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Mark: How about you? What’s new in your life?

Jill: Well, no new additions.

Mark: No new additions.

Jill: No pets.

Mark: What’s the matter with you? You’ve been married now what, a month?

Jill: Two months now, actually.

Mark: Two months.

Jill: Two months! No, nothing’s really changed. We’re getting new appliances this weekend.

Mark: Well, that’s a start.

Jill: That’s about it, I guess. Chris just decided two days ago, all of a sudden, we need new appliances. So, we’re getting a new

Mark: Springtime, time for a new stove?

Jill: I guess he’s bored and so we’re getting a new dishwasher and new oven and stove and new fridge.

Mark: Wow!

Jill: This weekend it’s being delivered.

Mark: That’s pretty good.

Jill: Yeah, he doesn’t mess around.

Mark: No!

Jill: When he told me he thought about doing this, this was about two days ago, and, apparently, things are getting delivered this Sunday, so.

Mark: Now is that a green light for you to go out and go buy something else that you want?

Jill: Well, not really because I generally do that all year round and that’s kind of his point that I just spend money all the time. You know, every week I’m coming home with something new, so. This is not actually for him either it’s for ‘us’.

Mark: Right.

You mean you’re not buying stuff for ‘us’?

Jill: Not generally, no. The bigger purchases I usually leave up to him.

Mark: Right. That’s a good thing to do, yeah.

Jill: But no, I’m happy. That’s fine with me. I mean they were the original appliances and I think our condo is now about 18 years old, so it was time to get new ones. I mean we got a new washer just about a year ago and these are just going to be much nicer, stainless steel as opposed to the white. You know, they were getting a little bit

Mark: Just newer and more features.

Jill: More modern and an oven that is self-cleaning.

Mark: Oh nice.

Jill: Our oven was getting pretty disgusting and neither of us were motivated to clean it.

Mark: I was going to say, you can clean non self-cleaning ovens, you know that?

Jill: Yeah, you can. So, anyway, now we have an excuse not to ever clean our oven.

Mark: Right.

Jill: So, yeah, we’re just completely spoiled here, obviously, that we have all these amazing appliances.

Mark: I was going to say, we have a self-cleaning oven too but it doesn’t seem to work, the self-cleaning cycle or thing part of it.

Jill: Actually, I’ve heard that.

Mark: So, we just don’t clean it.

Jill: Well, I think that’s probably the worst job, worst chore, is cleaning an oven.

Mark: Spraying that, whatever you call it,

Jill: toxic whatever and then leaving it.

Mark: I know, leaving it sit.

Jill: And then you have to get in there and scrub with an SOS pad, well, at least in our oven you do.

Mark: Oh yeah, in any oven. I mean the stuff just gets baked on there.

Jill: Yeah.

Mark: What’s amazing to me is I’ve done that before which

Jill: You’ve cleaned an oven before?

Mark: Yeah, I know it’s surprising, isn’t it?

Jill: I never have.

Mark: I can’t remember where I did that. I try to avoid household chores. I think maybe in college when we had to clean up our

Jill: Your dorm or something.

Mark: Not a dorm, our apartment or whatever we were renting there.

Jill: Yeah.

Mark: Anyway, I’ve done that before. It was not fun.

Jill: It’s a miserable job.

Mark: And trying to get in the oven and you’re crouched in the thing. You know, brutal.

Jill: Yeah, it’s brutal, so now we don’t have to deal with it.

Mark: That’s good. It’s nice to get new appliances. That’s always fun.

Jill: Oh yeah, that will be great.

Mark: Probably more energy-efficient too.

Jill: Yes, that’s right, energy-efficient and yeah, there will be a number of things that are better about them. And then the only other thing is I’m just fixing up our deck, our roof-top deck, which is quite large and quite nice.

Mark: It sounds pretty nice. A roof-top deck somehow sounds nice. Do you have a nice view looking off of it?

Jill: We go up some stairs and we open it and we’ve got a gorgeous view of the north shore mountains, all the buildings downtown and then also the ocean, so it’s a fantastic view.

Mark: Yeah.

Jill: And it’s a big deck. It’s not like a little tiny deck it’s very big.

Mark: Which is so nice; to have a big space.

Jill: Yeah.

We’ve got a barbeque and table and chairs and I actually want to get a few nice teak chaise lounge chairs to put out there and then I definitely want to do some nice flowers and plants this year. We haven’t done them for a couple years because we’re not home very much in the summertime on weekends and it’s full sun up there so things need to be watered all the time; every day sometimes in the middle of the summer here because there is never any shade up there.

Mark: Right.

Jill: So, I don’t know if things will survive but I want to at least try and spruce it up a little bit with some color.

Mark: At least if you are able to water it. I mean, being in full sun like that they’ll look great.

Jill: Oh yeah and I’ve been doing some research and I’m only going to, obviously, get the plants and flowers that do well in full sun.

Mark: Right.

Jill: Not stuff, you know, like hostas. And things that need shade, I just won’t plant up there.

Mark: No, yeah.

Jill: So, that’s about it.

Mark: Now we just need a little hot weather so that you can enjoy your deck.

Jill: Yeah.

Mark: So we can all get out and enjoy the weather. It’s been kind of cool this year. Here we are middle of June and, I don’t know, what did it get up to today 15?

Jill: I think it was supposed to get up to 18 or 20, actually.

Mark: Oh, really?

Jill: But to be fair, June, and I’ve always said this and even the meteorologist on the news the other day was saying this, that June is not a month you should count on in Vancouver for being nice.

Mark: Absolutely not.

Jill: It’s a very unstable month. There is always a lot of rain. It’s not a hot month and in May we had quite a bit of nice sunny weather. That last week of May and the first few days of June we were actually breaking records because we had so much hot, beautiful, sunny weather.

Mark: When you say ‘so much’, we had like

Jill: Well, a week and a half.

Mark: four days.

Jill: No, it was more.

Mark: A week and a half?

Jill: You forget.

Mark: Okay, there were four hot days and six days that were not raining.

Jill: Like 25 degrees. No, no, you don’t remember.

Mark: Any of you that are planning on visiting Vancouver, if you are looking for nice summer weather

Jill: July and August.

Mark: Yeah, mid July to the end of August even into the middle of September.

Jill: Yeah.

Mark: That’s when we have our nicest weather. Outside of that, you are almost guaranteed at that time of year to have beautiful sunny weather.

Jill: March, April.

Mark: And then in Vancouver or B.C., this area is just such a phenomenal place to be when the weather is like that. The rest of the year we just kind of grin and bear it until it gets nice again.

Jill: April and May, I mean, April-May you get some nice weather. There are always some nice days.

Mark: For sure.

Jill: But you can’t count on long stretches of nice weather.

Mark: No.

Jill: You certainly can’t say, oh yeah, you know, April and May are really nice months because there will be some nice days but there could also be a lot of rain, so your best bet is July or August.

Mark: Although, I seem to remember years past like this spring was particularly cool. We’ve had much nicer April and May and June, well June, we’re still in. It hasn’t been that bad really, I exaggerate.

Jill: But it’s been, except for the first few days of June, kind of cloudy or some rain almost every day this month so far.

Mark: And cool.

Jill: Yeah.

Mark: Like the other day, yeah, you had four blankets on in the office instead of your usual two.

Jill: No, I had two blankets and my heater.

Mark: Yeah.

So, no, no, but the weather hasn’t been great this year but any day now. It’s supposed to get hot next week.

Jill: Yes and if you recall last summer, June was absolutely terrible like usual; rainy, cloudy every day. I think I was still wearing my long johns to work to keep warm. July came and July was just scorching and it was

Mark: like someone turned the heater on, yeah.

Jill: Everyday sun and August and went right in to October where we had water shortage problems.

Mark: Did we last year?

Jill: We didn’t so much over here but they did on the island.

Mark: On the island they had that. In Tofino they ran out of water. They were trucking it in.

Jill: That’s right, that’s right, which is a real tourist town in the summer.

Mark: Which is really silly considering how much rainfall we get here in the wintertime, but if you don’t store it then you don’t have it when you need it.

Jill: Yeah, that’s right.

Mark: People here always assume it will rain but if it doesn’t rain for a while then you run out, which they did.

Jill: They did, yeah.

Mark: And they rely on tourism there. On Vancouver Island where we are going for our outing, a big part of their economy now is reliant on tourism and they basically had to send people home.

Jill: Well, people couldn’t even take showers or anything at one point. They just literally were out of water.

Mark: All the hotels shut down which is amazing, yeah.

Jill: It was a pretty big disaster for them. So, yeah, I’m hopeful that I think we’ll get another warm, hot, dry summer after this month is over.

Mark: Well, somebody told me, who was reading the Farmer’s Almanac or whatever, that’s what it says is coming: a long hot summer. I’ve heard that. I don’t know if that’s wishful thinking or what it is, but.

Jill: Well, I know people who swear that the Farmer’s Almanac is right. I don’t know.

Mark: For those who don’t know, the Farmer’s Almanac I don’t really know much about it… It’s a book that’s put out by I don’t know who that predicts all kinds of different things. I’ve never actually seen one; I’ve just heard it talked about.

Jill: No, me either; yeah, the elusive Farmer’s Almanac.

Mark: Yeah, but definitely it’s a book that’s published. I even think you can get it in bookstores.

Jill: People talk about it.

Mark: Presumably, farmers go by it. They plan their harvest or crops or whatever by what’s written in the Farmer’s Almanac. I don’t know how they predict stuff. I don’t know if it’s scientific or if it’s hocus-pocus, but

Jill: Well, we’ll see won’t we this year?

Mark: We will see.

We will see. Anyway, I think that is going to do us for today. Before we go I just want to remind everybody to make sure to come check out our site at thelinguist.com where you will be able to read a transcript of this podcast and use all our learning tools to save and lookup the words and phrases, to write, have your writing corrected, speak online with our tutors and other members and work on your pronunciation; whole range of functionality that we offer at The Linguist. Please come and check it out. There is a 14-day free trial and we hope to meet you online someday.

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Mark: Other than that, we had some things we were going to talk about today but they are slipping my mind at the moment.

Oh, I think we were, yeah, we were going to talk about my latest addition to my family.

Jill: Gordie.

Mark: Gordie, my dog.

Jill: Named after your street, Gordon.

Mark: That’s right, but it’s just a good name for a dog. Jill: It is cute.

Mark: No offense to any Gords who happen to be listening out there.

Jill: It’s a good people name too.

Mark: It’s a good people name too; that’s right. Like Gordie Howe, one of the most famous hockey players that ever played for

Jill: Canadian.

Mark: Canadian, yeah. Anyway, so yeah, we got a new puppy about a month or so ago and we’ve been having lots of fun. The kids have been having lots of fun. Some early mornings, although Jill doesn’t think it’s that early but it’s early for me.

Jill: Mark comes to work yawning now sometimes and he’s not–you’re not really a yawner, usually.

Mark: No.

Jill: You know and you do a lot of exercise and you’re in good shape and stuff but when I saw you yawning the other day you (said) blamed it on the dog. You and Kindrey take turns getting up with him in the morning because it’s like a baby. He gets up and he needs attention and it’s earlier than your kid’s wakeup and earlier than you normally wakeup. You told me it was 6:30 and I didn’t have any sympathy because to me 6:30 is really not that early in the morning.

Mark: 6:30 is very early. It’s not normal to wake up too early, you know that. Yeah, no, the dog has to go out for a pee at 6:30 or whenever he wakes up.

Jill: But when you first got him you said it was about 4:30 or 5:00 in the morning.

Mark: Yeah, that was really bad. It was like 4:30, 4:45, 5:00 for a few weeks anyway.

Jill: Yeah.

Mark: He’s been pretty much at 6:30, sometimes 7:00, sometimes 6:00, but around 6:30 most mornings which really isn’t that bad especially in the summer when it’s light out so early. I mean, at least he’s not waking up when the sun comes out at 5:00 or whenever it comes out, you know.

Jill: Yeah.

I think I heard my mom got a dog a couple years ago and I’m pretty sure somebody told her, whether it was a vet or whoever I’m not sure, that with the puppies, the babies, they can only go a certain amount of time before they have to go pee, right? They can’t hold it all night long because their bladder is not fully developed yet but, apparently, with each month they are able to hold it an hour longer. So when they are three months old they may only be able to hold it for three hours at a time; although, Gordie goes longer than three hours.

Mark: Oh, yeah, he’ll go from like 10:00 to 6:30.

Jill: Yeah, so that’s not bad, actually.

Mark: That’s pretty good. He’s pretty good about going to the bathroom, like better than any dog I’ve ever heard of in terms of he’s only gone pee in the house like four times.

Jill: Wow!

Mark: And he’s never gone poo in the house. So, like he seems I don’t think he’s got a like he must have a big bladder, I don’t know, but he’s really good.

Jill: Oh, that’s good.

Mark: We haven’t had problems there. I remember when we had a dog as a kid, we had a newspaper in the kitchen for quite a while that he would be going on. That hasn’t been a problem with Gordie.

By the way, Gordie is a half Black Lab, quarter Golden Retriever, quarter Flat-Coat Retriever. I don’t know what a Flat-Coat Retriever is but

Jill: Me either.

Mark: Anyway, that’s what he is. So, he’s a mutt but he’s great. Jill: He’s very, very cute. Mark: Cute, fluffy dog.

Jill: Yeah.

Mark: He hasn’t started shedding yet because he’s just a puppy so he’s still cute. Jill: Yes, exactly. But, actually I noticed, you brought him into the office the other day for a couple of hours and he definitely smells like a dog already even though he’s just a puppy.

Mark: Yeah.

My wife, Kindrey, she takes, everyday pretty much, she’ll walk the kids or walk with the kids halfway to school and there’s a park there with a stream and woods. Other people bring their dogs there and they just have a big dog party in the woods, in the creek and jumping in the water. He comes back from that and he’s just beat. He has to sleep for

Jill: He’s exhausted.

Mark: Oh, yeah.

Jill: He has to have a nap for a couple hours.

Mark: He has to sleep for a couple hours, for sure.

Jill: Oh, that’s great though.

Mark: The more they are in the water too that starts to get them

Jill: Smelly?

Yeah, yeah, that’s for sure. But he’s really, really cute so I can see why, you know, you can love them so quickly.

Mark: Totally. You know, I remember loving my dog when I was a kid and not really, yeah, he was a little bit stinky, but you don’t really think about it.

Jill: No.

Mark: And then when you don’t have a dog for so long and dogs come up to you, you’re kind of like yeah, kind of a cute dog, but ah, that’s kind of a stinky dog.

Jill: Now your hands smell.

Mark: Now your hands smell and you don’t want them slobbering on your pants, but now that I have a dog

Jill: It’s a different story.

Mark: It’s a different story, that’s right.

Jill: Yeah, they are just part of the family I think for most people.

Mark: Yeah, yeah.

Jill: So yeah, he’s great. He’s mellow and calm. He doesn’t bark. He doesn’t jump up. He’.s just amazing for a puppy.

Mark: He’s exceptional, isn’t he?

Jill: Like I say, exceptional like the rest of your family.

Mark: Well, that’s right.

Yeah, no, we really lucked out though, I think. We have other friends that have puppies and yeah, I mean, you’re just rolling the dice.

Jill: Yes, you don’t know what you are going to get.

Mark: You don’t know what you’re going to get and I think his litter, they were like that. They were just calm and well-behaved. I think the people we got the dog from they own both the mom and the dad and they decided to have puppies once just to see what it was like, so they are not a breeder.

Jill: Oh and sometimes when you go to a breeder there is, you know, they can be puppy mills where they are breeding them far too many times in a year and that’s when problems really start to arise.

Mark: That’s right. They are breeding them too often and they have too many puppies around and they are just kind of let to run wild; whereas, I think these puppies kind of got really mothered and there were kids and they were all over them. They took them out all the time to pee outside and so I think that just from the start they probably got more attention than they’d get at a breeder.

Jill: Right.

Mark: And so I think, I don’t know, maybe that’s part of it and probably the dog’s parents are probably calm; although, certainly when we went out there to visit the puppy the dad had his paws up on the fence barking at us because he kind of knew what we were doing. He’s protecting his family, right?

Jill: Oh yeah.

Mark: Gordie’s dad is big! It’s like a, I don’t know, five-foot fence and he’s got his paws up on the top of the fence and he’s barking over the top of it.

Jill: Wow!

Well, Gordie looks like he might be quite big.

He’s grown a lot just in the last couple of weeks even since I saw him last.

Mark: For sure. I think he’s not going to be small.

Jill: No.

Mark: Kindrey went out there and she thought she picked the runt of the litter. He was like half the size of his brothers and sisters, but then we subsequently found out that the runt doesn’t always mean they are going to end up being the smallest. Sometimes the runt can end up being the biggest. It just means they didn’t get as much to eat inside the mom but very often they catch up once they get their fair share, so.

Jill: So he just may be a hundred pound dog one day.

Mark: Oh, I don’t think he’ll be a hundred pounds but

Jill: No, most Lab and Retrievers aren’t that big.

Mark: Yeah, he’ll be just probably a good sized, Lab-type size.

Jill: Big enough to take on a run or on a hike.

Mark: Yeah, exactly.

Jill: But not so big that it’s kind of out of hand.

Mark: Exactly. Yeah, so, anyway, that will be it’s fun, it’s fun.

Jill: Now you have a new member of the family for 12 or 15 years.

Mark: I know and it’s amazing how fast they grow.

For all you dog owners out there and I know many of our Linguist members in Japan are probably wondering where my dog pictures are on my blog; I apologize. I’ve got to get some up there for you to see.

Jill: But you won’t have him dressed in any fancy kimonos?

Mark: No, I won’t.

Jill: Like some of our Japanese members do with their dogs.

Mark: That’s right. Boy, I can’t remember who it was now, but it’s amazing some of the detail in the kimono outfits that she makes for her dog.

Jill: Little, little dogs.

Mark: Dogs.

Jill: Dogs I think, yeah.

Mark: I think so, yeah, yeah. Anyway, that’s a lot of fun.

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Mark: Well, here we are again for another EnglishLingQ podcast.

Mark Kaufmann here with Jill Soles. Are you still Soles?

Jill: Officially.

Mark: I don’t know that I ever got the word on that.

Jill: Officially I am, yes. I haven’t changed my name.

Mark: Alright.

We were just actually talking with… we had a bit of a powwow in the middle of the day here in the office.

Jill: Friday afternoon.

Mark: Don’t tell anyone, but talking about the company outing that we’re going to be having in August. We thought maybe that would be a good thing to talk about today; just what we do and why we do it. This year we are going to Vancouver Island. Maybe, Jill, you can explain where we’re going.

Jill: Okay. We are going to Vancouver Island which is a large island I think bigger than several European countries.

It’s quite large where there are just a lot of different resorts and different places for people to go and stay for the weekend or camp or whatever so we’re going to a nice oceanfront resort called Tigh-Na-Mara there. You take a ferry from Vancouver that takes about an hour and a half on the ferry to get to Vancouver Island. We are going to go to this resort where we’ll have a game of golf; a round of golf. It’s right at the beach so, you know, you can spend it’s a beach that when the tide is out it goes out about a kilometer.

Mark: It goes out a long way. It’s a phenomenal beach for kids; whatever it’s called, Rathtrevor Beach.

It’s actually part of a provincial park I think. It’s sandy and shallow so it’s great for kids. The water on a hot day gets quite warm and around here the ocean really never gets that warm so if you have a shallow beach where the water has a chance to heat up on a hot day it’s really nice. So, that is nice.

Jill: And it’s full of sand dollars.

Mark: Yeah.

Jill: There are sand dollars all over the beach that kids like to collect and clams as well.

Mark: Yeah, for sure.

As the tide goes out all the clams and sand dollars and gooey ducks which are a kind of oyster all kind of I think people we’ve gone out digging for them before when we’ve been there, have we not?

Jill: Yeah.

Mark: Yeah, it’s fun. It’s great there. I also want to mention that Vancouver Island isn’t actually a resort island.

Jill: No.

Mark: I mean there’s a lot of I guess more than anything, the forest industry is very big there. It’s a big island but, obviously, heavily forested with beautiful coastlines and beautiful scenery. For that reason, a lot of people do go there on holiday.

Jill: Right and the capital city.

The capital of British Columbia, the province that we live in is over there — the Victoria. Our parliament buildings are over there so it’s not just a tourist destination, for sure.

Mark: But a lot of people do. I mean the ferry lineups to go over to Vancouver Island in the summertime on the weekends and the long weekends can be hours, for sure.

Jill: Yeah.

Mark: So, yeah, we’re looking forward to going and we were talking about what sorts of things we should be doing. Jill and I were pushing for a karaoke festival.

Jill: Accompanied by a little bit of alcohol just to get people a little bit loosened up.

Mark: You always need a little bit of alcohol when you’re going to be karaoke or we should pronounce it properly for all our Japanese listeners–karaoke. They won’t know what we’re talking about. Yeah, it’s funny, speaking of karaoke, how popular it is in Japan and in Asia. Here it was kind of popular for a while and now you just don’t see it as much I guess.

Jill: About five or ten years ago, I think, actually, several friends, several different groups of people I knew did go to karaoke bars in the lower mainland here in Vancouver quite often but I don’t know. You’re right; I don’t think it’s so common anymore.

I think it was just kind of a fad; something that was cool for a few years and now it’s

Mark: Which is really a shame.

Jill: Oh yeah, such a shame! I miss those times.

Mark: But I think it’s fun especially after having spent time in Japan where you do it a lot. We did it a lot and it’s fun, it’s fun. It’s fun especially when there are people that you know and, you know, none of us are professional singers so it’s good.

Jill: Yeah, so we’ll probably have some karaoke and then I was also saying we should have a poker tournament or some poker games one night. There will be a lot of us and poker has become very popular.

Mark: Well, yeah, maybe it’s replaced karaoke.

Jill: I’m okay with that. Mark: Yeah.

Honestly, though the poker thing, I’m amazed at how popular it is. Like, no one used to play poker at all.

Jill: You turn on the TV and there’s poker on TV all the time.

Mark: Yeah, you know, maybe guys would get together once a year and play a little poker. You know, yeah, I played it on the team bus or in the hotel. We’d play a little bit but now it’s on TV. Tournaments, prize money, people playing online and having friends over and playing poker; I’m amazed. Like, it’s just a total craze.

Jill: Oh, we had a big poker game on Christmas night last year.

Mark: You did, eh, yeah?

Jill: Nine of us after Christmas dinner, we broke out the poker chips and had a poker game, so. It’s really fun though.

Mark: I mean everybody plays now, yeah.

Jill: And it’s really, you know, Texas Hold ’em anyway, I think the most popular version or game of poker that people are playing nowadays, is really quite simple. I mean, I shouldn’t say that because I know there is probably technique involved and skill and all of these different things but, you know, even if people don’t really know what the hands are you can write it down.

Everybody can have a piece of paper that tells them, you know, what hands are worth and you only have two cards in your hand, you know, so it’s really not that difficult for anybody to learn to play it.

Mark: Right and especially when you are sharing most of the same cards it kind of makes it a bit more social, I guess. You know, you kind of know what everybody is doing and you can see what people are trying to get or you guess at what they are trying to get.

Jill: Yeah, yeah, it’s fun.

Mark: Yeah, it’s fun.

Yeah, as you say, Texas Hold ’em, all the big tournaments and on TV and whatever, that’s the game that they are playing all the time, so that’s the most popular game right now.

Jill: Yeah.

I don’t know if maybe it’s become so popular because of Vegas and all the gambling but that’s been around a long time, so I don’t know if there is a correlation.

Mark: I have no idea why. I mean, partly, all the Internet gambling makes it easier, I guess, but that doesn’t really explain why people are playing it more. I guess it’s a good social game that everyone can play together. Everyone can play and that’s a big advantage.

That’s maybe why golf is so popular too. Pretty much, everyone can play golf. People aren’t prevented from playing because of their age or their size or their, yeah, their ability. Yeah, I mean, if you can walk and hold a golf club then you can at least get out there. Obviously, some people are going to be better golfers than others but you can be out there and trying and having a good time.

Jill: Or be like me and just walk around the course with the people that are playing golf and just enjoy the scenery and, you know, be their caddie.

Mark: Well, that’s right and you’re probably having a better time than they are because you’re not frustrated.

Jill: Oh, for sure.

Mark: Yeah, no, I know and the poker is the same way, everyone can play and some people are better than others and there’s a big luck factor involved and it’s fun.

Jill: Yeah, yeah, so, we’ll see how that turns out. Hopefully, we’ll get some games going.

Mark: That’s right.

We are talking it up that we’re going to make it try and liven it up a bit and just try and do more things sort of together where in the past at these outings people have tended to arrive and then disperse and kind of do their own thing

Jill: with their family.

Mark: with their family, yeah.

Jill: The point of this company retreat or outing is to be sort of a team-building thing. That’s the point, right?

Mark: Spend some time with your coworkers away from the office, right.

Jill: See them as real individuals.

Mark: Right.

Jill: Real people not just a coworker.

Mark: Yeah.

Jill: Yeah.

Mark: So, we’ll see how that goes. We’ll give you a report later on.

Jill: After the August long weekend.

Mark: That’s right.

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Steve: Hi, Jill.

Jill: Hi, Steve.

Steve: You know what, Jill?

I don’t know where you were born and where you were brought up. Did you grow up here in Vancouver?

Jill: I did, in North Vancouver. I was born, actually, in a small town called Golden.

Steve: I’ve been to Golden.

Jill: Yeah, small town in British Columbia but we left when I was a year old. Actually, my mom left with us and my dad is from there and his whole family lives there so he stayed.

Steve: Oh, okay.

Jill: So, we grew up in North Van but always went back to visit.

Steve: I’ve been to Golden.

I mean, the scenery there is just spectacular.

Jill: Yeah, it’s beautiful.

Steve: Spectacular. That whole area from Golden to Revelstoke, the snow, the quality of snow they get, the rocky mountains, the peaks, the skiing, I mean, it’s really spectacular country.

Jill: Lots and lots of trees everywhere. Yeah, it’s beautiful.

Steve: And it’s nice in the summer too.

Jill: Very warm.

Steve: And it’s very warm; hot.

Jill: And very dry.

Steve: Dry and hot.

Jill: Yeah.

Steve: So, no, it’s spectacular; it’s spectacular country. Oh, I see, so you grew up in North Vancouver?

Jill: Yeah.

Steve: And gee, but that’s kind of tough that, I guess, so your mom left.

Jill: Yeah.

Steve: So, your mom had to bring you up? She had support, I guess?

Jill: Yeah.

Well, my mom’s whole family lived here. She has six brothers and sisters and then my grandparents and we were always very close. We first lived with my grandparents when we moved back for a year, so. And my dad did come down, you know, once a month to visit us and we went up there for all the holidays. So, actually, we thought it was really cool because, you know, my dad had a big ranch and we had horses and we had dirt bikes and we got to drive vehicles when we were 12. Because he had all this land we could just drive, so we got to do all these things that none of our friends ever got to do.

Steve: So your dad was a rancher up there?

Jill: Well no, not really, he actually owned a sawmill for many, many years.

Steve: What was the name of the sawmill?

Jill: Soles; Soles Lumber Limited.

Steve: Alright.

Jill: He just bought a ranch at one point. He was never really a rancher; he just bought it just, I guess, for whatever reason, but had 1,200 acres on this ranch. So, you know, we would go for walks through the forest with the creeks running through and horses and so it was really great.

Steve: Oh, yeah, and especially in the summer.

Jill: Oh, yeah.

Steve: To be up there it must have been

Jill: Oh, it’s light until 11 at night and it’s just …you don’t hear any sounds.

You don’t hear any noises and you see all the stars in the sky.

Steve: So you went horseback riding too?

Jill: Yeah, I grew up riding horses.

Steve: Oh really. So, do you like to ride?

Jill: I don’t; not any more. I used to just bug him solid when I was up there because when I was little I was too young to go by myself and I couldn’t saddle the horses up myself so he always had to come and he was always so busy working. So, I was always bugging him to take me riding. And then when I was, I don’t know maybe 13, I went to a camp for a week; a riding camp.

And it was actually English riding though, where you do some jumping and stuff and I had always done western riding with the big horn on the saddle. And then when I was about 14-15, I just completely lost interest and I think I’ve been on a horse one time since then; just no desire anymore.

Steve: Really?

Jill: Yeah.

Steve: You know, that’s very interesting. I guess I always try to relate everything back to language learning, but people go through periods where they like to do certain things and then they don’t like to do certain things. I mean, they often talk, for example, in the case of young kids who play sports…it might be a girl that’s into whatever, basketball or gymnastics, or boys into hockey…and some of them burn out.

Jill: Yeah and they could be very good.

Steve: They could be very good and all of a sudden at the age of 14 they’re no longer interested.

Jill: Yeah.

Steve: Very often the parents, they put so much into it. They see their child as this future ballerina or whatever it might be

Jill: an NHL star.

Steve: And the child loses interest.

Jill: Yeah.

Steve: It’s the same with language learning. I confess now that I tried very hard to get my two boys, Mark and Eric, interested in language learning with, you know, no real success. And then, Mark, because he played hockey professionally in Europe and then in Japan, he got interested.

So when he was in Italy and then he was in Austria and in Switzerland and in Japan, wherever he went, he tried to learn the language. And, you know, I’ve talked recently on my blog, thelinguist.blogs.com, about how in our school system we sort of treat everyone in the classroom as if they’ve all got an equal interest in learning languages.

Jill: Right.

Steve: So they all get the same treatment and they get a treatment that’s, basically, if they aren’t very interested in languages, it’s going to discourage them. It gives them a lot of seemingly meaningless things to do and it teaches them meaningless things.

And, you know, if it were only possible to nurture sort of an interest in language with young children and somehow allow them the freedom to explore so that they maintain that interest. And at some point, some of those kids, perhaps a larger percentage, will take that interest, you know, right to the extent that they are going to learn to be fluent in the language. But we don’t do that, we’ve got to force it.

Jill: We force it on them.

Steve: We force it on them and some of them won’t continue. Well, so what? So, you know, you were interested in horses and then you were no longer interested in horses, big deal; one way or the other.

Jill: I had different interests.

Steve: You had different interests.

Jill: Yeah.

Steve: Now, if your father or your mother had said “no, we want Jill to be a horsewoman and she’s got to do it”, you know, that wouldn’t have helped either. Jill: No.

Steve: No.

Jill: I wouldn’t have enjoyed it and I probably would have been angry and bitter with them and, you know, who knows?

Steve: And what you have now is you have very pleasant memories

Jill: yes,

Steve: of the time that you enjoyed horses.

Jill: It’s not a negative experience.

Steve: Right.

Jill: Yeah.

Steve: And I think education has to be that way.

There has to be more of an opportunity, especially for children but even for adults, to explore and discover things on their own. And the challenge in education is how do we stimulate that interest, how do we make it easier for them to cultivate that interest, but we shouldn’t be trying to force something at people.

Jill: Right.

Steve: And I think that’s where…you know, how many people have a pleasant recollection of their language studies in school?

Jill: You know, I don’t know anybody who does, honestly. In Canada we were always made to learn French.

Steve: The English speaking population.

Jill: The English speaking population were always made to learn French.

I think it probably varied, depending on the school, what grade you started at but at a certain point, you had to; it was mandatory. Do you know that I have not spoken to one person who was forced to do that who actually likes French? They all hate it. They remember very little aside from the basic “Hi, my name is” and “How are you?” You know, other than that, they don’t remember. And French is a beautiful language and I’m not just saying that because I speak it because I have very negative memories of learning French too. I didn’t enjoy my time learning it.

Steve: So you didn’t enjoy the French you learned in school?

Jill: I didn’t.

Steve: No.

Jill: I didn’t.

Steve: It’s a bit artificial isn’t it?

Jill: Yeah, I didn’t enjoy it. I didn’t actually even enjoy my university courses very much, but I do still believe that French is a beautiful language and I do still want to improve and use it. But, I think that most people have a negative experience.

Steve: Of course now you have French on the LingQ System, so.

Jill: Exactly.

Steve: Hey, you can go to town and enjoy it.

Jill: That’s right; that’s right.

Steve: Yeah, I mean, I’ve mentioned this on my blog, I think I want to do this experiment.

Take some children, maybe six or seven, and have a program in the schools which is called “Languages” and using a system like LingQ, allow the children to, say, look at a map of the world and on that map will be the languages that are available. In other words, we have, you know, audio books, like stories to listen to or to read, or we have videos, little short videos, in these languages and use a system line LingQ so that they can save words and keep track of the words that they’re saving. So, they keep a little score and maybe tie it to “Snakes and Ladders” or some little game; make a game out of it.

And so that all that we ask of them to do is that they will, in each year, explore one or two languages. Listen to it many, many times and children like listening to the same thing over and over again. I mean, children say “read me that story again. ” Jill: Oh, and they’ll watch movies a hundred times.

Steve: A hundred times, so they’re ideal. And, of course, if they will listen to the story over and over again and gradually learn the words and so then one year they might do Swahili and the next year they might do Spanish and the following year they might do sort of Indonesian, it really doesn’t matter, but they are expanding their mind; they are expanding their mind.

I think that with a program like that, when they are say 15 or 16, they will be better language learners and at that time if they decide to learn French, they’ll learn it in two years and so that they don’t need 10 years.

Jill: They’ll have learned some of the techniques.

Steve: They will have learned some of the techniques; their brain will be more flexible. Their brain will not resist the fact that different languages have different sounds, have different structures and so forth. I would like to do that as an experiment. The new approach so that we don’t teach French, one language, like arbitrarily decide

Jill: you have no choice and this is how it’s going to be taught.

Steve: Exactly.

Of the thousands of languages in the world, we decide which language you are going to learn. Whereas it should be, there are all kinds of languages out there, which one do you want to explore? And next year you can explore another one. All we ask is that when you do decide to explore one, stay with it. So, you have to listen over and over and do these other things, for which I think LingQ is very suitable.

Jill: Yes.

Steve: So, anyway, that will be our next project. Anyway, so once again, the transcript for this podcast will be available at… and I should say it will be the lingQ.com because very soon we’ll be moving to the lingQ.com but also at thelinguist.com.

You can also hear it at EnglishLingQ.com and we hope that you find the discussion interesting and with the transcript you can read and listen and, hopefully, improve your English at the same time. Thank you very much, Jill.

Jill: Thank you.

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Steve: Hi, Jill.

Jill: Hi, again.

Steve: Where have you been recently that’s been interesting?

Jill: For the better part of April, I was traveling throughout Central America.

There are seven countries; I think we spoke about that before and I went to five of them.

Steve: Now, Jill, you know, I think of the sort of backpacker, you know, wearing the same shirts and underwear for six months, trekking around India, eating, you know, off the floor of a truck, whatever and then I think of you; not the same.

Jill: No.

Steve: Not the same. So, how did you fare in Latin America? Because I know you went into the bush and you were in somewhat rough places. How was it?

Jill: It was great. It was so, so great. I’m sure there were times that I was maybe not so happy. Looking back, I have nothing but fond memories. But, we did break it up a bit.

We started in Costa Rica and the first four nights we stayed in a very nice, luxurious, beachfront boutique resort, so that was beautiful and we ended in Belize where we also stayed in a nice hotel on the beach. So, that’s kind of my style; more my style. Chris, you know, he kind of likes the backpacking around which I don’t mind either, so we had a bit of both. We spent about maybe two weeks or just under two weeks backpacking around and staying in a lot of places for one night or two nights. So, just moving around a lot, taking a lot of buses, you know, getting up in the middle of the night to catch a bus, stuff like that. That was all fine, actually; I didn’t even mind that.

Steve: But I gather you had an encounter with some of the local wildlife of the small variety.

Jill: Yeah. Yeah, in Costa Rica I got stung by a scorpion which wasn’t a pleasant experience. It felt like a bad bee sting. It wasn’t extremely painful but it was just gross to see this big bug crawling.

Steve: How big was it?

Jill: Well, to me, I thought it was about a foot long but, of course, Chris said, you know, no. It was really I think it was about two to three inches, so it wasn’t huge but much bigger than what we’re used to seeing here in Vancouver. They are just not particularly attractive looking creatures and the fact that it had stung me and all the rest didn’t make me too thrilled.

Steve: You didn’t like it?

Jill: No, it was a little scary, but it was all okay and by that night the mark was gone, nothing hurt and it was fine.

Steve: How about the food down there? How did you like to food?

Jill: The local food was fine. It consisted of a lot of chicken cooked in a variety of ways: barbequed, grilled, fried, you know, all different ways and rice and often beans and sometimes it was quite tasty and other times it was quite bland, it just depended. You know, some restaurants were better than others.

Steve: Right.

Jill: But, we didn’t eat a lot of that, you know. You travel nowadays and there’s just…everywhere has pizza.

That’s just everywhere, even in small little villages, so we had pizza probably four times. We were pretty sick of pizza actually by the end, to say. And we had, you know when we were on the coast there was always lots of seafood, so we would have lots of seafood.

Steve: Now, how do they make the seafood?

Jill: We got things that are very similar to here; you know, snapper or just grilled.

Steve: Do they fry it in a frying pan?

Jill: A variety of ways. You could get it a variety of ways. It was almost always very good, actually.

Steve: Oh, okay and was it expensive?

Jill: Belize was really expensive; it was the most expensive. It was very expensive.

In fact, a lot of things were more expensive than in Canada.

Steve: But how do the locals

Jill: I don’t know. I had a talk with some of them and I said how because their income is obviously not as high as ours and they just said they just, you know, they just make do; they get by.

Steve: How about language? You speak a few words of Spanish; I guess you used it occasionally. Did you mostly have to communicate in Spanish or in English?

Jill: Yes.

In Costa Rica, especially at the first resort we stayed, everybody spoke English really well, actually. That wasn’t a problem.

In Nicaragua and Honduras there was were some people who knew a little bit of English, but more often than not, we communicated primarily in Spanish. Chris’s Spanish is quite decent and at least we can understand most of the time if people slow down. Some people just won’t slow down for you. That happened the odd time. Most people were very gracious, but sometimes they just wouldn’t or, you know, just like with English or any language, there are people who speak the language better than other people. You know, they enunciate more clearly; they speak with less of an accent or whatever. So, sometimes people were real easy to understand and other people we just couldn’t understand no matter what; we just couldn’t.

But for the most part, we communicated in Spanish and then in Belize they all speak English. English is the native language.

Steve: Oh, right you are. That’s British Honduras.

Jill: Yeah, it was a British colony.

Steve: How evident is I know you saw some of the old Native American ruins, but how evident is that culture in everyday life down there?

Jill: I would say in Guatemala where the main Mayan ruins are located it’s still very evident. Fifty percent of the population is full-blooded Mayan. That’s what they think anyway; 50 to 60 percent, so they still speak the Mayan language.

Steve: Really?

Jill: It’s their first language before Spanish.

They’ve got, you know, traditional clothing on, very dark skinned, so there it was very interesting. In the other countries there wasn’t really that element. So, Guatemala was where it seemed very, you know, native.

Steve: Right; okay. Were there any things that you identified as native food or was the food more or less the same in all the countries; the chicken with the rice and the beans?

Jill: Yeah, the food was more or less you know, even in South America it’s pretty much chicken and rice. You know, “pollo” that’s what is served. Chickens are easy to have. You know, everybody can have them. You don’t need a lot of land so I think chicken is pretty standard fare.

Steve: Alright; okay.

Were you in the ocean at all?

Jill: Oh, yes, that was wonderful.

Steve: What was the water like?

Jill: Well, in Costa Rica you could go the Caribbean or the Pacific side. We went to the Pacific side which was fantastic; huge waves, excellent surfing. I learned to surf. The water is really warm. It’s not a clear color being the Pacific; although, Hawaii is on the Pacific and is. So, it’s not like it’s great snorkeling there, but warm water, great surf and long beaches with nobody on them so it was fantastic.

Steve: Wow.

Jill: In Belize that was on the Caribbean so that was spectacular water; warm and crystal clear.

They have a second biggest barrier reef there in the world there so the diving and snorkeling was amazing. We went snorkeling and we were snorkeling with sharks and dolphins.

Steve: With sharks?

Jill: Sharks. These ones were quite big but they aren’t aggressive. They swim away from you.

Steve: You believed that?

Jill: Yeah, well I tried to touch one.

Steve: Did you really?

Jill: I kept trying to get close but they just swam away.

Steve: Well that’s pretty brave of you.

Jill: Well, I was pretty far away still.

But yeah, stingrays and

Steve: But they can sting you the stingrays.

Jill: Yeah, yeah, they can but they’re pretty docile, generally, and they sort of stay back and there are moray eels and it was fantastic.

Steve: My goodness. And was there a lot of, sort of, vegetation on the ocean floor?

Jill: Well, yeah, it’s a coral reef; a barrier reef so lots of coral. In Belize they have conch, big conch shells everywhere on the ocean floor and that’s one of the main foods that they serve at the restaurants there is conch. I never knew you ate conch but I guess it’s just like another shell fish.

Steve: Sure.

Jill: So, big beautiful conchs.

We would just dive down and pick up a conch and they were just everywhere. It was really amazing, yeah.

Steve: So, you were on the beach, you were in a resort, you were in the jungle, I guess.

Jill: We were in the cloud forest in Costa Rica, yeah.

Steve: …in Costa Rica. You visited the Mayan ruins.

Jill: Yes.

Steve: That must have been quite the trip.

Jill: It was. Actually, one interesting thing too, in Costa Rica in the cloud forest and, of course, this is a very old forest, old growth, and we were in there and we saw a couple different types of monkeys and amazing birds, quetzals, which are the national bird of Costa Rica and they are very difficult to see.

They are the most beautiful birds I’ve ever seen and we saw those. We also had one big tree collapse and take down three other trees with it in the forest just while we were standing there. We just heard this noise and looked and right in front of us, I mean not right in front of us, a bunch of big trees just fell over. I mean, it’s part of the natural cycle of things but it was quite something to see.

Steve: Sounds interesting. You know, we should say that this is going to be transcribed and the transcript will be available in the library of The Linguist which is soon to be the LingQ library so people can read and listen at the same time. And, of course, they should go to the LingQ blog which is EnglishLingQ.com.

So, thank you very much, Jill.

Jill: Thank you.

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Steve: Hello, Jill.

Jill: Hello, how are you?

Steve: Not too bad.

Jill: Good.

Steve: Jill, since the last time we spoke, you’re a married woman.

Jill: I am, yes.

I know, it was over a month ago that we last spoke and I guess a lot has changed since then.

Steve: Yes.

You know, it’s interesting; we will talk a little bit about your trip to Latin American, Central America, which sounds very interesting and I think people are interested in that subject but, first of all, I would like to ask you about marriage and children. Nowadays, women seem to get married later and they have children later.

Jill: Women and men.

Steve: Well yeah, it kind of takes the two.

Jill: Yes, but men used to be younger when they got married.

Steve: Right, but it becomes, in a way, more of an issue for women than for men because women have this so-called biological clock which, in theory, the men don’t have.

So, this is one of the reasons why the birthrate in many countries has dropped in so-called advanced countries or the wealthier countries.

Jill: First world countries.

Steve: Yeah, it seems the wealthier a country is, the fewer children they have.

Jill: Right, the poorer the country, the more children people have.

Steve: The question I want to ask is, first of all if it’s not too personal, how many children do you intend to have, if all goes well?

Jill: Yeah, if all goes well, I think probably two; maybe three. Definitely, I want more than one and I don’t want more than three so two or three.

Steve: Do you think that most of your friends, your girlfriends, do they want to have two or three children?

Do some of them just want to have their professional career? Is your attitude typical amongst your friends?

Jill: Most of my friends…I have to say, actually, a couple already have children or one child and most of my close friends do want at least a couple of children. I do have one sister-in-law and another friend who are more focused on their career. Although they love children and they are very good with children, it’s hard for them to think of, you know, giving up the lifestyle that they have to raise children and if they did have children, they would definitely want to go back to work. That’s what they think now anyway.

Steve: I think it is a little easier now to work and have children and probably we should make it even easier.

Now, obviously, for a small company like ours, we are not going to start a daycare center here on the premises for 10 employees but we are quite flexible; people can work from home. Everyone has a computer and high-speed access which the company pays for and people regularly say “I’m working from home today” and we do tend to accommodate people who have to take their children here or take their children there. Jill: Right, yes.

Steve: And I think the workplace will become more flexible.

Jill: Well, and actually, I read several months ago an article, I think in the newspaper, that was talking about a few big companies here in Vancouver… not all Canadian companies but gaming companies such as Radical and EA [Electronic Arts] ,and talking about how they have started, because of this situation of both parents having to work or wanting to work, they’ve started allowing different schedules. So, one woman, for example, comes in at 6 in the morning and stays until 2 and her husband gets the kids to school and she’s off in time to pick them up from school. Others go in later and stay until 8 at night and I think some bigger companies are doing things like that or providing daycare services so that it’s easier.

Steve: There was an article in the paper here the other day saying that in Denmark they have increased the birthrate because the health system there is more generous in paying for various, you know, technologies related to helping older women have children.

Jill: Oh, that’s interesting.

Steve: Whereas in Canada, these can be quite expensive and they are not necessarily covered by the health system. So that whereas women, perhaps, traditionally felt that their childbearing years ended at the end of their 30s or into their early 40s and that was it, now it’s possible to have children later than that.

If women have a career and are professionally very active up until their early or even mid 30s and they then decide to have a family, the idea that the national health system helps them to have children, if they for whatever biological or medical reason would normally have difficulty, you know, that’s not a bad thing to do.

Jill: No.

Steve: That’s not a bad thing to do.

Jill: Seems to me that Europe is always sort of on the cutting edge of things like that. There is often technology there for quite a few years before it comes over to North America.

Steve: Well, it’s not so much that the technology comes from there; I think a lot of the technology is developed in the United States.

But, what’s interesting in Denmark is that the state health system will pay for these technologies so they are not considered just an optional procedure

Jill: …that only wealthy people can afford.

Steve: That’s right. I think people in developed countries are concerned about their aging population; their declining birthrates. Denmark apparently has a birthrate of 1.9 per thousand or whatever which is quite high per family. I don’t know what the number is, but replacement is two so at 1.9 they’re not bad.

Jill: No.

Steve: Korea is like 1.1; Italy is 1.2; I think Canada is 1.5 or 1.6.

Jill: Japan is very low.

Steve: Japan is very low. I think it’s also an attitude thing.

I know in talking to some of our French learners the feeling there is that young women now are more interested in having children. That this whole idea that the women felt that well, I’m not going to have kids; I’m going to have my career. I think societies’ attitudes are changing and it’s almost as if there’s a sense now that gees, we can’t just Jill: …It’s important to have children.

Steve: We need kids.

Jill: You need to carry on.

Steve: Well, that’s right.

It’s almost as if the sort of western, including Japan and Korea, modern, call it secular non-religious lifestyle, is essentially a suicidal lifestyle in the sense that those communities don’t reproduce themselves.

Jill: Right.

Steve: So that over a sufficient period of time they won’t be there anymore.

Jill: Right.

Steve: So, anyway, that’s good. No, I think we should do more to make it easier for women to have children and to bring them up and yet maintain their, you know, professional careers and so forth.

Jill: And, I mean, part of the problem I know here in Vancouver is there are a lot of women… I know  and my mom was one of these women… who would have loved to have stayed home with her kids but simply couldn’t afford to. It was just not possible to survive on one income living in such an expensive city and that is definitely the case I think for a lot of people today. Sure, living in smaller communities and things like that can be cheaper, but it’s just often a necessity.

Steve: And it is true, I think, you know, as attitudes in our society change, there are a lot of women who work who don’t need to work; right. There are a lot of two-income families where actually one of them makes enough money for both.

Jill: And by the time they’ve paid for daycare too, often they don’t even take in very much from the other person’s salary.

Steve: That’s right. But it always was I think the case that if a woman is at a party somewhere and someone says “And what do you do?” And she says “Well, I stay home and look after the kids,” then that was kind of like a loss of face or something. Jill: Right.

Steve: But I think attitudes are changing and I think people in society now have more respect for someone that says “Well, I look after the family and I’m very busy doing it. ” Jill: Yes, that”s right and I”m happy to do it. Steve: And people kind of say “Good for you; we need someone to do that. ” Jill: It’s a tough job.

Steve: It’s a tough job and, of course, it is also a less stimulating environment than, you know, going to work. But, of course, occasionally I’ll go to a party and I’ll meet some man and I’ll say “What do you do?” And he says “I”m a househusband. ” Jill: Really? You’ve had that happen?

Steve: Twice!

Jill: Wow!

Steve: So, yeah.

Jill: I thought that was only in the movies but that’s great.

Steve: No, I’ve had it twice; I’ve had it twice.

Jill: That’s great.

Steve: I don’t think society has yet fully accepted the househusband.

Jill: Well, and I think it is still rare that a woman makes more than her husband, in most cases; not all, of course. And so, I think that’s just where it has always made sense that the person who makes the most money is going to continue to work and that’s typically the man.

Steve: Right, although, as you say, it doesn’t have to be but it very often is. It’s almost like a vicious circle.

I think one of the reasons why women often make less is that the employer kind of halfway expects that somewhere down the line

Jill: …they are going to leave.

Steve: And, statistically, they do. I mean even in something like medicine, a very high percentage of women doctors, which are a higher and higher percentage of graduates from our medical schools, they don’t work as many hours as the men.

Jill: They do part-time.

Steve: They do part-time and they end their careers early so, I mean, there is some truth in that.

Jill: Yeah.

Steve: Of course, there are other reasons too, but we don’t want to have the women earning too much money. I mean that’s …come on now. Jill

Jill: You’ve got to keep them under your thumb, ha?

Steve: Well, you know, you have to be a little sensitive to the position of the man.

Jill: Right

Steve: So, if the woman makes more than the man, how do you think the man feels? Have you thought of that?

Jill: They’ve just got to get their egos under control.

Steve: Well, it’s easy for you to say that but, you know, if the woman makes more he can’t boss her around.

Jill: Not all men are interested in bossing around!

Steve: I’m not really, but no, that would be a big comedown. But, she would have to pretend to make less. If she were really smart, she would pretend to make

Jill: …she would let him still think that he was the breadwinner.

Steve: That’s right. I mean the women control the money anyway.

Jill: We control everything, pretty much.

Steve: Well, that’s right.

I haven’t a clue where my money gets spent. Fortunately though, my wife is more frugal than I am so it’s probably a good thing

Jill: …that she’s in control.

Steve: She knows what’s happening.

Jill: Yeah.

Steve: Well, okay. Well, we’ve talked a little bit about family-type things and it’s been interesting.

Maybe the next time we talk we’ll talk a little bit about Central America.

Jill: Perfect.

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Steve: Hi, Jill.

Jill: Hi, Steve.

Steve: EnglishLingQ.com, again.

Jill and I were talking the last time about houses and places to live. You were telling me that you and your brother and sister-in-law and your husband were thinking of living in the same house which, for many people, would be a formula for trouble.

Jill: Disaster! Except for I think in many countries in the world it’s very common to live with your extended family. Steve: Right.

Jill: But in Canada, it’s not so common in North America. Steve: No, not so common. So, but I’m sure you’ll be successful in doing that. What kind of a house would you want to buy?

Jill: Well ideally, we would like some sort of heritage house; an old house probably, you know, 80-90-100 years old that has a lot of character. We really like character. Chris and I, we don’t like really brand new really ultra-modern homes, generally. There are some that are beautiful that we really like, of course, but we do like the style with the porches and a lot of dark wood and stuff like that. So, there are a lot of beautiful old heritage homes. The problem with them is they need a lot of work.

Steve: I was going to say, I mean, a heritage home sounds very nice, but people today are very conscious of energy issues and, of course, we have this great discussion of global warming and just the fact, even leaving aside global warming, that the energy costs are going up and typically older houses are not very well insulated.

Jill: Right.

Steve: They have poorer windows; the walls are not properly insulated. It can be quite expensive to maintain, to heat or to maintain an older home.

Jill: Yeah.

Steve: The other thing too is you don’t know what’s in the walls. There could be some problems with it, so how do you deal with all of this uncertainty?

Jill: Well, you have to I mean, thankfully, Chris is actually very knowledgeable when it comes to a lot of this sort of thing. He’s an engineer too, so he really looks into things and figures things out and is interested. He does a lot of home improvements himself for his friends and stuff like that because he enjoys it. And so, I think definitely, you would install double pane windows. You would definitely have the electrical looked at; probably, it would need to be updated.

Steve: When we say the electrical, you mean the electrical systems or the wiring.

Jill: Yes, the wiring throughout the house.

Steve: Yes, throughout the house.

Jill: Exactly.

Steve: Right.

Jill: Plumbing would probably have to be looked at.

Steve: When you say looked at, before you buy the house or after you buy the house?

Jill: Well, before. You would definitely want an inspector to come in and have a look and, you know, give you some advice.

Steve: And now these people exist. I mean, inspectors will come and inspect a house on behalf of the buyer of a house before that person commits to buying the house.

Jill: Right.

Steve: So that’s quite a common service to have an inspector. Jill: Right.

Steve: For the structural aspects as well as for plumbing and electrical, what do the inspectors look at?

Jill: Well, you know, I’m not entirely sure to tell you the truth. I think they have a look at everything; I’m not sure.

And, you know, some inspectors are better than others so you want to be there. You want to know a little bit about what’s going on when they are there so that you can ask some questions and maybe not just leave it up to them completely. Steve: I’m sure Chris would want to be there. Jill: Oh, yes, he would be there for sure grilling the poor guy. But, no, I think most heritage homes that have not had some work put into them in the last, you know, 20 years, need work and you would have to buy it with that in mind that you would probably be spending $1 or $200,000 to update it and make it more livable.

So, that is a consideration because often these old heritage homes are on very big lots so they are very expensive. Obviously, we can’t buy something very expensive and then put in another couple hundred thousand dollars into making it even better. Steve: Right.

Jill: So, I mean, that’s what we would like, but who knows if that’s what will happen. Steve: Is there a lot of that kind of thing going on? Are there many people buying older homes and fixing them up?

Jill: Yeah, I think it’s become quite popular again; going back to hard wood, natural hard wood. You know, people are ripping up carpet now that is covering hard wood because it’s in fashion again.

You know, you have the big molding in these old homes, usually big crown molding, which people are paying a lot of money to have in their new homes.

Steve: We might explain that too. Moldings, of course, refer to the woodwork that’s molded, therefore. Jill: Or the frame or the boarders kind of around the wall.

Steve: Well, that’s right. It deals with…it can be the crown molding,

Jill: …baseboards,

Steve: connecting the ceiling to the walls and it will have a fancy pattern which is supposed to represent, I think, the tops of the old columns from Greek architecture. You also have a baseboard which is basically the corner of where the floor meets the wall. There are all kinds of fancy names, plinths and I don’t know what.

Jill: Oh, I don’t know either. Steve: Then, of course, you have the molding that goes around the doorframe,

Jill: …window casings and door casings. These are all things you do not need to have in homes and it’s much cheaper to build a home without those things and the home is just fine, but they are very attractive so a lot of people want them. Steve: I mean after all, nowadays, I mean, yeah, you could live in a shack; a one-room shack. You don’t even have to have a separate room for the toilet for that matter; it’s probably cheaper to have everything in one big room. So, yeah, we do spend money on things to make the homes more comfortable; to make them more pleasant.

I know that nowadays, even in very relatively, I would say, inexpensive homes, it’s not uncommon for people to want granite kitchen countertops. Whereas 20 years ago, everything was Formica; everything was…call it fake, you know,

Jill: …like plastic substances,

Steve: …plastic, synthetic material; nowadays, people want real.

Jill: They want real rock and granite and tile ceramic.

Steve: That’s right and, of course, the trouble is…and we were involved in building a house, you know, 10 years ago…of course, each individual item; it doesn’t seem like such a big deal. Well, yeah, we can spend a little more money to have a granite countertop; it’s not so much.

But, we would like to spend a little more money to get better windows; per window it’s not so much. Jill: A little bit more for appliances.

Steve: We want the better quality fridge and maybe my wife wants a better stove for her cooking and, pretty soon, you add all of these things up and it is just a fortune.

Jill: Yes, yes.

Steve: It adds up very, very quickly.

Jill: Yes. I mean I think the cost of materials right now is very, very high so it’s certainly not cheap to do this. Steve: I am amazed, actually. When we built our home you could build a very good home with granite. I mean, a granite countertop was kind of the thing you had to have.

Obviously, wooden floors, good quality kitchen appliances, good quality double-glazed windows with this argon gas, you know, between and what they call special ultra violet, you know, whatever coatings they put on the glass; the whole thing.

Jill: So that the sun doesn’t ruin your furniture when it’s coming in? Steve: Well, A: it reduces the heat gain so that you have a window facing the south and the west which is designed to reduce heat gain and the windows that face the north and the east are designed to reduce heat loss.

Jill: Right.

Steve: Okay? So these are some of the things that you can…because depending on how the coatings are applied and which surface because there are actually four surfaces.

If you have two panes of glass in your window, there’s the outside surface of the outside pane and the inside surface of the outside pane and then so forth and so on. So, depending on where you apply what coatings you can get different functions.

Jill: It’s keeping heat in your home better or keeping it out. Steve: Out; depending whether you are facing south and west or east and north.

Jill: Right.

Steve: So, with all of these things, we were able to build a house for $120.00 a square foot. I think today to build the same house is at least,

Jill: …$300.00.

Steve: Yeah, it’s amazing to me!

So, it’s not only the cost of land that’s gone up, it’s the cost of building and the reason for that is that Vancouver has been such an active construction market that what we call the trades people, the carpenter, the electrician, the plumber, the painter, Jill: …the framers,

Steve: all of the framers, the people who lay your floors, the drywallers…, because people who put up the gypsum board…and, of course, in building the trades are all, you know, very much divided into different specialty skills.

So, even for drywall, you have one group of people who come in and put up the gypsum board and they typically have to be quite strong because the gypsum board can be 4 feet x 8 feet, 4 feet x 10 feet, 4 feet x 12 feet and those are not easy to pick up.

Jill: No.

Steve: So, they tend to be stronger people and they have dedicated tools for that activity. Then you have the people who come in and they put the mud on and they put the tape on and they sandpaper it and they get this very smooth finish,

Jill: …which is quite a difficult thing to do.

Steve: Very difficult.

And so those people tend to be more detail-oriented and so they have to give you a very, very smooth finish so that when the painter comes in that he can do a good job and so they are all specialized. All of these trades people, because it’s supply and demand, it’s like anything else, now that Vancouver has been in a very strong construction market for year after year after year, the wages of these trades have just gone up and up and up and it’s difficult to even find people. Jill: They are so busy.

Steve: They are so busy and if you don’t have a large project they come around, they have one look; they say okay, I’ll send you an estimate and you never hear from them again.

Jill: Yeah, if you just want your bathroom re-plumbed or painted or whatever, they are not interested because they have so much work that they can just pick and choose who they want to work for. And so, yeah, wages have gone way up and then materials are very expensive.

Steve: So, it’s tough for young people. Jill: Well, I think the younger generations, you know, maybe my generation and younger, will not be living in single-family homes for much longer. I think the trend will be…we’ve already seen it actually in North Vancouver where lots of single-family homes are being torn down and there have been triplex complexes put up. Steve: Right.

In other words, three homes.

Jill: Three homes that are

Steve: We talk about a duplex which is two homes and a triplex or triplex which is three homes, yeah.

Jill: Or fourplex or whatever which is…they can be quite large, but they are all attached so almost more like a townhouse. And that’s going to, I think, start to be more of the trend because the average family is just not going to be able to afford a house with land. Steve: Or, some people move further out.

Jill: Or they move a long way out of the city and then commute for two-three hours everyday to their job. So, that’s an option which some people choose but I’m not interested in that.

Steve: No, for sure. Okay, well, maybe we should end today’s conversation here.

We’ve talked again about houses and renovating houses and construction costs and so forth. Again, this is all available at EnglishLingQ.com. We hope this is useful to people in their language learning. Go to EnglishLingQ.com and please work on your language and we hope you enjoy what you are listening to and let us know if you have any comments. Thank you.

Jill: Thank you.

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Table of Contents:

The Primacy of Input

Vocabulary over Grammar

Learning in Chunks

Better Tutors on the Internet

Meaningful Communication

Motivation and Enjoyment

Efficiency

A Learning Community, The Linguist

English is the dominant language of the Internet.

The Internet will in turn become the dominant place to learn English.

The way languages are learned is changing, and these changes are accelerating.

The Internet is constantly evolving.It has created a dynamic environment for the communication and the management of information.The Internet has brought with it new forms of social interaction without boundaries.Technologies like MP3, iPod, Skype and PDAs, as well as blogs and podcasts, are making an immense variety of communication, information, literature, news and other language content available anywhere and anytime.A cascade of developments is causing interactive communities to spring up based on common interests, without regard to geography.This is going to stand traditional language learning on its head.English dominates on the Internet in areas ranging from entertainment to science.If you want to learn English, this represents an unprecedented opportunity.

You can access English language content on any subject and learn from it.You can connect with English speaking people who share your interests.You can do this via e-mail, through blogs, podcasts and forums.You can link up with friends or even language tutors using free Internet telephony.The World Wide Web is the ultimate dynamic classroom and learning community.

Over the next few years the Internet will take over from the classroom as the place of choice to learn English: Here are some of the reasons.

The Primacy of Input

If you want to learn English or any other language, you need input, meaningful, interesting and at your level.Today language learning experts emphasize input over output, listening and reading over grammar study.Before you can use the language, you must get used to the language.You don’t need to be in a hurry to speak English, and you don’t need to speak it all the time to improve.

Real language acquisition develops slowly, and speaking skills emerge significantly later than listening skills, even when conditions are perfect.The best methods are therefore those that supply ‘comprehensible input’ in low anxiety situations, containing messages that students really want to hear.These methods do not force early production in the second language, but allow students to produce when they are ‘ready’, recognizing that improvement comes from supplying communicative and comprehensible input, and not from forcing and correcting production.”Stephen Krashen, University of Southern California.

When you learned your own language as a child, you didn’t begin by speaking.You began by listening.New language learners can benefit from a “silent period”.During the “silent period” you can absorb the language.You need not force yourself to speak it until you are confident.Even if you are an intermediate learner, extensive reading and listening will increase your familiarity with the language, enrich your vocabulary, and develop confidence.This is more beneficial than studying grammar.

While listening and reading often and regularly are vital, the content must be meaningful.Learning content should be interesting and comprehensible to you.This means that you, not the teacher, should choose what to learn from.The Internet allows unlimited choice of fascinating authentic content.The traditional textbook cannot compete.

Motivated learners used to spend their time in book stores looking for graded content that would help them in their language studies.Yet, inevitably a lot of this material could only be found in uninteresting textbooks and readers.But today authentic content on a variety of subjects is only a click away.This is especially the case for the person who wants to learn English.

This range of material is made accessible to learners, since new systems can grade it for difficulty in a way that is customized to your specific vocabulary.You can learn English by listening to and reading on subjects that interest you and you won?t find it too difficult.

Vocabulary over Grammar

In order to achieve fluency in English you need to be comfortable using at least 10,000 words.On the Internet, you can choose appropriate content to listen to and read.The content can be graded to your level.But what about learning and remembering all those new words.We know how quickly we forget words when we look them up in a dictionary.And there are so many words to learn.Fortunately, the Internet makes it a lot easier to learn vocabulary.

On the Internet you can use online dictionaries to look up words instantly (i.e., Babylon).There are learning software programs which create customized word lists for you as you learn words.This software can help you accumulate example sentences for these words from the familiar contexts you are listening to and reading.You can set vocabulary goals and follow your progress towards these goals.

The Internet helps you to efficiently accumulate vocabulary based on lively and interesting language content, customized to your needs.This combination of vocabulary learning efficiency and limitless content is only part of why the Internet will become the place of choice to learn English.

Learning in Chunks

Vocabulary does not only mean words.It also means phrases, or chunks of words.Phrases are groups of words that come together in a way that is natural to the native speaker but not always to the learner.Michael Lewis has been one of the pioneers in pointing out that you learn language in chunks, or lexical phrases.The Internet and the computer make this easier.

On the computer, you can grab language chunks as you are listening and reading and collect them in an easy to use database.Phrases and chunks of the language can be linked to larger contexts, which are already familiar to you.You don’t need to rely on dictionary definitions and rote memory.You can review these chunks of language in short fragment form, in sentence form and as part of a larger context that you can listen to and read many times.

In this way you gradually develop an instinctive sense for how words are used.This is the natural way to learn correct usage.It is more effective than trying to remember and apply grammar rules.

As you build up your confidence in English through regular input and word and phrase learning, you will no doubt want to talk to native speakers.Once again the Internet is the ideal environment, offering more opportunities than the classroom.

Better Tutors on the Internet

The Internet connects people who are looking for each other.A quick search on a few professional web sites will locate native English speaker writers, editors, or professionals from all over the world, who are interested in acting as language tutors and coaches.If you want to learn English, you can interact with this outstanding pool of qualified people with a wide range of experience and knowledge.

You do not need teachers with specialized linguistics degrees if you want to learn English on the Internet.The new learning paradigm does not require teachers who are trained in the details of grammar and language teaching.Instead the important qualifications for a tutor on the Internet are; an interest in people, an ability to use one’s native language well, and rich experience to share with learners in English.

On the Internet you can choose the tutor whose accent and interests match your own.

Meaningful Communication

Technologies like Skype make conversations via computer easy to organize and the communication is free of charge.You can get your friends together for a chat or make an appointment with a tutor.

It is like having lessons on demand.You can schedule one-on-one or four-on-one discussions via Skype with the tutor of your choice.You can invite your friends to join, or make new friends from different countries and cultures.Tutors need only provide advice and encouragement as well as feedback, at your convenience.There is no need for grammar instruction or quizzes, since you are learning the language naturally through your input activities.

In the relaxing atmosphere of Internet online discussion, learners and tutors become friends and form a community of people helping and encouraging each other.These are not stressful lessons.They are pleasant opportunities to communicate.You can record these conversations or produce your own oral essays and file them or share them.In this way you can keep track of your progress as you learn English on the Internet.

To really improve your accuracy of expression it is important to write.The correction of written texts can be efficiently organized on the Internet and integrated with your input and speaking activities.Systems can keep a permanent record of both your original texts and the corrected texts.These records can include details on the nature of your mistakes and the tutor’s notes.Tutors can make audio recordings of your corrected writing for you to listen to, in order to reinforce the learning of the corrected phrases.The writing can range from casual writing for a blog to serious academic essays.

Motivation and Enjoyment

Learning on the Internet is effective because it is fun.The Internet avoids the tension and boredom of the classroom and increases your motivation.You choose the content, vocabulary is easy to learn, progress is constantly measured, and you become part of a community.

There are already blogging communities with learners and tutors sharing their experiences.People come together from all over the world to help each other.Bloggers may post in their own language, or in English.English becomes the medium of communication among people of different cultural backgrounds.Blogging isn’t an assignment, but a genuine, enjoyable, and meaningful activity.A contagious enthusiasm will keep you learning.It is not like studying.It’s more like making new friends and discovering new cultures through language.

Efficiency

The Internet introduces a higher level of efficiency in language learning.Efficiency is essential because it creates intensity.It takes a high degree of intensity to transform yourself into a fluent speaker of another language.

There is also another reason why efficiency is important.You have a right to a decent return on your investment of time and money in language learning.If you want to learn English, efficiency is important, yet it is often ignored in traditional language teaching.

I spent over 14 months studying English in a school.It was a waste of money for Canadian government and a waste of time for me.”Humberto Soto, a recent immigrant to Canada.

Traditional classroom methods are not as efficient as the Internet.It is difficult to cater to learners of different levels and interests.Stress and boredom are often the results.Many people are discouraged by their school experience, and end up convinced that they cannot learn to be fluent in a new language.They lose interest and give up.

For people who want to learn English, the Internet opens up a new world of efficient and satisfying language learning.The Internet makes possible a quality and variety of input that far exceeds the resources of a traditional classroom.Learning methodologies and communication opportunities are available to you on the Internet that the classroom cannot match.Goals can be set and achievements measured.The result is a highly integrated and enjoyable learning environment.

This new method of learning appeals to all ages.While youngsters and students are the most avid users of the Internet, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation 70% of Americans between the ages of 55 and 64 use the Internet!Similar trends are being seen in Europe and Asia.

A Learning Community, The Linguist

The Linguist is both a learning methodology and a community.It is the first language learning system developed specifically to take advantage of the possibilities offered by the Internet.It was initially developed to help people learn English.It is now being revised and expanded in order to offer other major world languages.In the future, The Linguist model has many applications for life-long education.

The explosion of new media and learning technologies via the Internet will change forever the way people learn.The Linguist system will influence how many subjects are taught.It will make it possible for people all over the world to share their knowledge, expertise and learn from each other, in many languages.Learning English is just one of many lessons we can learn on the Internet.Another one of them is to learn how to learn.

Steve Kaufmann

Steve Kaufmann, CEO and Founder of The Linguist, grew up in Montreal.He obtained a Diplome from l’Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris in1966 and then entered the Canadian Foreign Service, as a Trade Commissioner.

Steve was posted to Hong Kong in 1968 and then served in Japan from 1971 to 1974.In 1974 he left the diplomatic service and served in senior executive positions in the Canadian forest industry until 1987.In 1987 he founded his own company, KP Wood Ltd which today has offices in Japan, Sweden and Canada.

Steve speaks fluent Japanese, Mandarin, Cantonese as well as six European languages.He wrote: The Way of the Linguist: A Language Learning Odyssey.In 2002 he established The Linguist Institute Ltd.

Published: August 11, 2006

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Steve: Hi, Jill.

Jill: Hello, again.

Steve: Yeah Jill, you know, obviously, you just got married so you are a different generation from me.

I have a house which I bought a long, long time ago, but what’s it like for a young family starting up here in Vancouver? Obviously, people like to have a nice home of their own. Even if it’s an apartment they want to have their own home. How affordable is housing?

How is the cost of living versus people’s income both for you and Chris now that you’re starting up or your friends?

Jill: Well, I think Vancouver is quite expensive. Certainly, it’s the most expensive city in Canada. It used to be Toronto and Vancouver has surpassed Toronto. Different areas of Vancouver, West Vancouver which is where we are located, The Linguist Office, is very expensive and then also some areas right in Vancouver quite close to where I live. We have a condo there but we could never afford a house.

Steve: Now, why don’t you begin by explaining what a condo is?

Jill: A condo is a condominium, so basically, an apartment. I think here we probably refer to apartment more when you are renting, maybe.

Steve: Well, I think condominium suggests that it’s joint ownership.

Jill: Right.

Steve: The whole apartment block or building is owned by the people who live

Jill: … in the building.

Steve: So, they don’t just own their own…as I understand it they don’t just own their own little apartment, they own a share in the whole building. Is that how it works? I know they can buy and sell their own apartment, but aren’t there sort of strata title and committees that you sit on governing common, you know, facilities and stuff like that?

Jill: Right.

I mean, there are certain areas that are common like if you have a courtyard, you know, things like that.

So, maybe they need to clean it up or decorate it with flowers or whatever so everybody pays a strata fee and when things need to be done, they take the money that’s been paid and use it. If a new roof needs to be put on the building, you know, everybody pays but you pay based on how large your place is per square footage. So, if you have a smaller place you pay less.

Steve: But it was my understanding, you know, whereas if I own an apartment and I rent apartments out, then I own the building.

I understood that in these condominiums you have a form of ownership that is called a “strata title” so that you own a percentage of the building and that is why you get involved in talking about what you are going to do in the common areas and so forth. Jill: That might be true; I’m not sure. I don’t really have a lot to do with that.

Steve: Right.

Jill: Chris bought it 11 years ago and I just moved there two years ago, so he pretty much deals with all of that and I don’t know a lot about it.

Steve: Okay.

Jill: I know we specifically own the part that we own but you could be right about the common areas.

And so, yeah, I mean we live in a condo that is actually a good size condo compared to a lot.

Steve: Okay, what’s a good size? How big is it?

Jill: Ours is about 850 square feet.

Steve: Which is 85 square meters roughly for people who

Jill: And it’s only a one bedroom so it’s quite a big one bedroom. There are a lot of new condos being built nowadays; a lot that are one bedroom that are only 600 square feet or even smaller. I’ve been looking around at different condos recently just to see what’s out there, how much things cost and, actually, most condos that are 850 square feet like ours is a two bedroom and some are even three bedrooms, so it means the rooms are very, very tiny.

So, ours is quite open; there’s a lot of open space and we have a big deck that looks over the ocean and at the mountains so it’s really beautiful. But, to be able to afford a house with land, you know, a lot of land, with property in the area that we live is really not feasible. It’s probably not going to happen unless we were able to buy a place with friends or with my brother and sort of have a duplex or something.

Steve: Is that something you’ve considered?

Jill: Yeah, yeah, we are considering that. If we do that though we will probably move back to North Vancouver, a different area, which is where I grew up because that’s where my brother and sister-in-law want to live.

Steve: Now, let me just get this straight here. You would buy a house together with your brother and sister-in-law and you would divide it into two homes.

Jill: Right.

Steve: And you think that’s going to work fine? Chris gets along with your brother and sister-in-law?

Jill: Oh yeah, it would be completely fine. My brother and I have always been really, really close. Like we never disagree; we hang out together. My sister-in-law is an exceptional person; everybody loves her and gets along with her and Chris just goes with the flow. He just…I mean, it wouldn’t be a problem. I know for some people it wouldn’t work, but for us it definitely wouldn’t be a problem.

Steve: Oh, so that’s interesting. Now, let’s talk a little about numbers because A: it’s interesting and B: numbers are often difficult for people when they learn another language.

Jill: That’s true.

Steve: Because it seems that the numbers in your own language are so hardwired in your brain that it’s very difficult to get onto numbers in another language. Do you mind telling us how much, not necessarily yours, but how much is a little condo, 850 or 600 square feet which is 60 square meters, in downtown Vancouver in the fashionable area where you live amongst all the fancy coffee shops and sushi restaurants and so forth?

Jill: Well, ours is worth about between $400,000 and $430,000 and it’s 20 years old so it’s not a new building.

I mean 20 years is not really old, but not new and it is only 850 square feet. Many places in Canada you can buy a nice large home for that amount of money.

Steve: Right.

Jill: So, that’s kind of what ours is selling for or would be listed for.

Steve: Right.

Jill: When I have been looking at the condos, the newer ones that have maybe three bedrooms but really aren’t a lot bigger, maybe 100 square feet bigger, are close to $550 or $600,000 which is a lot of money for not having a yard. And I know, I think we are spoiled here in Canada. We’re very used to having big houses and big yards and so that’s what we expect and that’s we think we should have and we need.

But I realize, you know, having been to different places in the world now, it’s very uncommon in other parts of the world for people to have big homes with just one family living in 3,000 square feet or 2,000 square feet.

Steve: Right.

Again, just for our listeners, whenever we have thousands of square feet or hundreds of square feet, we just divide by 10 and we get roughly the square meterage.

Jill: Right.

Steve: So, you’re saying that your apartment, which is a condo a condominium, is about 850 square feet or 85 square meters and it would sell for $400,000 to $430,000. The newer ones would cost probably as much or more for a smaller unit.

Jill: Exactly.

Steve: And while it’s nice to be downtown because there’s nice restaurants and it’s very lively and so forth, at some point, people do aspire to move into a house because I think the Canadian dream is to have a home with a garden and maybe a dog and the kids can run off and play on the street and so forth and so on. I was going to make one other point by the way, the reason of course…no, and you made the point that for $400,000 in smaller towns in Canada you can buy a very nice house, 3,000 square feet you said, again, 300 square meters, with nice trees and a nice garden and so forth. But, of course, downtown Vancouver is the place to be.

Jill: Right.

Steve: There is a saying in the real estate business, because we are talking about real estate, real estate which is the term for the buying and selling of land and houses and so forth, in the real estate business, realtors, people who deal in real estate, they say that everything depends on three factors: location, location and location.

Jill: That’s right!

Steve: Okay, so the cost of land and therefore of housing, depends on three important considerations: location, location, location.

Jill: It’s all about location, in other words.

Steve: It’s all about location.

Now, you’re saying that you and Chris would like to move into a house, have a little more room and so you are considering moving into, it’s not a suburb but it’s an area of Vancouver that’s not right downtown, North Vancouver, which is across the ridge.

Jill: Right, which is also very expensive and one of the nicer areas in the Vancouver area the Vancouver region.

Steve: But why

Jill: No, go ahead.

Steve: No, I was going to say why is it so expensive?

Jill: Well, it’s beautiful. I mean, this part over here, North Vancouver and West Vancouver, is right at the mountains.

I grew up in a house where I could just walk into trails and go hiking or bike riding or running; quick drive to one of three local ski hills, plus some homes have a view of the ocean and downtown and even if you can’t walk to the ocean from certain places, it’s certainly not a long drive right down to the ocean and then it’s also very close to downtown.

Steve: I mean this is the thing; again, you talk about location.

Jill: Yes.

Steve: It’s a desirable location because you’re 20 minutes really

Jill: …from downtown.

Steve: Unless you hit the peak rush hour and then it might be 35 minutes but a lot of the time you’re 20 minutes from downtown.

Jill: That’s right.

Steve: From North Vancouver we say North Van, West Van, North Vancouver, West Vancouver you can take a ferry across, the sea bus as it’s called and yet the lots are very sort of natural and it’s not the same kind of grid-like setup that you have in other parts of Vancouver. There are large trees so it’s really very, very pleasant.

Jill: Right, and the yards, the lots, are much bigger. Even homes we’ve looked at over in the area that we live, of course it’s much more densely populated where we live, all of the homes are on much, much smaller lots.

Unless, I mean, there are big mansions over there that are on huge lots, but the average home is on a lot a third of the size of the average lot over here and more expensive.

Steve: You know, Jill, maybe we’ll stop it there. Next time we can pick up the same subject and talk a little bit about how we live in these homes and so forth. But, I think we should remind people here that this is EnglishlingQ.com where we have these conversations and we also transcribe them and the transcripts are available at EnglishlingQ.com.

We do this in order to help people learn English but, in particular, we hope that people will import this content or come and join thelinguist.com where they can access this content in the library and use a lot of our very effective learning methodology so that they can learn words and phrases because to learn a word you have to see it and hear it many, many times. In our system every time someone saves a word they not only get the meaning, we create many examples from their listening and so people gradually increase their word power and, of course, in language learning we here believe that vocabulary growth, word power, is the most important consideration, much more important than grammar. If people can increase their vocabulary by listening to and reading enjoyable content then they can enjoy themselves and increase their vocabulary.

And, of course, it’s our hope that our conversation is of interest to some people. Everyone has to live somewhere so hearing about how we live here is of interest and, of course, one day we might want to hear about how people live elsewhere and maybe hear that in their language. But at any rate, EnglishlingQ.com here is the Website. Thank you for listening and we’ll pick this up the next time we meet.

Jill: Alright, see you next time.

Steve: Okay, bye, bye.

Jill: Bye, bye.

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

Steve: Hi, Jill.

Jill: Hi, Steve.

Steve: How are you today?

Jill: Good, thanks.

How are you?

Steve: Good, thanks.

We are trying out a new sound box here because I had some complaints about the quality of my sound and I went looking for different solutions like soundcards and we ended up with this external sound box.

Let’s hear your voice now.

Say something, Jill.

Jill: It’s a beautiful day today.

Steve: Looks like you are showing up on our little graph here.

Yeah, this is obviously our usual EnglishlingQ Podcast.

We do it because we hope that the combination of sound and text helps our learners and we also hope that we attract new learners to The Linguist System.

You know, just as an aside, it is very encouraging on my blog to get comments from people who very much agree with the approach that we’ve taken to language learning.

Some of them are involved in English teaching.

I had one person come from Japan and say how discouraged he is at the methods used in the school where they are teaching English and how we are on the right track in terms of making language learning fun and natural and aiding people to acquire words and phrases without going overboard on grammar explanations.

We are The Linguist http://www.thelinguist.com and this is our Podcast.

What should we talk about today?

What do you want to talk about, Jill?

Jill: Well, I’m fairly curious about something you were going to do recently.

I think probably most people listening to this Podcast probably have never heard of it and so I thought maybe you could talk a little bit about that and that is the Vasaloppet in Sweden, a large cross-country skiing race they have every year.

I know you and a couple of other men in the office here were going to participate in this 90 kilometer race last month.

Steve: Right. Well, first of all, the Vasaloppet is perhaps the largest ski race in the world; one of the most famous; 15,000 participants.

It has a long tradition because it commemorates an event that happened 500 years ago when Gustav Vasa who was going to become the King of Sweden, wasn’t yet the King of Sweden, was escaping from his enemies the Danes, the wicked, nasty Danes.

I think some farmers in the area around this town of Mora…he was actually escaping…went and found him and persuaded him to come back and lead a resistance to the Danes, which he did.

The thing is he was escaping on skis.

I mean the legend is full; 15 different versions but somehow or other out of this has come this Vasaloppet ski race, which is 90 kilometers long and attracts people from all over the world, so that’s the race.

Now how did we get involved?

Our lumber company K.P.

Wood buys lumber, wood, from a number of sawmills in the general area.

Two of our people were over there and they were probably drinking a fair amount of aquavit, which is the local drink, and they all decided they would go in this 90 kilometer race.

When they came back and told me that and they said that they had also suggested that I should go in and then I agreed so we were all committed to going in the race.

Jill: Now, I don’t think any of you were big cross-country skiers.

I think you have done a little bit but I think for sure the other two weren’t.

Steve: I think we had all done some and so this became a challenge.

I think I even made reference on my blog to, you know, just how important it is to have a challenge and to have some goals.

We had a goal.

We wanted to do well in this race and so we got busy.

We looked up on the Internet and found out that they recommended that you spend a lot of time training because 90 kilometers of skiing, you know, your body has to be ready for it.

One of the things they recommended was that you do, if possible, 500 kilometers of training so we set out to do a lot of training.

We hadn’t done a lot of cross-country skiing and we invested in new skis, you know, as inevitably happens and I spent a lot of time skiing.

Let me just take my own situation.

I skied a lot here on the local mountains and then I took a week off and I went up to a resort in the interior of BC called Silver Star, which you are familiar with.

I had a fabulous time.

I went out every day and I skied for four or five hours and it was beautiful and, of course, cross-country skiing is hard work so four hours of this and that was it, you know.

I did some downhill skiing while I was there as well but I just had a fabulous time.

I did my 500 kilometers and I was in great shape for this race; ready to go.

Unfortunately in my case, two days before the race I caught this terrible flu.

It’s funny, we were staying in the home of this person who owns the sawmill; very, very nice gentleman called Patrick Furdell.

Very, very nice gentleman and he invited the three of us to stay in his house.

We arrived there and we weren’t sure there was anyone home.

It was dark.

We arrived about 9 o’clock at night.

All of a sudden we heard someone.

We were upstairs and he was downstairs and we heard someone moving around so I walked downstairs and there he was in his bathrobe.

He has white hair and he says, you know, he is a very, very nice gentleman, and he said Steve, so glad to see you but stay away; stay away, stay five meters away, I have the winter vomit disease.

Jill: The Swedish term.

Steve: The Swedish term the winter vomit disease and it is very contagious; you stay away so I said fine; so we stayed away.

I can’t say that I got it from him.

I could have got it from anyone but living in the same house and we touched the same doorknobs and stuff, there’s a good chance.

Jill: Right.

Steve: Whatever.

For two days prior to the race and on the day of the race I was just vomiting.

I couldn’t keep any food down so basically I had nothing.

I could not possibly have gone in the race, so I was out.

It was like a comedy of errors.

At this point now the two other guys, Richard and Steven, were very afraid of getting the dreaded winter vomit disease so they decided to move out.

Jill: Oh, that’s what happened.

Steve: The other guys, the fellows from the Swedish sawmill, they were all gathering in a place that was three hours away from the start of the race whereas where we were staying in our house we were only an hour and a half away.

Jill: Okay.

Steve: Our original plan was to get up at 4:00 and take a bus to the start of the race and so we’d get there about 5:30-6:00.

The race starts at 8:00 because with 15,000 people the earlier you get there the closer to the front you are.

Apparently, you get there early and you put your skis down then you can go and have a cup of coffee or whatever you want to do; sleep some more, whatever.

Jill: Yeah, I heard that there were actually people that slept in the parking lot so they could put their skis out, you know, at 3:00 in the morning or whatever and then go back to bed.

Steve: Exactly. I mean 15,000 people!

But, Steven and Richard now they were frightened; they were afraid.

I mean, you know, here am I ever hour on the hour, day and night, I go to the bathroom right beside where they are sleeping.

They hear me getting up and, of course, they picture all the germs that I’m spreading around so they decided to leave.

They went out to this place in the middle of the woods three hours from the start.

They were with a group of these other people, the employees of the sawmill, and their plan was to leave at 4:00 in the morning so that would get them there at 7:00.

Richard and Steven complained and some of the others, the keener ones, so then they said okay, we are going to leave at 3:30 in the morning.

They get up at 3:30, wolf down some porridge and get on the bus.

The bus left late and, basically, they were on the road for about a half hour and one of the guys from the mill said I forgot my number.

They also have a little chip that you put in your shoe or something so they can keep track of your time so the bus had to go back.

The net result was that they got there with about 15-20 minutes to go so they were at the very back of the group.

They, in fact, couldn’t finish the race because if you don’t reach a certain point by a certain time they basically throw you out of the race.

Jill: Yeah, they don’t let you go on.

Steve: So, the three of us trained very hard and I basically came away with more honor than the other two.

Well, that’s not true, it wasn’t their fault.

I don’t regret for a minute the effort that I put into my training.

I had a fabulous time and I was motivated by the race and I was motivated by this particular measurable target, 500 kilometers.

Of course, I had a great time skiing.

Some days it was sunny and some days it was snowing in my face and some days it was windy and some days it was cold and some days it was warm, it didn’t matter.

In my blog I compared it a little bit to language learning that our long-term goal is to learn the language.

We have this image like I had this image of completing my 90 kilometer ski race; that’s 9-10 hours.

I mean maybe I can’t do it, I don’t know, but I visualized that I could do it.

I would never have trained if I didn’t think that I could do it.

Jill: Right.

Steve: I don’t know for sure that I can.

Jill: Well, you can’t have that attitude that I can’t do it because then what’s the point of all the training?

Steve: Exactly, you wouldn’t even try but I haven’t yet proven that I can do it.

Jill: Right.

Steve: Right.

Because I got sick I didn’t do it.

I haven’t done it yet but I believe I can do it; otherwise, I wouldn’t bother.

So, that’s my long-term goal, but you also need a measurable goal.

And so that was 500 kilometers and I can basically do that; 30 kilometers and another 20 and another 40 and another 30 and so I can gradually, you know, take that off.

Now I’m at 100, 130, 150 and stuff.

Jill: Until you reach your 500.

Steve: Until I reach my 500 kilometer goal, so it’s a very specific and clear goal.

That is, of course, what we’ve tried to do in The Linguist.

Your long-term goal is you want to achieve fluency.

Okay, for me, I want to complete the race.

I’m not going to win the race so it doesn’t matter to me.

If I complete the race, I’m happy.

Jill: Right.

Steve: I have the same approach to fluency. Fluency in a language doesn’t mean that you are perfect.

Jill: Right, sound exactly like a native speaker.

Steve: That’s right. You don’t have to be better, you know.

My pronunciation is better than Jill’s.

Jill knows more words than I do.

Who cares?

It doesn’t matter.

Jill: Right.

Steve: If I can speak, if Jill can speak, we’re both happy, we’re both fluent, we can communicate and we can continue to get better.

To that extent, there is also a comparison with language learning.

I just want to be in the race.

Well, I just want to be in the language.

Okay, I want to be fluent but to have more specific concrete goals is also useful.

That’s why we count the words and we have a number of measurables and graphs and statistics because it helps you.

If they had said to me just go out and train well, how much do I train?

I don’t know.

Jill: You have no measuring stick.

You have no idea whether you should be doing 10 kilometers at a time or 30 kilometers, you know, a total of 40 kilometers over several months or 1,000 kilometers so you don’t even know.

Steve: It’s motivating to know, okay, I want to do this amount.

Of course, the other thing is we at The Linguist want to make the content interesting.

Just as when you go skiing, I mean, I didn’t ski in a tunnel.

I didn’t ski in my basement on some treadmill.

I went to places that were nice.

It was in the snow, it was in nature, different trails so the whole thing was enjoyable.

On that basis,

Jill: It was hard work but it was enjoyable.

Steve: Exactly.

It wasn’t hard for me to get up the next day and go back out there skiing.

I had a ball.

I loved it.

So, anyway, that’s a longwinded answer to your question.

In the end, yeah, that was the Vasaloppet and, unfortunately, the three of us came back to Canada as we say with our tails between our legs.

Jill: But there’s always next year.

Steve: Yes, there’s always next year.

I think we’ve kind of covered the Vasaloppet.

Jill: I agree.

Steve: Okay.

Once again, this is EnglishlingQ.com where you can find a number of similar Podcasts and the transcripts will eventually be available in our Library.

For those of you who are members of The Linguist, you can then access the text and you can save words and phrases, you can add to your totals, reach the… not the 500 kilometer mark but the 5,000 word mark.

I should point out that in The Linguist we have a number of people who are at the 20,000 word mark and at all points in between.

So, thank you.

Jill: Thank you.