and then in different union situations people may get four, five or six, a lot more.

Steve: With seniority and stuff.

Jill: With seniority right but I think there are a lot of people who get two or three weeks.

Steve: Right.

Jill: in Canada. So I think maybe I will take the position that that is just not fair.

Steve: What’s not fair?

Jill: Two or three weeks. I think five or six sounds better.

Steve: Well, could you, alright. I hear what you’re saying. I should just interrupt here. What we’re going to do is we’re going to use a lot of expressions that are used in discussion in order to lubricate the discussion to make the discussion more pleasant and so I hope that people who listen to this content and then read it that they will save some of these expressions and hopefully be able to use them.

Jill: Right.

Steve: So, I hear what you’re saying but as an employer if I am only required to give my employees two or three weeks of holiday a year and if my employees accept that because everyone else in the society is happy to have two or three weeks, why would I possibly suggest that they have five or six weeks?

Jill: Right, which is perfectly understandable. From an employer’s perspective I agree totally and I may even be the same if I was an employer. On the other hand, there can be arguments for the fact that people who have adequate time off are actually more productive during the time that they are at work. Um, so I guess really, it needs to maybe be weighed, how much it’s costing you, what the cost benefit ratio is. You know, do you give an extra week and do you get more productivity out of that person because they have more rest or whatever, relaxation or do you not get any more productivity out of them and you’re just paying them for another week of holidays?

Steve: Yeah, I think that’s a good way of putting it. And, I know that in Europe typically the employee will take a full month off.

Jill: Right.

Steve: And have another couple of weeks later on so they’ll take their month in whatever, August.

Jill: Right.

Steve: And then they’ll get another two weeks to go skiing and yeah, you could argue that the company doesn’t suffer but, I mean, presumably the employee is doing something while at work.

Jill: Right.

Steve: So if say six weeks out of fifty-two the employee is not at work presumably that represents a cost.

Jill: Exactly.

Steve: to the employer. Now, you’re saying that after four weeks of holiday the employee comes back fully recharged but three weeks wouldn’t do it.

Jill: No, not even necessarily, I think that when you only, if you get two weeks for example a year you’re likely not to take two weeks at a time because you probably want a bit of time off at Christmas and you probably want a bit of time off in the summer so you will likely only take a maximum of a week at a time. And, I think for most people a week is not really enough.

Steve: Right, but we do have holidays around Christmas and around Easter.

Jill: Long weekends, yes.

Steve: Long weekends and so forth. By the way are we negotiating here?

Jill: No and to be honest I actually, I mean I’m defending a position but I kind of think that five or six weeks is a little bit ridiculous. I’m not really …

Steve: But you know Jill, in these discussions and we’re going to do more of them, I don’t, I mean I could be on the other side, okay? Should we switch? I’ll defend the six weeks and you, because you’re too reasonable. I want you to be stronger. I’ll defend the six weeks. Alright? I’ll tell you why six weeks is good. First of all, because every employee gives his best for the company but they also have a life to lead.

Jill: Right.

Steve: So, you could argue from the employer’s perspective that the employer should give no holidays at all. I mean from the employer’s perspective if, for the same salary he can give no holidays and have the employee work 10 hours a day, maybe one day off a week, that would be better. Now you’re saying, and I agree with you that there is an issue there of recharging the batteries but that’s very difficult to measure. So, I think one of the strongest arguments is that the employee who granted, gets paid but gives so much of his or her time to the company, if they can, if the company can achieve its objectives and the employee can enjoy a richer life.

Jill: And is happy.

Steve: And is happy because they can spend more time with their family, they can take three weeks off in the summer, they can go off to the beach or climb a mountain or whatever, and then they can go again and maybe, you know ski or they can go do something educational with their kids, they can go visit Europe then why wouldn’t the employer do that?

Jill: Right.

Steve: As long as it doesn’t harm you know, essentially the economic performance of the company.

Jill: Right.

Steve: So, I, quite honestly, six weeks? Yeah, why not? The problem however is it would affect the economic performance of the company. I think six weeks, I agree with you. We have to find another subject where we disagree.

Jill: Where we disagree. I mean not that I wouldn’t love to have six weeks. I’m not saying I wouldn’t love that and my mom gets seven weeks holiday every year.

Steve: Because she’s worked a long time?

Jill: She’s worked a lot of years and just, she’s not in a union but she’s in a managerial role working for our health care system. And, so yes she started at four weeks 25 years ago and now she gets seven and a half weeks or something and it’s great. She takes a month off in the summer and she takes a week or two at Christmas.

Steve: Now that raises some interesting points. First of all, in the public sector, they have more generous, more generous conditions than in the private sector.

Jill: Right.

Steve: And yet it’s the taxpayer who’s paying for that.

Jill: Right.

Steve: I sat beside a gentleman on my last flight back from Europe who was from Holland and he had left the private sector and moved into the public sector in Holland and his holidays went from five weeks to nine weeks.

Jill: That’s unbelievable.

Steve: Now why should the public sector, where they are not facing the problems of economic survival of their unit, why should they get these kinds of holiday conditions? And there is no limit. I mean, yeah, let’s work six months and get off six months. Sure, the employee would like that. So, that’s one issue. The other issue is this whole seniority thing that we have here. Why, you know why should the lady with all due respect to your mother, who is probably in her 50s, why should she have seven weeks and someone just starting who has a family and wants to spend time with his or her kids or with his or her husband, wife, whatever, why do they get less? Why should the person’s that’s worked, you know, I don’t think that’s very …

Jill: I guess that’s because they’ve earned it, it’s sort of a, perk for having been there so long and given your loyalty for so long. I guess I don’t know if that’s the reason or not but yeah, that seems to be how it is. You, you sort of acquire these vacations, you earn more vacation.

Steve: The problem is then we have in our society, we have started to look at certain things as being rights. So, with seniority you have certain rights. Is it fair? Is it fair that a 50 year old gets twice the amount of holiday as a 25 year old? Not necessarily.

Jill: No, it would be more fair to bring it down and balance everything out and maybe give everybody four weeks or whatever.

Steve: Maybe there are no rights there. Maybe there is no fair there. It’s just, and, but still, I think two, I agree with you, we’re supposed to disagree but I agree with you two weeks is too little.

Jill: Two weeks is too little, yeah.

Steve: At least four weeks, three to four weeks is not a bad number because we only live once and we need to have the time to enjoy our lives as well. What we have to do Jill is we have to find something where…

Jill: A more controversial topic?

Steve: More controversial. How controversial can we get?

Jill: Well.

Steve: Let’s see what we do for the next topic.