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Steve Kaufmann speaks 20 languages and recently challenged himself to 90 days of consistent study in Persian and Arabic on LingQ. In this video he talks about his progress 30 days in, the difficulties he has faced and the content he has been enjoying.

Elle: Hi everyone and welcome to the link podcast with me, Elle. If you would like to study the transcript to this podcast episode and all past podcast episodes as an English lesson, you can do so on LingQ. I will always pop the link to the lesson in the description.

LingQ is an excellent way to study English. You translate words and phrases you don’t know, adding them to your own personal database and learn from content you love. And remember to like, share, follow, subscribe, whatever showing love means on the platform that you are listening on.

This week I am joined by the man, the legend LingQ co-founder and YouTube polyglot Steve Kaufman. Steve, how are you?

Steve: I’m fine Elle, how are you?

Elle: I’m good. Thank you. I’m good now that we are in 25 degree heat, as opposed to 41 degree heat that we just previously had.

Steve: Yes, we’ve had… that was extraordinary. Extraordinary how hot it was. Yeah.

Um, yeah. And, and, uh, just as an aside, of course, some people may know that the town of Lytton in the interior set a record of 49, almost 50 degrees of heat centigrade, whatever that is in Fahrenheit, 120 plus, uh, and then the whole town had to evacuate and the town basically was burned to the ground because they had this enormous forest fire. And then they showed pictures of, there’s so much heat over the interior of the province that is creating these massive and multiple lightning strikes, which of course creates more forest fires, which creates more heat. It’s just a horrendous  situation.

Elle: Scary for the season ahead.

Steve: You know, I was, I, uh, I had to, I had a few chores to do, so I went to, had to go to get some insurance at the insurance office. One of the two ladies there spoke Farsi. So I was able to practice my Farsi. Then I went to the liquor store to buy some wine and the checkout lady there spoke Farsi. So I was able to speak Farsi with her. Then I went to the supermarket and then the checkout lady there spoke Farsi.

So I spoke Farsi again, just in, it’s amazing. It’s amazing. And, and I’m reminded of that, uh, there was a gentleman standing behind me in line and we started chatting and we were chatting about, you know, we don’t need to wear the masks anymore, and some people feel more comfortable wearing masks and that’s fine too.

And, and, uh, he was from Lillooet, which is  very near Lytton. And I said, how are things up there? You know, cause they’re right in the, I call it the eye of the storm. And he said, he said he has a small business, 20 employees. He was basically, they were all waiting to see if they would also be evacuated and they could see the fire.

But the fires didn’t come their way. And apparently there was a heavy rain storm and that seems to have dampened things a little bit. Uh, but it was interesting. He’s originally from, uh, North Vancouver and we had a long chat. He’d moved up there and he runs a bakery. And so I said, you know, my wife likes making sourdough bread.

And so we talked about baking and stuff like that. So I was very… but here’s a guy he’s from he’s right on the front lines of the whole heat wave fire, forest fires situation.

Elle: It’s really scary. I live,  so I’m in North Van I can see the mountains from my street and they’re scorched, they’re brown. A lot of the trees have been scorched. And so, yeah.

Steve: Oh, I hadn’t seen that. So nearby us then.

Elle: Yeah, Grouse Mountain, up that way. Um, my husband’s lived here his whole life, on this street, and he said he’s never seen that before. So it’s kind of scary for the wildfire season.

Steve: I mean, if we get a forest fire here in Vancouver, there is no shortage of vegetation. I mean, there’s so many trees everywhere.

Elle: Yeah, it’s a scary thought for sure.

Steve: I mean, there always used to be forest fires. The, the difference is there’s a lot more people living in the forest, but the forest always used to burn regularly. It’s scary.

Elle: It is. Um, so I wanted to ask you about your challenge, um…

Steve: right.

Elle: Uh, anyone who isn’t aware, steve started a 90-Day Challenge 30 days ago now, right? So you’re a third of the way through. Anyone who doesn’t…

Steve: only 30 days? I was hoping I was further along than that.

Elle: Is it dragging, or is it tough to meet your targets?

Steve: Uh, you know, not all of our decisions are good ones.

Elle: It’s intense, right? A 90-Day Challenge is intense. For anyone who doesn’t know, a 90-Day Challenge is 90 days of consistent study every day on LingQ, uh, hitting your targets. So reading, listening, Creating LingQs, which are words and phrases that you don’t know that you’ve translate and saved to your database. You’ve also, you’re also in a Streak with Steve Challenge, which is meeting your daily LingQs target, and which keeps you in a streak for, for 90 days.

That’s an intense one, also. So you’re being sufficiently challenged right now on LingQ. How’s it going?

Steve: Um, well, I saw that Streak with Steve didn’t fully understand what it entailed, but I thought that what I would try to do is force myself to study both Farsi and Arabic. So I’ll do two languages and set myself lower goals, like only create 13 LingQs. In other words, look up and save 13 new words initially in each language. And I think I kept that up for a while, but that’s too difficult to do. Uh, I, I find myself wanting to spend at least one week on one language and then one week on the other language, um, I find it’s a bit confusing to do two languages like that.

Uh, I’m committed to doing it. Uh, otherwise I think I would just go back to saying work on one for three months, really get into it, then work on the other because I find that I don’t slip that much. I can go back and do my mini stories again and it’ll come back to me, right? So I find that it’s a little bit confusing now to be in one in the other back to the first one, again, not, not an ideal situation, but this depends.

Some people do that. Some people study three languages at the same time and they’re happy doing it. I think I’m, um, I prefer to stay focused on one at a time. That’s kind of my conclusion, but I’m committed to doing this. So I’m gonna.

Elle: Had you ever previously studied two languages like this? You hadn’t done two languages in a challenge before, I know that, but…

Steve: No, I went, I once went at three and I was more ambitious and maybe I was just more, um, had more energy then or something. I was trying to do a hundred LingQs a day in three languages: Arabic Farsi, and Turkish. But when you’re starting up in a language, it’s so easy to create LingQs because every lesson has a whole bunch of unknown words in it.

But now in those languages, I’ve, I’ve been at it so long that I have a lot of yellow sort of saved LingQs. Words that I have looked up, but I don’t yet know. So, you know, if you just want to crank up the number of new LingQs, you just go into new material. And if the page is full of blue, unknown words, you have very quickly reached your goal.

But now even if I bring in new material in Farsi or Arabic, there aren’t that many blue words, but it doesn’t mean that I know the yellow words. I don’t know them very often. I haven’t seen them often enough to, to know. Uh, I do have the sense that certainly I understand a lot better than I did before.

And, um, so in order to create those 13 LingQs a day, I have to go out and get new material every day, which again, it’s easier in Farsi because Sahra who’s our  collaborator in Iran is constantly creating good content for me, uh, Iranian filmmakers or Iranian food or Iranian history. So that part of it is easy.

The Arabic is a little more difficult. But I’ve even started branching off into Egyptian Arabic and, and, uh, you know, because, because the Arabic world is so different. So if I had a Ted Talk in Levantine Arabic, then I want to try to understand that and look up the words there. Uh, my tutor is from Cairo and we’ve been going through some Egyptian, Arabic texts.

And so I’m just playing around. Like, I’m not, I’m not going to write a test in any of this stuff. So I’m just doing, I’m sort of exploring and enjoying. And, um, the challenge is not, you know, it’s not what motivates me. What motivates me is my interest in what I’m listening to and reading. But I know that for many people, these challenges, uh, become a major motivator.

People don’t have much time and they need that extra, basically a nudge to make sure they do something every day. And it’s so important to do something every day. So I think it’s a good idea to, to have these challenges, but I’m kind of not living up to my commitments.

Elle: Okay.

Well thank you for being so honest. That’s great. Um, are you speaking, you are speaking in the languages too, as part of the challenge or just as part of your weekly study for Persian and Arabic?

Steve: Yeah.

I’ve uh, so I’ll have say maybe three sessions in Farsi with Sahra and then three sessions with Mohammed in Egyptian. I really enjoy my time with both of them because they’re very nice.

They just keep me going. I don’t have to worry about what we’re going to talk about. I think we have a good rapport. So it’s just like sitting down with a friend and, uh, speaking. So, and then I get a report back with my mistakes and the recording. And so the whole thing works very well, but three a week is enough because I have to fit this in with all of the other things that I, commitments that I might have, you know?

Elle: Right. And so the what, so then Sahra, and is it Mohammed? Your, um…

Steve: Mohammed, yeah. Mohammed in Cairo and I Sahra she’s in Northern Iran.

Elle: Okay.

And so they prepare, do they give you reading or talk to you about things they know that you’ve read?

Steve: No, no, no, no. If I want to, then I can, but normally we just show up. They’re not prepared. I’m not prepared. Um, because we’re venturing into Egyptian Arabic, so with Mohammed, we did some reading of the mini stories in Egyptian Arabic. Uh, I found also in our library at LingQ a series of, uh, interviews with people in Egypt, in Arabic.

And because these are not scripted, they’re sort of more natural, you know, you know, people using the equivalent of, “you know”, “like”, “I mean”, you know? So you got a lot of this sort of filler words stuff. So it’s very conversational, sort of Egyptian Arabic. And I’m reading through this with Mohammed and typically we’ll have maybe even half of the time will be spent reading, and then half of the time speaking, I think my Farsi is better than my Arabic. Now it used to be the other way around and that’s because, uh, Farsi is just so much easier.

Elle: Okay.

Steve: So much easier. Yeah.

And it doesn’t have this complication of different forms of… I mean, there may be different forms of Farsi, but basically there’s two forms of Farsi.

There’s a more formal form, which is, which has sort of the written form. And then the form that people use to speak, not very different, essentially the same words, some different endings, some slightly different vowels is not a big deal. So, whereas with, with Arabic, you know, Egypt, uh, Gulf Arabic, uh, Lebanese, Arabic, Moroccan, Arabic, they’re all there.

Elle: What do you, what… so you mentioned that you were out today and you spoke to three people in Farsi. How, how are you received when you start chatting to them?

Steve: Uh, you know, the, the different sort of national groups react differently. Like if you were to generalize, the Farsi speakers are so pleased when they hear you speak Farsi and they’re so encouraging and accommodating. And it’s funny, I was out swimming in the ocean the other night, and there was a couple swimming and they started had some kind of, I don’t know, small boat or inflatable boat, and they were both in the water and splashing around. And there were a couple in their fifties or early sixties. And, uh, I heard them speaking Farsi.

So I spoke to them in Farsi. Now you can imagine their surprise, they’re swimming here in West Van and all of a sudden, some guy, some old geezer speaks to them and, uh, and, uh, so they reply. You’re speaking. Are you, are you speaking Farsi? Yeah, guess what, I’m speaking Farsi. So we had a bit of a chat, uh, but generally, I mean the, the one, the one lady at the supermarket I’ve spoken to her before.

She’s always very nice. She speaks to me in Farsi. Sometimes the inclination is for them to come back in uh, you know, to prove like, well, you know, I’ve been in Canada for 10 years, so I speak English very well, you know, so they need to demonstrate that, you know, but this lady at the supermarket, she’s always very nice.

Oh, I haven’t seen you in awhile. How are you? And we went back and forth in Farsi. Yeah.

Be careful because there’s a lineup at the checkout, you know, I can’t just sit, stand there and talk to her while people are waiting to pay for their groceries. But, um, yeah if I see someone see their name hear in their accent, I know you’re not supposed to do this, but if I figured that they’re Farsi speakers, I say, do you speak Farsi?

And then normally react very well.

Elle: I don’t know that you’re not supposed to do that. I don’t think that’s…

Steve: Well there’s this whole idea, like, especially like, so the, the people who seem to be the most sensitive sometimes are people who are Asian. So if a person looks Asian, In fact, you can’t assume that they speak an Asian language.

Elle: Right. I see.

Steve: In other words, if you have someone who has a Polish name like in Canada, now we have people from all over, right? So you can find Italian names, Polish names, German names, Dutch names, whatever. You can assume that they speak that language. Like my name is Kaufmann. People come up “Ah Steve Kaufman ya…”.

That’s not on. So, and the Asians are particularly, or some of them are a little sensitive, but you know, like I’m Canadian, you know, just because I look Asian, you kind of assume that I can speak English. Right. So you have to be very careful. So you got to pick, you know, you got to sense if this person, you know, you can’t sort of imply that they can’t speak English.

So I, I normally will say, uh, You know, you’re not even like according to the real die-hards, you’re not even supposed to have any curiosity about where this person is originally from. Even though they look non-Caucasian like that’s a no, no. Okay.

Uh, people have no difficulty asking me if I’m German, just by looking at my name and it doesn’t bother me in the slightest.

I’m not German, but they can ask me because they’re curious. Oh, you got… It’s like, so, so I just have to be a little bit aware of that. So I typically say, do you speak an Asian language? It’s still a little bit dicey because just because of location, why should I have to speak an Asian language? And I agree with that.

I agree with that.

Like a person has been here for three, four generations, no more likely to speak an Asian language than somebody who has someone who has, um, you know, Polish name is expected to speak Polish or who has a Dutch name is expected to speak Dutch. So I agree with them, but I nevertheless enjoy speaking these languages.

And most of them react quite pleasantly. I haven’t had any negative interactions, but it sometimes becomes an issue. You know, the sort of politically correct people say you shouldn’t. So yeah.

Elle: So, uh, setting out 30 days ago on these challenges, 90-Day Challenge in Arabic and in Persian, did you have any goals, anything you would you wanted to have achieved by the end, in terms of not necessarily, you know, known words or hours of listening, but, uh, content that you would then be able to approach maybe movies or something?

Steve: Well, yeah, I find that my goals have changed. When I started out, I said, I want to be able to understand like a large part of my diet content has been these political partners, which typically I, uh, you know, I extract the MP3 file, convert that to text on an automatic transcription website, bring it into link, uh, and, uh, study it.

So I said, I want to get to where I can really understand these podcasts. But I found that my motivation to do that has declined because they’re kind of boring after a while. It’s always the same, the different groups and Yemen fighting each other there and Libya or whatever. I just get tired of it all.

So, uh, with Arabic, I’ve decided no, I’d rather get to where I can understand Egyptian movies. So then I said, well, then I better learn more Egyptian Arabic because I don’t understand them very well. And there are Egyptian movies and series on Netflix. So I decided with Arabic, I want to start moving more into the spoken Arabic. Uh, with the, um, with the Farsi…

um, I had been basically following the diet that Sahra fed me. So it was the history of Iran. It was food of Iran. It was minority peoples in Iran, all this stuff, which I found very interesting. So that was great. And all of a sudden she sends me these descriptions of famous Iranian, um, film directors, uh, more than a few of them have won international acclaim even in the last 10 years or so.

Uh, Oscar’s uh, awards at the Cannes uh, film festival, Berlin film festival and so forth. So she sends these through and the way she does, she talks about a certain film director, and then she has these circling questions about that same film director. And then she sends me a link to that movie or a movie by that director, uh, on YouTube.

Uh, so I’m able to watch it. So all of that, it has been very interesting. I tried to extract the MP3 file and transcribe it, but, you know, uh, audio from, um, from a movie is a bit disappointing as language learning content, because there’s so many, you know, your car noise, the doors slamming, birds chirping. It’s not dense language.

So I don’t do that. I just, whatever she sends me, I read it and I try to learn it, learn about the movie, the film, a director, and then I watch the movie a while and I’ve enjoyed that. So in a way, I’ve moved more in the direction of enjoying movies, uh, in both, uh, Arabic heavy to Egyptian, Arabic, and, uh, in Farsi.

And trying to talk to three times a week with both Mohammed and, uh, Sahra.

Elle: Excellent. And you watched a movie, is it Asmaa? You recently  mentioned n one of yourivideos.

Steve: Asmaa, that was the Egyptian movie. It was very interesting movie, actually, Egyptian movie. Uh, it it’s, it’s sort of a, it’s about the stigma of AIDS in Egypt, uh, about, uh, uh, and I would say even the Iranian movies, this whole honor that the men seem to feel, uh, you know, basically, and, and an important component of their honor is being able to tell women what to do. So these are themes that come up in those movies.

Elle: Okay.

I’ll have to, I’m always looking for movie recommendations. So if you say that’s good I’ll check that out.

Steve: Uh, yeah, it’s, I’m trying to hear the Arabic. I mean, it is to get a bit of a, of a, of an insight into, uh, Egyptian society. I, I recommend it. Yeah, Asmaa, definitely.

Elle: Okay.

Steve: And, uh, the same with Iranian movies, um, The Separation, it was quite an interesting, quite an interesting movie. Very interesting. And it won some awards, it’s an Iranian movie.

Elle: Is that, I think I’ve seen that one. Is it about the mother who. She had children, they don’t know who she is. She’s… she was…

Steve: No

Elle: Okay, I’m thinking of something else.

Steve: It’s about, um, a couple in Iran and they have a daughter and, uh, they were preparing to leave Iran, to immigrate. And the wife was very keen on doing that, but then the husband decided he wouldn’t go because his father now has Alzheimer’s and can’t look after himself.

And so then she wants to divorce and then it gets very complicated. So I can’t, I won’t get into the whole plot, but it’s quite good. And it’s apparently quite a psychological study on, um, Iranians. And the one thing that comes through when you watch Iranian movies, and there’s another one called Ellie as well, is that while there’s this sub-sense of the sort of, um, you know, male, call it male dominant, uh, you know, uh, you know, honor.

And yet, at least on the surface, the Iranians, they live very much like we do, you know, they’re very modern, European, North American. We have this image that they’re all wandering around the women shrouded in black and very backward and stuff. And no, it’s not. I mean, there’s, there’s social differences in Iran, uh, like everywhere, but maybe more marked over there.

And, uh, but the, there is a middle-class that lives, you know, like Europeans. So, and that comes through in these movies.

Elle: The Separation. Okay.

I’ll check that out too. I was thinking of a completely different movie. Okay.

Um, so Steve, you have, you have a mere 60 days left  in your 90-Day Challenge. I wish you the best of luck and, um, yeah, I think it’s, it’s amazing to me, you’re speaking three times a week.

So I’m… so you alternate then I assume you spend one week on Arabic one week on Persian?

Steve: One week on each. Yeah.

But you have to be flexible. Um, Mohammed told me that and he was gonna be without his internet for a week or so. So then I went two weeks on, on Farsi and now he’s back, uh, up and running again.

So I was spending more time with him. I don’t follow my, to be honest, I don’t follow my streak that closely. It’s just that I feel a commitment. I feel that I have an obligation to, to work on those languages, which is no big deal. Cause I enjoy doing it. Uh, but I, I made this commitment to do both. At the end of my 90 days, I’m going to do just Farsi because Farsi is the biggest opportunity here in Vancouver to use the language.

Although, you know, uh, internationally of course there are far more, uh, Arabic speakers than Farsi speakers.

Elle: That’s good to… it must. It’s nice though I’m sure, to be able to speak to people, as you say, at the supermarket and wherever you are.

Steve: Yeah.

Elle: Well, anyone who’s interested in joining a challenge, I will pop the link in the description to the 90-Day Challenge the Streak with Steve as well.

Thank you so much for joining me, Steve. It’s been great, as always.

Steve: I should say too, Elle, I’ve watched your interviews with your various guests. I think they are excellent. Absolutely excellent. Very interesting. And of course, not only are they interesting, but I think they’re an opportunity for people to work on their English because they’re all lessons at LingQ.

Elle: They are.

Steve: And you normally have guests on there who speak very clearly. You speak clearly. So I think they’re excellent. Uh, interesting and excellent learning methods. Uh, have a sort of an intermediate, uh, less, they’re not overly difficult. So I think it meets a need a real need.

Elle: Well thank you so much. And as you mentioned, I will always pop the link to the transcript of this video as a lesson in the description.

And there’s a full course of all past interviews and episodes there for anyone who’s learning English. So, uh, thank you so much, Steve. I, like I said, best of luck with your challenges.

Steve: Thank you. Bye.

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

Learn Mandarin Like Mischa Wilmers: Graded Readers, News in Chinese, Novels and LingQ!

Elle: Hello everyone and welcome to the LingQ podcast with me Elle. Remember all you English learners you can study this podcast episode as a lesson on LingQ. I will always pop the lesson link in the description. Using LingQ you can work through the transcript, translating the words and phrases that you don’t know to add to your own personal database.

And remember to like share, follow, subscribe, whatever showing love means on the platform that you are listening on.

This week, I am joined by another wonderful guest Misha Wilmers is a language learner, blog and LingQ user. Welcome Mischa, thank you so much for joining us.

Mischa: Thanks very much for having me on.

Elle: And whereabouts are you joining us from on this fine Monday?

Mischa: So I’m in Manchester at the moment, uh, Manchester in the UK. Elle: Excellent. In the kind of north, I guess. Yeah.

Don’t, you’d call Manchester north, right? Northern England.

Mischa: Northwest. Yeah.

Northwest.

Elle: Okay.

And how’s life in Manchester these days? Mischa: It’s good. Um, at the moment I’m on a staycation kind of thing, not going abroad this year.

So I never thought I’d say that about going on holiday to Manchester. I actually work in Leeds, which is about an hour away from here, but, um, yeah. Um, generally things are good. The weather is for Manchester standards, um, reasonably good. Okay.

So not too bad.

Elle: Excellent. That’s a great word, actually, “staycation.” vacationing at home.

I think a lot of people around the world will be doing that this summer. So yeah, hopefully, hopefully the weather stays nice for you. Uh, so Misha, as I mentioned, you are a language learner and a blogger. You run a blog called I’m learning mandarin.com. So as we can guess, you’re currently studying Mandarin Chinese. So what, uh, first off, what made you decide to land on Mandarin? Why, why Mandarin Chinese?

Mischa: So I guess the initial reason was basically the, I had moved to a new city, so I moved from Manchester where I’m from about five years ago to Leeds. And when I first moved to Leeds, I was looking for things to do. Um, I was looking to meet new people, didn’t know anyone in the new city. And so I saw that the university that I was working for, um, they were advertising cheap Mandarin classes at the Confucius Institute that operates on campus. And so I decided to just take advantage of them.

I had a basic interest in languages from before, um, because I grew up bilingual, I’m half Spanish. So I grew up bilingual in English and Spanish. And at school I’d also done French, but I always felt like, um, I always really enjoyed doing French, but I felt like, without doing much work I had a kind of natural advantage over other people just from knowing Spanish with the similarities between French and Spanish. So when I was thinking about activities to take up in the new city I’d moved to language learning seemed like an obvious choice given my previous interest.

But I wanted to like set a new kind of challenge to see whether I could cope with the language is different as Mandarin rather than something like another romance language, like French or Italian or something like that.

Elle: And how did you find those classes and how many… was it like a course of classes or you just went to the odd one and then we were all on your own studying?

Mischa: So initially, um, it was a course of, a beginner course of eight classes and that kind of got me going, that kind of kept me inspired.

Um, I really enjoyed that course, it was a one and a half hour classes in the evenings after work once a week. Um, so really not enough to, to learn very much Chinese at all, but enough to inspire me to want to keep going basically. I then complete, I completed a couple of other courses after that, um, which were similar, but a slightly higher level each one, but, um, all of them quite basic stuff again.

So I completed about three or four courses overall.

Um, after that, I’ve just been mainly self studying, using LingQ, and other tools like that. Yeah.

Elle: Excellent. So yeah, self study. What does that involve for you then? What, uh, what kind of methods? What kind of, I guess let’s talk about methods first and then maybe talk about LingQ little bit. Mischa: Yeah. I mean, when it comes to methods like I split my kind of Chinese learning experiences intitwo parts because I’ve been on it for about four years now.

Um, um, the first two years, my methods were basically, I didn’t have any methods because I was trying to figure out like, how, how do you learn Chinese? I had absolutely no idea how to learn a language like Chinese, as I say, like completely different challenge to learning something like French when you know Spanish.

Um, so I kind of spent a lot of that two years trying to figure out different, download any apps I could, figure out different ways. Things like Duolingo are like the first obvious things that you come across, they have the best like marketing.

Obviously they have the most money to spend. So, um, I came, so, so basically the first two years I had no idea what I was doing.

I would like go to my classes, leave my classes and then try and get some, um, language exchange partners, and there’s quite a lot of Chinese people on campus. So there was no shortage of people to speak to. So I’d just leave my class and try and practice with Chinese people. But after two years, I kind of felt like I need to try something different.

This isn’t really working.

And that’s when I came across, um, Steve Kaufmann’s YouTube videos, um, and he was talking about, cause he has one on learning Chinese, um, and it, he discussed how, um, the most important things for him were kind of listening and reading. And that was the first time that like I came across what seems like quite an obvious point, but I didn’t realize at the time, which was that input is the most important thing when learning language.

So all the, all the kind of stuff I’ve been doing at the beginning stage of like trying to use basic words and phrases I’d learned in class and practiced them over and over again with language exchange partners, but not really having any idea what they were saying back to me. Steve Kaufmann’s videos kind of helped me to see that, like there was maybe another approach. And since my previous approach wasn’t really working, I felt, um, I thought might as well give this a go.

And, um, so from then, um, I used a lot of, uh, graded readers, um, at the beginning because, and I blog about this as well, because particularly in Chinese at the beginning the characters are a huge barrier to being able to read even a very basic level.

So I found something that was really useful that I hadn’t quite, I hadn’t discovered the mini stories on LingQ, which if I went back now, I might do. But, um, at the beginning stage, before I started using LingQ, my main input was from graded readers.

So there’s Mandarin companion graded readers I found really useful. Um, um, yeah, so they’re basically just short books, short stories. They’re not like high literature or anything like that, but they’re entertaining enough. Um, they’re more entertaining than like your average textbook kind of thing. So I started doing a lot of reading and then listening to the, um, to the CD of the audio, the audio of the books as well.

Elle: Okay.

Mischa: So, so mainly like, um, my methods since then have been embracing this mass immersion approach.

Mass input approach, but without, obviously, without being in the country. So, um, so from, from the UK.

Elle: Excellent. Excellent. And so how, so you said the graded readers, you, you, when you first discovered Steve and then LingQ you were into the graded readers. Were?You…

was that tough. I mean, were you studying the characters, I guess, as you read, were you, were you reading the same story multiple times?

Mischa: Yeah, so, I mean, by the time I got to, by the time I started reading graded redesigned, maybe memorized, committed to memory about 500, uh, characters through using flashcards, uh, using Pleco and things like that.

Um, and that helped. So I was already able to read a bit like, but I’d just been reading short dialogues in textbooks. So then when I first started reading graded readers that are graded at different levels. So the first level, the beginner level is like, um, set at like maybe 500 words or 500 characters.

So, um, so I started reading them about two years ago. And when I first started they were like really challenging for me. I was reading above my level I think at the beginning. Maybe I was reading, like I start with the 500 characters one, but they’re not necessarily the characters that you have that you’ve committed to memory. So there’ll be lots of unknown characters.

So it was a bit of a slog, but I just… like, because I’d never read a whole book before, when I finished my first kind of graded read a book, it was just like a sense of achievement. And also you’re exposed to all the grammar patterns over and over again. So it was my first sense of like, after kind of reading a few of them, I started to get real sense of like the, the real benefits of mass immersion compared to what I was previously doing.

Elle: Right.

Kind of got the ball rolling.

What, uh, what did you move on to after graded readers? What kind of content?

Mischa: So after graded readers, then that’s pretty much when I discovered and started using LingQ more. So I mentioned, I discovered Steve Kaufmann’s videos, but I didn’t immediately make the transition to LingQ. That was a bit later. Um, so after graded readers, I decided I got to a point where a lot of people get to with graded readers where you’ve read like the highest level of graded readers, which is maybe like set at 1,500 characters or something like that.

But that’s not quite enough to, um, read newspapers or novels. So there’s, uh, there’s kind of a, a small gap there, a bit of a gap that you have to bridge somehow. So I wanted to make a concerted effort to start tackling native content. Um, that’s where I discovered LingQ. And, um, the rest is history, as they say.

I mean, since then, LingQ has basically been my main tool for learning. I import lots of stuff into it and that kind of thing. Initially, I was working a lot on native dialogues.

Um, so there’s, um, Wolf and Wawa. I don’t know if anyone’s heard of that, um, on LingQ, there’s a really good podcast, which is two Chinese friends discussing, uh, natural, more or less natural speed. I think they’re designing it for learners, but it’s, it’s, um, they’re using like everyday Chinese, um, and. It’s kind of, because it’s like a transcript of daily conversation, a lot of the words and phrases they’re using a very common, um, so that’s kind of the first kind of more or less native content that I started tackling.

And then from there I started moving on to radio transcripts of SBS, um, SBS, which is, um, the Australia’s like Mandarin channel, which has like, uh, short broadcasts on lots of different topics and radio phone ins where Chinese people living in Australia phone in to chat about everything that’s going on in terms of politics and other things. So, so yeah, basically from that, um, so that, that’s what I was doing at first with LingQ.

And then after that I started doing more novels and, um, and things like that, which, um, which I’m still doing now. Elle: Excellent. And to go back to something you said about newspapers there, so you said 1000 to 500 characters isn’t enough to read like a regular, um, newspaper article in Mandarin? Mischa: Yeah, I’d say that’s right. I mean, the thing is there’s, there’s different… people put different figures on the number of characters that you need in order to be literate in terms of reading a newspaper and there’s no set number.

Um, but I think to be comfortable, I would probably put it above 1,500.

I don’t know what I put it at specifically, but maybe more like 2000 to 3000. Um, at 3000 probably you start feeling fairly comfortable, but there’d still be characters that come up in the news that you don’t know. But, um, but yeah, I’d say I’d put it around more like that, but certainly after the graded readers, um, which was set at something like one between 1000, 1,500, I still found reading the news very, very challenging.

Elle: So how many… so many characters, how many characters would you, do you think you have committed to memory at this point four years in, right?

Mischa: Yeah. Um, it’s very difficult to say, actually, but I recently did um, there’s a website you can go on, which is, I forget the name of the website, but it, it asks you a series of, it’s like you take a quiz and it basically tells you the vocabulary level that you’re at. But it doesn’t tell you like specifically how many characters in terms of vocabulary level.

It put me at 11,000 words, LingQ puts me at 15,000, but I think that’s inflated. Uh, Steve, Steve has talked about how it gets inflated for various reasons for Chinese, but, um, 11,000 probably for wording in terms of characters, maybe 3000, but that’s just a guess. Elle: Um, how about writing? Are you into the writing out of characters?

Mischa: So initially I was, um, um, when I first started out, I did spend quite a lot of time writing them out by hand.

Eventually I had to make a choice because I have a full-time job. I have other commitments. So it’s kind of a, um, a choice about what you’re going to commit your time to. And I just didn’t have enough time if I wanted to commit all the time that I have to reading and listening, like using LingQ and other tools. Yeah.

Um, I just didn’t have enough time to basically on top of that, like write them out by hand.

So I got to about, I think 500, which I’ve probably forgotten a lot of them by now, but I found that without writing them out by hand, you can still quite, I wouldn’t say I don’t want to say easily, but there’s, there’s no problem committing them to memory in terms of visual memory. So you don’t need to learn to write them out by hand in order to recognize them visually. Elle: Right.

Mischa: So, so yeah, I got, um, I got about 500 eventually, but then I decided to just focus purely on listening and reading.

And I think at some point in the future, I may go back particularly because I’m told if I want to pass a proficiency test in the future, uh, which is not a priority for me, but it may be something I want to do in the future that the new system they’re talking about, which hasn’t been confirmed yet, but the new system may involve uh, writing by hand component. Whereas at the moment they allow you to take the proficiency tests by writing Chinese using a computer, but in the future, maybe they may make you write it out by hand.

So I, so anyway, I may, I may go back to it in future.

Elle: Okay.

That’s interesting that they would as it, add it, sorry, to the test, as opposed to it being there and them taking it away with our modern world, but okay. Mischa: They, um, initially, I mean, there’s always been a writing component. Elle: Right.

Mischa: But what they’d done in the past last few years is they’d introduced us some test centers, HSK test centers. They started allowing people to, um, take the test using a computer.

And like, as you say, that makes perfect sense because the, I mean, that’s how everyone writes nowadays. Uh, if you can communicate using a computer, then there’s really no problem in terms of communicating. But I think, um, the new system hasn’t been confirmed, but if they do end up bringing back the writing component, I suspect it’s because there’s, um, a case to be made about preserving the, the art of writing by hand and that kind of thing, and preserving the tradition of that. Elle: That makes sense. That makes sense.

I mean, the characters are so beautiful and I know you’re not writing them out like a calligrapher would, but it’s an art, for sure I can see that. Mischa: Absolutely.

Elle: So what does, and I know days are different, you know, some days you work, weekends maybe you don’t, but what does a day of a Mandarin study look like for you?

Mischa: Yeah, it’s interesting because I don’t really see it as study anymore because, because it’s kind of transitioned to it phase where, um, a lot of things that I would previously have done in terms of leisure in English now I do in Chinese. So for example, I spend, um, most of the stuff I, if I’m reading for pleasure, like in terms of novels, um, I do that in Chinese now instead. So that’s kind of study time.

So the typical, if I were to like set out like a day, uh, just for studying Chinese, it would probably involve spending some time reading my novel. And then, um, listening to, uh, for listening, like I’m watching you, there’s a lot of like YouTube channels that I follow. Um, like talking about politics.

Um, there’s some cartoons that I quite like because they’re slightly, so, um, so sorry I say easier, but they’re still, I mean, um, yeah, so like there’s a cartoon called … uh and it’s, um, about, uh, a girl going about her daily life. It’s actually dubbed from Japanese, but that’s sort of what I use for like easier stuff is like cartoons like that. And then for harder stuff, like things like sitcoms and political channels where people talk about politics and stuff, a lot of stuff on YouTube basically. So I do that.

And then, um, one thing that in the past few months I’ve started doing a lot more of particularly during the lockdown and then coming out of lockdown was because I couldn’t meet up with Chinese friends, doing a lot more Zoom calls and that kind of thing. So I usually most days actually I’ll spend some time half an hour or an hour even calling or doing like a, a call with a Chinese friend and doing conversation exchange. Elle: Excellent. I like that. It doesn’t feel like study anymore.

What, at what point do you remember when it started to feel that way when it was less of, like you said, some things were slog, of course, the beginning period in any language is a slog, do you remember when you went “huh, I’m replacing english or Spanish or whatever, TV time, book, time with Chinese and it’s like it’s entertainment now? Mischa: Yeah, I think that, I don’t know if it was a single moment. I think it happened quite gradually and it was quite, um, a slog to get there.

I mean, the, the, um, first lockdown a year ago, um, I basically started like stepping up quite a lot.

So previous to that, because, uh, like, as I say, I was working, I still am working full-time. But with, with when there wasn’t locked down, there was less time in the day. So previous to that, I was maybe doing Chinese for like half an hour a day. And then when lockdown happened, I started taking it more seriously.

So then I started like spending several hours a day.

Um, and then gradually through doing that, I think I started to get more of a sense of like, that I could, I could do this for enjoyment and purely pleasure at the beginning during that lockdown, like I still felt it was a slog. I was trying to grapple with native materials on LingQ that were above my level, that I still found very challenging, both to read and to listen to, and actually like, um, something I’ve blogged about as well.

But like, because I was spending so much time and because sometimes I was using materials which didn’t interest me that much, I did feel sort of after three or four months when the first lockdown ended, I think in like June last year, um, I started feeling a bit burned out and I took it, I took quite a bit of time off Chinese at that point. And I think I actually took like probably three months, the whole summer off Chinese. I just couldn’t couldn’t face looking at any, um, Chinese at that time.

Um, when I got back to it, I think maybe that’s kind of a moment worth talking about, because although I’d been away from, from it for three to four months, I think within a week of getting back to it, I felt like I was at my previous level or slightly better than my previous level. So the three months off hadn’t done me any harm at all.

And I started to feel from then because I had some distance, um, when you’re actually like working really hard, I think a lot of the time you can’t really see the progress that you’re making, because I had that distance of a couple of months coming back to it and I started to feel, this is slightly easier. I’m starting to get more pleasure. I’m starting to like reading like novels and stuff like that. Isn’t so much of a slog anymore. Elle: Excellent. So there’s hope for anyone listening who is maybe in that situation Mischa mentioned before.

You can get to the point where it’s, it’s more fun and less of a slog for sure. Mischa: Um, absolutely. Yeah.

I mean, cause when you’re in that moment, like sometimes I think particularly if you’re a first time language learner, as I consider myself a first time language learner, because I don’t really count learning French at school or being bilingual in Spanish and English. So being a first time language learner, I think if you, um, I think that like it’s something that you can lose sight of.

Like it’s, you know, because you, you see people out there polyglots like Steve and others that have done it. So, you know, it’s possible to do, but you don’t, you haven’t yet internalized that because you’ve never done it. Is is very, it’s a very difficult thing to kind of internalize those it’s possible to do when you’re in that moment. And you don’t feel you’re making any progress. Elle: Yeah. For sure.

And you think too, okay, well, yeah, that person’s done it, but they have some special talent or skill that I clearly don’t have It’s so easy to convince yourself of that. Mischa: And I think on that point, like, because that’s definitely something I think, I I’ve thought in the past, well, they must just be talented. That kinda thing. Cause you see the end-product of them speaking fluently.

Um, I think the main talent is the ability to spend several hours like on end, like the way Steve describes spending eight hours when he learned Chinese in his twenties, spending eight hours a day concentrated, like just doing Chinese and like from a beginner level, I think there’s talent involved in, in that level of concentration. And, um, I personally like haven’t reached that level. Maybe in future I’ll be able to, but like, like, um, yeah, I I’m, if I can get like, um, a few hours in a couple of hours, then that’s okay.

A good day for me.

Elle: Yeah. Such discipline, right? You just have to be so persistent. Yeah, for sure. Has there been anything that’s surprised you on your, on your Mandarin learning journey so far? Mischa: Um, I think lots of things have surprised me. I think one, I think they’ve mostly being positive surprises because I mean the initial surprise of learning Mandarin I would say was slightly negative because I went into it very naively. And so I had no idea what learning Mandarin involved.

So the initial surprise was, oh, this is actually like quite hard.

This is like, not… this, this is the amount of work that this is going to require is like an order of magnitude above anything I’ve done before if I want to become like properly fluent in Mandarin. So I, as a completely naive language learner, that was my initial surprise. Once you get over that surprise…

and once I got over that surprise, the surprise, the surprises after that were all positive in the sense that after that initial surprise, you start to wonder, is this possible?

Am I ever going to be able to do this? Is learning characters possible? Particularly characters, I would say. Um, and, and the surprises that no, if you, if you stick at it, do it every day, um, spaced repetition, flashcards, they will stick. And particularly because one of my concerns was you hear a lot about some people are visual learners, some people are audio learners or whatever. And, um, in my case I’m definitely not a visual learner, in my opinion.

I don’t know if there’s any, if that’s meaningful or not like whether these categories are meaningful or not, but yeah. Um, never considered myself to be a visual learner or to like have a visual memory, anything like that. So I was concerned maybe that that would be an impediment to learning characters and yeah, the surprising thing, the positive surprise was that no, if you stick at it every day, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a visual learner or not like you will, they will stick, you’ll be able to pick up characters. So, so that was positive.

Elle: Excellent.

Um, so what does the future hold? As you say, four years, And you have your website I’m learning mandarin.com. Is the next year or two just Mandarin focussed? Do you, are you hoping to move on to another language?

Mischa: So I think for the time being, I’m definitely quite committed to Mandarin because I’ve reached a level, which for me personally is fairly gratifying. I mean, I’m able to have like long conversations about lots of different topics with my friends and that kind of thing.

Um, there are still things that I want to achieve in Mandarin personally, that I haven’t yet achieved. And particularly in terms of listening fluency, um, just general fluency as well. Being able to express myself. I don’t want to get to an, a native level. I’m not so sure interested in that. Like some people are, but, um, I do want to get to a slightly higher level of fluency than I am at the moment. Um, and just general improvement across, across the board in terms of listening and, and reading as well.

Um, because for example, in reading with characters, Um, I know enough that like reading novels on LingQ is generally very comfortable, but if, if they’re on paper, it’s a lot more difficult because you need to look up every word in the dictionary. And, um, although I may recognize 95%, that 5% is still very difficult to cope with on papers, not so much on LingQ.

So there are still those areas that I really want to improve. And in terms of, uh, blogging and that kind of thing, definitely want to continue blogging.

Um, my insights about my experience and I’m, I’m interested in maybe getting more into YouTube, this kind of stuff, which I’ve never done before, this is my first time. Maybe start like joining the ranks of the kind of YouTube exhibitionists who like speak different languages, which is another thing, um, I wouldn’t mind trying in the future, but so there’s a few things I’m interested in, but generally just, um, continuing, improving my Chinese and learning and blogging about the learning. Elle: Excellent. Sounds good.

I just wanna apologize if anyone can hear banging my adorable and very lively nephews are right above me. It’s kind of stomping. I don’t know if that’s going to carry through, but maybe. The joys of working from home. Um, excellent. I was going to say to you actually, yeah, you should start a YouTube channel.

Definitely. I mean, that’s where everyone’s at and you, I think it’d be great.

So, and you know, people love, you know, when you’re learning a language, you love to see, like you said that it can be done, you know, someone’s progress week by week or every other week whenever you post something. Um, yeah.

Mischa: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

I mean, those YouTube channels have really helped me. Um, particularly people like Steve Kaufmann, there’s also Luke Truman.

Yeah, but people like that, like you watch the videos and you, you can, if you’re a beginner, particularly you can see what’s possible, um, that they really can speak Chinese fluently that, um, they’ve done it in adulthood. So why can’t you? Um, and often like very insightful. So, so yeah, I’m open to contributing to that kind of thing. Elle: Perfect. Well, best of luck. We’ll be following along. I’ll pop the link to your website I’m learning mandarin.com.

I’ll also pop the link to the blog post that you wrote for the LingQ blog about learning Chinese on LingQ which is excellent. And yeah, any other. Uh, content that you mentioned, um, to, for anyone listening, watching, we’ll also be in the description. So, uh, Mischa, thank you so much. That was a really great chat and I wish you all the best luck with your blogging and maybe YouTubing in the future.

Mischa: Perfect. Thank you for having me on.

Elle: Cheers. Bye-bye.

Mischa: Thanks, bye.

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

Nicholas Edwards is an American living the dream in Japan! Not only does Nyk speak amazing Japanese, he is a musician and actor and now he has an awesome YouTube channel. In this video Elle chats with Nyk about his career in the Japanese music industry, where his channel will go next and, um, cod sperm? Yum!

Elle: Hi everyone and welcome to the link podcast with me, Elle. Remember all you English learners you can study this episode and all past episodes as a lesson on LingQ. I will always pop the lesson link in the description. If you’ve never used LingQ before, it’s a great way to study a language. You can use content you’re interested in, just like this episode, you work through the transcript, saving words and phrases translating and saving to your database, and you can also work through vocabulary activities there also.

This week’s guest is someone a little different. He is a YouTuber but he is also a musician. This week I am joined by Nyk from the channel Niku Chan Neru. Nyk, how are you?

Nyk: Good. How are you? Thank you for having me.

Elle: Oh, thank you so much for joining us. I am good. I am doing well thank you. Um, you are joining us from Japan correct?

Nyk: Yes, I am joining from Tokyo, Japan today.

Elle: Tokyo. I miss Tokyo. I didn’t live there…

Nyk: Not the best at the moment.

Elle: I was, I was going to ask, so is it rainy season? Well, for many, a few reasons I’m sure. Is it rainy season right now in Japan, too?

Nyk: Rainy season is on its way. It’s currently just starting to get humid, which as someone from the Northwest of the mainland United States, that is not my favorite kind of weather.

Elle: No. Yeah, I remember that humidity well. You step outside your door and you’re just like drenched in sweat.

Nyk: Absolutely.

Elle: Yeah.

I don’t miss that. No. Um…

Nyk: Otherwise it’s going well.

Elle: Oh, good. Good. Okay. That’s good. Um, so Nyk, you are, as I mentioned, you’re a musician, also anyone who were to check out your channel and from the name could guess, and you’re living in Japan. Uh, you speak amazing Japanese. I am blown away by your Japanese, honestly.

Um, and so the first thing I want to ask you is how did you get the Japanese bug, so to speak? Uh, what sparked your passion for all things Japanese? And how did you go about learning Japanese?

Nyk: Um, well originally… I get asked this question a lot, but I, I, and I always feel bad because I don’t have a very, um, exciting origin story.

I actually didn’t have any specific interest in learning Japanese, per se, until I was faced with having to choose a second language elective when I entered high school and at my high school, they had French, German, Spanish, and Japanese as options for us. And as someone who at the time was not particularly interested in language, um, I figured out of those four  why not Japanese? Because it’s the most different from English. It’s a different writing system. It’s a completely, well, it’s the only one that’s not a European language of what was offered. So I just thought that it would be an interesting challenge. And at the time in, in middle school, as I’m choosing my electives for the coming year in high school, I was not a very good student.

And, um, I asked my home room teacher, I was like, I think I want to learn Japanese, doesn’t that sound fun? My homeroom teacher is like, you’re going to be a straight C student at best, and you’re going to choose the most difficult language. So I was like, well now I’m definitely going to choose the most difficult language since you’ve insulted my intelligence.

And that was the, uh, the origin story more or less. Um, and my, my passion for Japanese really kind of developed after I had been studying for a few months.

Elle: Okay. That’s interesting you say that. I just, uh, I just interviewed last week, a guy called Robin McPherson and he is a polyglot YouTuber and he basically has the same story, but with French, he started studying… sorry Spanish? Spanish, and the teacher was like, nope, you’re never going to be able to learn this language.

And yeah, it’s amazing the power of, you know, rejection or…

Nyk: negative reinforcement.

Elle: Yeah.

Nyk: So my, whenever I go back home, I meet that teacher and she’s always like, you’re welcome for changing your life. So we’re on very good terms.

Elle: So that’s great that you. Are glad you got to tell her. Robin told, uh, he emailed that teacher and she never responded.

Nyk: No, I definitely. I got, um, I got my, my “told you so!” In a good way, I guess kind of moment. So that was good.

Elle: Yeah.

That’s good. That’s positive. So how long have you been living in Japan now?

Nyk: I moved to Japan in 2010, so I was 17 at the time. Um, and it is now 2021. So it’s about to be 11 years coming up this summer. Um…

Elle: Wow.

Nyk: I started studying Japanese when I was 14. I’m currently 28. So it’s been exactly half of my life since I studied Japanese, um, over a third of my life since I’ve lived here. And since I was here since I was 17, it was all of my adult life. So, um, I’m pretty, pretty in it. I’m pretty committed to this life.

Elle: For sure. Wow 17 is so young to move to a completely different country. That must’ve been exciting and kind of terrifying, no?

Nyk: Um, interestingly where I grew up, sorry, my Roomba keeps making a sound and I’m not sure if I’m too close to it. Um, interestingly, I, uh, I… what was I talking about?

Elle: I would make the excuse for you that it’s early but it’s not that early for you is it?.

Nyk: It’s not early! It’s almost 11.30 at this point. And I’ve already been awake for quite a while now. Um, and so when I, when I, when I first moved to Japan, there was of course, a lot of culture shock in, in, I guess the traditional sense as well, but because I grew up, I grew up in, I guess you could say the suburbs to the more like country area of, um, the Pacific Northwest of the United States.

So I came from a state called Oregon, um, and kind of near a city called Portland, but I didn’t grow up in the city. I grew up more, um, at the very ends of the suburbs, more towards the country area. So, um, I always look back on coming to Japan at 17 and feeling like it was a really, really good, it was good timing in the sense that my life was going to change anyways, from going from a high school student to even if I had decided to go to a university somewhere, in a city or whatever. My life was going to be changing either way. So I kind of escaped having to be like really, really accosted by the cultural differences, because I was already so surprised by just the difference of living somewhere, where you had to like get in the car and drive like for many, many miles to find a convenience store to there’s literally a convenience store

across the street from my house right now. And now that I’ve lived in Tokyo for so long, even getting up out of my bed and walking to that convenience store is like the least… the most inconvenient thing in the world to me now. I would have walked like miles for a 7-Eleven when I lived in Oregon, but now I’m definitely, uh, have become, uh, a city man.

Elle: Nice. And so you, you were always in Tokyo from, from age 17 until now you’ve been in Tokyo?

Nyk: Yeah. I’ve always lived somewhere in the inner city of Tokyo for the last 11 years.

Elle: Okay. And how are, how earthquakes these days in that part of Japan or just Japan in general. I don’t miss those I tell you what.

Nyk: They are still… I’ve gotten so used to them. Earthquakes are a common occurrence. Obviously I was here for the big one in 2011, and there’s obviously been nothing like that since that time. But every once in a while, you’ll get jostled awake by like a decent, like five pointer. I forget how to count magnitude because they use a different system here. But um…

Elle: Right.

Nyk: …I don’t even have like earthquake level, uh, I guess like a three sometimes and Tokyo, which is enough to wake you up out of sleep or at least give you a really shaky dream. Um, so those are still present, but fortunately nothing in the last 10 years that comes close to, uh, that, the 2011 one.

Elle: Good. Good. Good. Um, so talk to us about your career in the music industry in Japan. Um, how, how was it getting into the industry? Do you find it also I wonder to, it’s different, of course you’re non non-Japanese. Um, I wonder if it’s maybe in some ways that makes it more difficult or in some ways. Do you, can you kind of use that because you are a little different?

Nyk: Yeah. Um, so I, my, I originally came to Japan completely with the intention of being a singer in Japan. So that was always my goal since high school. And, um, I came to Japan just passport in hand. I didn’t have a visa at the time and I just went with no scheduled appointment to a bunch of record labels and agencies and said, I want to sing.

I just put myself out there. And, um, eventually I was blessed with the opportunity to, uh, compete on a new television show that was on Nihon Terebi, which is the Japan TV… one of the main what do you, what do we call them in English? Basic cable networks. One of the ones that you can, everybody can, everybody can watch.

So on one of the basic TV networks, uh, and it was a, it was on everywhere in Japan. And I was very lucky to have, I won that show. Um, and that eventually, uh, led to the opportunity to release music on a major record label, which was… ended up being… so I was on the show for the first time in 2011, um, which was a year after I had came to Japan originally.

Um, and that year, the, towards the fall of that year was the year that I won. And then the following year, I did a lot of different things before I ended up releasing music, I did, um, movies. And I did, uh, like stage plays. Um, I of course did a lot of live performances. Um, I did like,  like runway shows.

I was all over the place. And then in 2013, I, yeah, in 2013. So the year after that, I took a year, yeah, to kind of, um, test out all the things that I was interested in, in entertainment. And then in 2013, with Warner Music Japan, I released my first I guess it was kind of like an EP, uh, through, with them.

And, uh, I’ve been releasing music ever since I’ve put out, I don’t even know how many albums, I think, five or six. Um, and, uh, you know, as far as the music industry being what it’s like specifically as someone who’s not Japanese. Just to be completely transparent, I think that it’s a hundred percent in my case, at least definitely a, I was able to use that as a plus in almost every way that you can.

Um, one of the main reasons being that because I spoke Japanese, um, I guess, well, uh, I always wrote my own songs since my debut EP, so, um, I at least spoke Japanese.

Elle: Wow, in Japanese?

Nyk: Yes.

Yes.

So I at least wrote and spoke Japanese enough that Japanese people could appreciate that without it having to be about, you know, since it’s music, if you just hear it on the radio, you can’t tell, well, I mean, you can tell, cause I do, especially the way that I sing is just, I, I kept, I stuck with my roots a little bit, so I don’t sing exactly like in the way that people expect a Japanese person to, but, um, You know, the, the lyrics and the content, or at least to a level that a major record label was willing to release them in Japanese to Japanese people.

So, because my Japanese was at that level, I was able to kind of use the… japanese people don’t expect a person who’s not Japanese to be able to speak Japanese at that level. So I was able to use the kind of, um, I just can’t think of any of these words in English. I spend so much time speaking Japanese.

Uh, you guys say, I guess it’s kind of like, um, like the, the surprise quality, because people don’t expect it. It’s kind of, um, it’s comes off as interesting, I guess. Um, so I was able to use that definitely as, um, a plus for me. Uh, as far as maybe things that were more difficult for me as someone who’s not Japanese.

It would definitely Just be the, um, the assumption that I, I don’t know, I mean, basically when you’re in Japan, speaking Japanese and working with Japanese people, um, because Japanese people are so used to people who aren’t Japanese, not knowing about the culture, not knowing the language, you always kind of have to work with the assumption that people that you don’t know well, are going to assume that you don’t know what they’re saying or know, or even if you do know what they’re saying, you’re not going to understand what they really mean kind of thing. So, um, kind of being able to have, yeah, your opinion listened to is something that you would, one would probably struggle with as a non-Japanese person working in Japan.

But generally I would say that I wouldn’t be in the position I was, if I was not, uh, non Japanese. So I do like to make sure that I’m recognizing that I have been afforded a lot of privilege in that sense.

Elle: And you mentioned that people don’t expect, Japanese people don’t expect, as you said, non Japanese people to speak Japanese as well. Have you had any other, any standout moments, um, where, you know, people are speaking in Japanese and not expecting you to understand that have been kind of comical or satisfying for you in some way to turn around and be like, “Hey, I know what you’re saying.”

Nyk: It’s usually compliments, so I don’t think I’ve ever had anybody, um, I don’t think I’ve ever had, and most Japanese people wouldn’t, uh, even if they don’t think you’re gonna understand them, I don’t think they would… I mean, I dunno, I guess it would depend on what the situation was, but I don’t think they would generally like diss you right to your face, even if they don’t think you’re gonna understand them.

Um, but usually it would be something like, um, kind of comments on my appearance, or I guess my, my, uh, like singing or whatever it might be that they would normally, you wouldn’t compliment someone in Japan that aggressively to their face if they, if it was two Japanese people, but because they thought I wouldn’t understand, they just  were very blatantly kind, which I go ahead and count as a win in my book. Nothing that really made me uncomfortable. I don’t think. Um, but uh, definitely sometimes people thinking that I wasn’t gonna pick up what they were putting down.

Elle: And how about, uh, stand up moments, stand out sorry, moments in your music career so far. Are There are any that are especially memorable. Wonderful?

Nyk: Oh my goodness. I’ve been really blessed to have, I mean, a really great experience overall. I mean, there’s been plenty of. Sorry. I’m I don’t speak English very often.

So just to be completely transparent, I have a really terrible potty mouth because I only speak English when I’m talking to like friends from home or my family who I, well, I probably wouldn’t go Willy nilly on my mom swearing. My dad, for sure.

Elle: You can swear. You can swear This is for people learning English. Swear words are English.

Nyk: Perfect. I mean, I’ve, there’ve been, you know, really shitty moments, um, and situations that I would have of course loved to have not had to endure, but that’s really, I don’t think any of that has been specific to Japan. So I say that overall, my experience, um, working in music and entertainment in Japan has been great, especially because I’ve been able to kind of exercise a good amount of control over my career, which isn’t necessarily a luxury that’s afforded to, um, all especially people who aren’t Japanese and especially people who are, um, what in Japan they’d call idols.

Um, You know, like you gotta be skinny and can’t date anybody or whatever, it may be.

Elle: So strange.

Nyk: Yeah. Very, very unique culture there. And definitely as like a Western person, you know, I think that Western people, Western people being, you know, um, cultures that are, that are, or, uh, stem from anglo-Saxon cultures, um, like English speaking cultures, I think we tend to have a very strong sense of right and wrong and in a black and white kind of way.

And for me, a lot of those rules and those expectations at first really felt like I was like, well, I’m not gonna do that because that’s wrong. Like, why would I pretend that that’s okay. But you know, living in Japan for a long time, you realize that it’s not, you know, there’s a lot of gray areas and things like that.

And, um, even Japanese people, themselves, sometimes with rules like that, it’s not so much that they actually care if you’re, um, if you’re abiding by those rules or not so much as you’re supposed to do a really good job of pretending that you’re abiding by the rules, it’s like kind of the.

Elle: Saving face.

Nyk: Yeah, it’s the truth of that culture is that, you know, you have like idols who aren’t allowed to date, but what they’re really not allowed to do is have the public find out that they’re dating.

Elle: Be seen to not be dating.

Nyk: So, yeah, exactly. So, um, I mean, out moments in my career have been, of course in order would be, you know, winning the show was huge for me. Um, starring in a movie was very huge for me. Uh, I just recently, uh, to, I think it was two years ago now because of, um, coronavirus, it’s been a little longer than I would have hoped, but, um, uh, the year before last I released my first album where I have all the writing credits and all of the production credits.

Um, so I did…

Elle: congratulations.

Nyk: … everything from the, the artwork to the booklet, to the lyrics, to the music. Um, that was a really great one for me. Um, and of course, very recently, um, for whatever reason I, I started, I started my YouTube channel last year at the big getting of last year. Um, obviously at the very beginning of last year.

So not with the intent, like, well, if we’re all going to be at home, then I might as well YouTube. It just happened to be that timing when I started a YouTube channel, because I had produced my own album the year before. And I was really enjoying getting to kind of like, I guess, like flex my creative muscles and yeah as you may have already noticed. I like talking. So YouTube seemed like a good, good outlet for that. Um, and for whatever reason, Yeah, for whatever reason, there’s I put out, I put out a video that I’m in like a wrinkly shirt with like the worst roots, the worst roots in the world and my fake blonde hair.

And I was just like, I was just having fun. And for whatever reason, that video now has like 140 or I mean a million, 1 million 4,000 views or something.

Elle: Ooh.

Nyk: And I don’t know, I clearly wasn’t expecting it to do that well because I look disheveled as all, but, um, but people have been very kind, uh, to, you know, now find out about those who didn’t know about me on TV or through music, especially probably younger people because, um, I’m, I’ll, I’m gonna include myself, but we’re not big TV generation.

So, um, Uh, a new audience was, has been watching my content. So I’m very grateful for that. Those have been some, some really happy moments for me in my career.

Elle: Excellent. Well, I know you mentioned earlier, you said “I’m not sure how many even albums that I’ve done”, I read on your website, six mini albums and five full albums. Wow.

And that’s over, that’s over the span of….The 11, 11 years?

Nyk: 10 years, actually, it was because of my, I debuted in 2013. So that’s like basically almost an album a year, but I didn’t really say I was going to release an album last year, but you know, there was, I, I don’t, I didn’t want to, I mean, I don’t really, I guess it’s all in the past now, but, um, I made the whole album and then I ended up deciding that it just wasn’t the time to release it. And it wasn’t really the message that I wanted to be… not that it was about anything that is like rude, like in regards to this situation with the pandemic. Um, I just, it just wasn’t, my heart wasn’t in it anymore after, you know, experiencing, especially the first half of last year with all the really heavy lockdowns in Japan and whatnot.

And, um, unfortunately my heart just didn’t return to it. So I… whole new album. I, it might’ve been six, but it is going to remain five until I finish the new album that I’m working on.

Elle: Okay. And is that, and you’re working on the new album now? Cause I know you’re also in a play, which I went to ask you about.

Nyk: Yes.

Elle: What, what’s the play?

Nyk: The play is, uh, called Lazy Midnight. It’s about basically, um, Japanese people are real sticklers for not, uh, saying the actual name of the inspiration. So I’m just going to say there’s a, there’s a, there’s a, uh, a national television station that’s run by the government in Japan.

Uh, let everybody just remember what it’s called by themselves. And, uh, we kind of play on that and call our TV station and the play NKH. So it’s a story about like a group of people working on making a new television program for this completely fictional NKH station. And, um…

Elle: NKH. I love it.

Nyk: And, uh, it’s basically about like the directors and the producers and the assistant directors and the people kind of working to make that show a reality and kind of just the ups and downs of that. And then a bunch of different like surprise, uh, there’s like fantasy elements to it as well. Um, it’s the first stage play that I’ve done in almost exactly 10 years.

Cause I did my first stage play when I was nine 19. Um, and oh my God was that, not a bad experience, but it was a very difficult experience because that play and this current play I’m, um, the only foreign foreign person, the only non-Japanese person, non native Japanese person in the cast. Um, so I have to be extra careful to make sure that I’m not, I’m not, my Japanese is not giving away my, my foreignness because I’m just, my character’s name is Iwabuchi Kotaro so it’s just a Japanese name. So, um, I guess that’s the fantasy element.

Elle: So working on the play, working on your album. And how about your channel? What can everyone who’s going to rush and subscribe to your channel after listening, what can they expect moving forward from your channel?

Nyk: Um, interestingly, I originally wanted my YouTube channel to be a travel channel because I, my, one of my biggest passions after music and language is travel, which I mean, actually my biggest, my big passion is that I just love culture and in all forms, specifically art, um, and the way that, that influences kind of culture as a whole.

So a big part of that is traveling to see all these different places and the way that each place has kind of left its mark on society at large. And so I travel a lot within Japan because as a musician I tour, um, and so my original plan with YouTube was that I was going to take YouTube along with me on these tours.

And I usually, um, okay I was going to say forced to like I’m at gunpoint. My management forces me to go back to Tokyo, but my, I ended up being scheduled to do like, um, because of the way that Japan is shaped and the proximity of everything. I ended up going to a city doing a show, that night going to the next city, sleeping in a hotel, doing a show the next day, going to the next city.

So I don’t really get to like sit and, not sit, but, you know, stay and enjoy each particular place.

Elle: Appreciate where you are.

Nyk: Yeah. And with YouTube, I figured it would be a good opportunity for me to do the show, take a day in between to kind of experience the place, film and do stuff like that. Um, and then of course our now dear friend coronavirus has not made that possible. So, um, my YouTube channel kind of ended up being a, I guess, commentary sort of channel. And I mostly kind of sit and talk about, which is fine with me because those that’s interesting to me as well, but I talk about kind of the ways living in Japan has changed me as an American person or a Western person or a man or whatever.

Um, and then I kind of compare and contrast American and Japanese culture or Western and Japanese culture and, um, But, you know, I’m ready to get out on the road hopefully soon. Um, so that is definitely something that I think, I think everybody can look forward to on my YouTube channel is a lot more, um, hopefully taking people around Japan because I, I love to also, I guess this ties in with culture as well.

I love to eat and drink. I mean I’m alive. So I guess everybody who’s alive likes to eat and drink, but I mean, I like to try things that I haven’t tried before. I’m a very big, um, I’ll eat anything. Uh, so, and that is that it means something completely different when you’re in Japan than it does.

Elle: I was going to say you’re in the perfect country. I ate some really weird things when I was in Japan, I still can’t quite believe. It’s pretty out there. Some of the stuff . For sure.

Nyk: You just got to, I mean, what… in Japan once you, there’s a few specific ones that if you check off, it like doesn’t get much worse than that. So, I mean, um, I definitely like to, uh, experience food and, you know, Japan has a lot of its own different, um, alcoholic beverages as well, that I would never, that you would never run into in the states.

And those are, you know, each made individually in each place based off like what kind of, um, what kind of, uh, What’s the word I’m looking for? Uh, harvest. What kind of crops? Crops.

Elle: What’s grown locally.

Nyk: What kind of crops they have. Yes.

Yes.

What’s grown locally.

So, um, I want to take more or hopefully have more opportunities to kind of introduce those, uh, differences between even just Japanese major cities and obviously not just major cities.

I have one video where I went to Niigata in, uh, on the, the, uh, the, well, in Japan, it’s called the Japan Sea that Japan seaside of, um, Japan. Uh, and so I have only one, which was the, during the time when they did the, uh, Go To campaign here in Japan, where it was like everybody travel and then… yeah, it, it backfired.

So we’re back where we started, but, uh, I did get, I did sneak one video in there. So a little taste of what I hope that I can, uh, bring more of in the coming year or, or as, you know, the situation gets.

Elle: Excellent. Well, it sounds so fun. What’s the weirdest thing you’ve eaten so far in Japan, just out of interest? Can you choose one?

Nyk: Well, I mean, I think definitely the most shocking one and I don’t want to like offend anybody, I don’t want to have everybody clutching their pearls, but, um, the most, the one that’s just like the most shocking to say out loud in English is definitely the it’s called in Japanese.

It’s called shirako, which, it means “white child”. So it’s Cod um, I don’t know what this it’s it’s…

Elle: Is it testicles?

Nyk: No, it’s Cod sperm.

Elle: Oh, okay. I think, I think I’ve had that. Yeah.

Nyk: And that is a very not, I mean, Japanese people eat… that that’s not rare to find on a menu, so that’s not even one of like the, you have to go to like, Some like dark cove in Southern Japan to find it like, it’s definitely, it you’ll find it on like menus, especially in the winter.

Um, things like that. Probably uh little tiny full squids or stuff like that, I guess. So probably those are, and not only do I have, I tried those, but I like, like all of those. That’s where it gets dark.

Elle: And I liked it. Have you tried to cow tongue?

Nyk: Yes.

Elle: It’s my favorite.

Nyk: That’s very good. Yes.

And you know that it didn’t even cross my mind to say that because it’s so that’s like definitely you can find that anywhere that they sell meat in Japan.

I mean, usually they’re not feeding it to you as is. So there it’s, it just looks like a piece of meat by the time it arrives at your plate. But definitely when I had my dad come over, um, well my dad and my brother come over and as soon as I was like, well, we’ll get, we’ll get this, like this, uh, like fine meat and this like red meat and then the tongue and my dad’s like, the what?

Elle: Excuse me?

Nyk: You know, the tongue, like what? And, uh, probably older Western people aren’t as shocked by this, but, um, my generation is shocked even by like liver. So like, uh, just like a thick piece of liver. Um, apparently my grandma’s like, “we used to eat…” my grandma doesn’t have an accent I don’t know why I just…

Elle: In my day…

Nyk: Yeah. So…

Elle: It’s good for you apparently.

Nyk: They use to eat liver apparently, but my parents’ generation finds that to be just as offensive. Um, but those, the tongue and the liver are, are staples for sure.

Elle: It’s high in iron, I know, liver. I think  it’s disgustngi. I just, I can’t eat it. I just don’t like the taste, but yeah…

Nyk: It has a, a unique texture as well. So I understand why people would not be, you know, huge fans of the liver. Um, especially because Japanese people are all secretly eating it raw. If you weren’t aware.

Elle: Uh, I was not aware.

Nyk: Yeah, you’re not supposed to eat it raw because obviously, I mean, it’s not a super, um, common thing, but obviously it can be contaminated and it can make you sick.

But, um, Japanese people, Japanese servers will come up to you and be like with a plate of liver and they’ll be like, “make sure you cook it.” And everybody’s like, “oh, okay, we’re going to cook it.” And then just like, without even touching the, without even touching the grill, just kind of like pass it over and then straight  raw. It’s called nebasashi. And that’s definitely quite the delicacy. Yeah.

I mean, those ones are,,I have become so second nature to me. I forgot that they were even gross.

Elle: So you, I mean, you know, it’s gross to me cause it’s gross to me. I like to try different foods, but I can’t do liver, but um, so you, you eat that then? Do you eat it? You’ve eaten it raw? You will raw when you’re out?

Nyk: I prefer, I prefer it raw.

Elle: Wow.

Nyk: Cause when it’s, when it’s cooked  for a long time, it’s cooked is when it gets that really kind of like sandy texture. Um, and when it’s raw, I mean, there’s, there’s no way that I’m going to explain it, that it’s going to like, oh, that sounds better.

I mean, it’s awful if you don’t like that stuff, but, but, you know, I mean, I’ve, I’ve never been a picky eater and, but I had no idea. I was not, I was this not picky of an eater until I came to Japan.

Elle: Well, uh, we can certainly, I’ll look forward to watching you eat your way through Japan on your channel. That sounds like so much fun. And, um, yeah, I’ll pop the link to your channel and the description, of course. It’s such a fun channel. Great. For anyone listening, who is studying Japanese, just interested in Japanese culture also. Nyk, thank you so much for joining us today. Really appreciate it. It was a great chat.

Nyk: Thank you so much for having me.

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

YouTuber Robin MacPherson is passionate about language learning, so much so that he has created his own language learning tool, Journaly. He also wrote a book titled How to Maintain Languages which help readers… you guessed it, maintain their languages! In this episode Robin shares how his love from languages started, the methods he uses and more.

Elle: Hello everyone and welcome to the LingQ podcast with me Elle. Remember if you’re studying English, you can study the transcript to this podcast episode as a lesson on LingQ. I will always pop the lesson link in the description. If you’ve never used LingQ before a LingQ lesson allows you to read through and lesten and also watch in this case to a piece of content in English, translating the words and phrases that you don’t know, saving them to your own personal database and then learning English from content you’re actually interested in. So check it out.

The lesson link, as I said, is in the description and you can also find all past episode lessons there also.

Today. I have another wonderful guest for you. He is a polyglot YouTuber, also designer, software engineer and a data scientist, no big deal. Um, Robin McPherson, how are you, Robin?

Robin: I’m doing very well. How are you today?

Elle: I’m great. I’m great. Thank you. Thank you so much for joining us at the end of your day, because you are joining us from the UK, correct?

Robin: Yeah, that’s right.

Although it’s funny just a couple months ago, you and I would have been in the same time zone.

Elle: Right, because you were in San Francisco?

Robin: Right, exactly. Yeah.

Elle: Um, so whereabouts in the UK are you now?

Robin: So I am now in Bristol. Um, I guess we call the Southwest. Um, yeah. Yeah.

And you’re in Vancouver, right?

Elle: Yes. Yes.

Vancouver, originally though, and we talked about this before we started recording I’m from Cardiff, which is basically right next door to Bristol. Yeah.

Yep.

Robin: Awesome.

Elle: Sunny, sunny Cardiff, sunny Bristol. So, uh, so Robin, as I mentioned, you are a, uh, YouTube… uh, polyglot YouTuber rather. Your channel is such a wealth of knowledge for anyone who is, um, actively learning a language, maintaining a language, interested in learning languages. So tell us what, uh, what languages have you studied?

Robin: Yeah, so I’ve studied, um, Spanish was the first one I did independently.

Um, then Japanese was the language that I really like fell in love with not just languages, but… well, not just Japanese, but the art and science of learning languages. After that was French. Um, I don’t remember the order after that, but then there’s, um, Portuguese, Italian, German, Swedish.

Um, now I did also learn Dutch, um, at one point, uh, to a reasonably high level, but I no longer speak Dutch. Um, and then Mandarin Chinese has been a language that I’ve been learning most recently for the last couple of years.

Elle: That was a really varied selection of languages. So Spanish was the first language you, you studied, you said?

Robin: I did French in school, but I was so terrible at learning languages, um, that my teacher said I would never speak a foreign language.

Um, so that prediction ended up not being true, thankfully. Um, but Spanish was the first one that I actually said, I want to learn a language. Uh, I was 16. It’s one of the only things in my life, I have no clue why I, you know, like so many I’ve done so many things like skateboarding or basketball where I can remember the moment like that I was inspired to do it by somebody else.

Elle: Right.

Robin: Spanish was the first thing.

I just, I have no idea, but I just called, my mom was like, mom, can you get me a… cause back then I had no clue. I’m like, can you buy me like a CD? Or a book? Uh, so she got me, you know, Fluent in Six Weeks. Um, the little book and a CD with some flashcards you could cut out.

That was where it all began.

Elle: Wow. And so to go back to what you said about that teacher, I think that is amazing. Have you… that was a French teacher. Have you spoken to that teacher since?

Robin: No, I did try to reach out, um, at one point after I got out of uni. Uh, but I didn’t hear back.

Um, so yeah, it’s a shame.

Elle: Yeah, yeah. Wow. I wonder if that spurred your interest to actually prove, him, her?

Robin: Her

Elle: That teacher wrong. To prove her wrong.

Robin: I’ve never had that. I think, um, I, it’s not really in my personality, but I will say after having sort of become so passionate about language learning and also most of all seeing the effects that had on my life. I mean, all the best things that have happened in my life, even things that are not to do with languages, like becoming a software engineer, for example, none of that would have been possible without at some point realizing that I could learn a language. That’s how it began.

And so I’ve often wondered how many people are just like I was, but they don’t ever, for whatever reason, their life doesn’t present that discovery that no, you actually can do this?

Uh, and that’s what made me, honestly, that’s been one of the most powerful driving forces in terms of me wanting to help people not just learn languages, but sort of, it sounds cheesy, but you know, believe in their ability to learn independently much beyond languages. I’ve just found that languages have been my best vehicle to making that positive impact.

But certainly my aspirations are that, you know, the work I do to help people learn languages, hopefully it then goes on to have a bigger impact in their lives as it did mine.

Elle: And so tell us about your methods then.

So you, the first language that you truly learned was Spanish, and I’m sure your methods have perhaps changed over the years, but what are the key aspects to the, your language learning method?

Robin: Um, I think that these days I would overall classify myself as sort of an input first learner. I don’t tend to speak until much later on. I’ve actually been documenting the process recently of finally starting to speak in Mandarin Chinese after two years. Um, so, um, you know, I almost think it’s gotten simpler over the years.

Um, you know, where the beginning stages, it really depends on what’s available, you know, uh, I find the beginning stages, uh, wherever it’s an app that I like, or a certain textbook, basically finding a good set of resources.

But basically the first phase of learning for me is about seeing as much of the language is like can.

Um, so it’s not about mastering anything. It’s, I just want to see all of it in terms of the key structures, the key grammar things like once I’ve seen at least a few times, like, okay, that’s how you do the past tense, or this is how you do that. Even if I forget it, I’ve seen it now. So it’s, it’s the, it’s the entire journey after that.

Yeah.

Is about actually, um, cultivating and sort of deepening my knowledge of all these things. So first phase is sort of finding a set of resources I like, so I can see everything.

Uh, and then after that is where it gets more interesting to me where I do a variety of things such as I like reading a lot.

So I do enjoy extensive reading. However, one thing that I find makes me a bit different than lots of people who certainly follow my stuff, I’m a big fan of more intensive reading as well. A lot of the methods that I use tend to be a little bit more intensive. Um, and I also say, I always say, I’m, I’m a depth first learner.

So I tend to use relatively few resources, but I tend to go very deep on them. Um, and, and then, so, and then that kind of honestly takes me all the way through my, my journey.

Um, and the reason why I say I’m sort of depth first is that, you know, programming, we have this, these two concepts depth first versus breadth first.

Right?

Elle: Okay.

Robin: So the approach of either going deep before you go wide or going wide before you go deep. And I find that by just having a few really good resources that I go really deep on, um, it actually makes maintaining languages, um, a lot easier for me. And it also makes it easier coming back to languages later because I have a much narrower set of things that I know really, really, really well.

And so maintaining a language or getting back to it becomes quite simple.

I just have these, these things I go back to, um, Yeah, I guess I could talk for hours about my different methods and stuff, but I would say I want to see everything. And then I want to combine things like extensive and intensive reading.

I want to combine sort of extensive listening with things like transcription. I do a lot of substitution, uh, manipulation drills. Um, and then the other thing that I think makes my learning style perhaps stand out online at least, is that I tend to develop my speaking skills without really talking to people in the beginning.

Um, yeah. And this is a style that developed mostly out of necessity where I just didn’t have people to talk to. Um, and I didn’t have the money to book a tutor or something.

So there are a number of languages where I actually became quite proficient at speaking and expressing myself without really talking to a human.

Um, and then I ended up finding out there were loads of people online who for one reason or another don’t have people to talk to. And it turns out people are quite fascinated by this idea that you could develop your speaking skills without actually speaking to people if you need to. So.

Elle: Interesting. Do you mean then that you kind of talk to yourself or you talk about what you’re doing in the day? I know that that’s a method.

Robin: Yeah, but there’s, I find there’s loads of stuff. And recently I’ve been developing a lot of my own methods.

Like there’s one that I love talking about, uh, what I call the podcast interview method, where, you know, it’s basically a method where I pretend I’m on a podcast like this, and I pretend that you’re going to ask me a question, but I basically take the exact same question every day of the week for a full week.

Um, and I, I do my best to give a different answer every time, same answer, but there’s no script. And what happens is that throughout the week I get better and better and better at answering that one question. So I start to get this immense depth. I develop my vocabulary. And then the last two days I’ve tried to give a completely new answer altogether as a way to get the spontaneity in there.

That’s just one example.

So I have all these different methods I do. Some of them like that one do involve actually speaking, but I do also find things like extensive reading will improve what’s called automatic processing. My ability to sort of formulate thoughts or parse language as it comes in. So yeah, lots of stuff.

But yeah, I find you can actually become quite comfortable speaking, if you need to, without having to talk to others.

Elle: Excellent. I really liked that idea. I might try that in French this week. So, so you, you take a question and then each day you answer it, they, you said the final two days you answered something completely different.

That’s great. Okay.

Robin: What I do is it’s like I’ll have, I’ll have like Google Translate or something of my favorite dictionary, something open. And then the first day I find the, wow, I’m lacking a lot of vocab, you know, if the question’s about design. It’s like, oh yeah. I don’t know how to say any of these words in French.

Um, but so the first day is more about like figuring some stuff out, but then the second day it’s like referencing it. I’ll have a list, right? Um, I may even go ask some people that I know people, but the point is that by the third, fourth and fifth day, you, it becomes less about, oh God, what are the words?

And it becomes more about, okay, now I’m actually just focusing on how to express myself. So it kind of isolates that problem, but as a by-product you learn all the words. Um, and then, like I said, the last two days you get that spontaneity that is much more lifelike where now it’s like, okay, how can I, you know, improvise on this subject?

Uh, and I find that you could either do that several weeks in a row with related questions. So you go deep on a topic or you could do different topics every week, and then you grow the amount of topics you can discuss.

Elle: I really like this. I am going to give this a try.

Robin: I’m glad you like it. I’ll send you a video.

Elle: Oh yeah. Excellent. Thank you. So it sounds like maybe your, um, your career as a software engineer really influences your language learning. Would you, would you say?

Robin: Certainly influenced how I view languages. Um, you know, I now view languages almost like systems. Um, and this came from building not just sort of software engineering, but in particular, working on software architecture where, yeah languages are kind of similar, you know, there, there are different… and I say similar in that there are these moving pieces that interact with each other, you know? And so for example, that’s how grammar works, right? It’s like, well, if we change this piece, maybe the, maybe we go from talking about one person to two people.

Well, that has an impact over here, perhaps, um, maybe a conjugation or a declension or something, right? And that, that perspective came from being a software engineer and it kind of simplified things, especially languages like German or Russian, where the grammar can be quite complex. It’s kind of cool to be like, it’s just a system.

You know? It’s like having cars where one car may have more moving pieces and more components to it. And another one… but they’re all still cars. And it’s just about understanding how this one is different than that one.

Elle: Excellent. And in terms of maintaining all the languages that you know, um, you literally wrote the book. So you wrote a book called How to Maintain Languages. And what was your inspiration for writing that book?

Robin: I think early on, I got very inspired by some of the, um, sort of, uh, pioneers of the polyglot um, Community, which I think now is really blossomed into more of a broad language learning community. Um, and with that, I did begin learning quite a few languages quite early.

And then I found that at a certain point, it was a mess, you know, where I have like one or two languages that were, that were really high levels. And then I had a whole bunch and it was very overwhelming just to even keep them at a basic level concurrently. I just thought I have to figure this out because I want to learn these languages.

Um, and those are almost exact same ones I know today except for Chinese.

Um, and so, yeah, I just thought I have to figure out a system that works for my life. Something that is sustainable, that will allow me to not only keep them at the same level, but over time deepen my knowledge of all of these languages.

And so the next couple of years was me trying to do that and it worked really well. And so, and then I realized this was a massive problem that I didn’t, I felt people weren’t discussing in enough depth. And so that’s when I decided to write the book.

Elle: Excellent. Now I know you can’t condense, you wrote a whole book, you can’t condense that into some soundbites, but, um, what are your key tips for maintaining languages?

Robin: I think there’s a few, I think, um, the biggest perhaps underlying realization that I had was that you don’t have to do everything all the time, right? I think a lot of people perhaps view language maintenance as like, you know, gotta do every language every day.

Uh, and I think realizing that there are many, many ways to do this, um, that are quite intricate and, and, but also quite simple, that’s really helpful. Uh, I think there are certain techniques. I have like one, like whole little language projects where once in a while I’ll take a language that I haven’t really been working on enough,

um, or as much as I want to, and I’ll say, you know what, for the next week or two weeks I’m going to do a project with that language, right? Um, and it could be like, I’m going to read a novel if it’s a really high level language, or it could be, I’m going to watch a single episode of this TV show, whatever it is.

And just having that, understanding that it’s okay to just pause, take one week or whatever, however long it takes to do a little project in this language. And in doing that, I can really boost, um, that level. I can… it’s amazing.

The long-term impact that has on keeping my languages fresh, but in the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t really take much away from whatever else I was doing.

And so that’s an example of a technique I have that I think long-term helps me enormously in keeping languages sharp and fresh, but also continuing to deepen them over time.

Elle: Great. Well, I’ll leave the, uh, the link to the book in the description. If anyone is interested, I think it’s such a great topic because there are so many books on, you know, learn this language. Learn it, learn it, get it in. But what about once you have a decent level, you do need to not lose it, which is such a shame, you know, it happens.

So, yeah, it’s a, it’s a great topic. Uh, another interesting, um, project that you’ve been working on lately I would love to hear about, this is exciting for anyone who’s learning a language, but especially anyone who’s learning a new language and enjoys writing.

So tell us about Journaly.

Robin: Yeah. So Journaly is a project that I’ve been working on for now three and a half years. Um, and it’s basically a foreign language writing platform. Now I’ve centered the concept around the idea of journaling because journaling is a habit based thing. Um, It’s something that I found through doing research and surveys, like loads of people want to journal even just for their own lives, right?

It’s such a helpful positive habit and it involves writing.

And I think that writing is the most underused tool for learning languages. Um, and I think it’s so powerful. So I wanted to build a tool that would hopefully from a design perspective, make it as easy as possible to write, right? Like, because I think a lot of people don’t write, because it’s it’s effortful, right?

It takes effort, right? So it was about how can I create a place where you can write, but also one of the things, this is why I love writing is the feedback element, right? It is the best way in my opinion, to get the most granular, amazing feedback, right?

When you’re speaking, it’s pretty hard for someone to stop you constantly and everything else, even if you record it, it’s like, it’s very difficult to package that feedback for you.

And then for you to digest it, writing is such a great way to do that. So with Journaly, basically you can come, you can write in any language you want. We support all languages. Um, if any languages are not there, you can just write to me and I’ll add it to the database immediately. Um, we have over a hundred languages already supported.

Um, you can get feedback from native or advanced speakers and I’ve built these tools where I, for example, you can highlight exactly a certain piece of text and then open a thread. And then have a discussion inside of that thread.

So your feedback ends up exactly where it belongs. It doesn’t just go to the bottom of the page and you scroll up and down again.

It’s like, how can it, how can we make it as easy as possible for you to both give feedback to somebody, but also collect it. And, and then the other aspect of Journaly is that we don’t just collect language data. We collect topic data. So what’s this post about? And so the long-term goal is to not be transactional.

It’s so that you can actually meet people on journally that have similar interests, not just similar languages, right?

So if you’re learning Japanese and you love gardening or plant, houseplants or interior design, wouldn’t it be great if you could find someone that’s a Japanese speaker, learning English, who’s journaling about plants and interior design so that you too could actually potentially have a long-term connection?

So it’s writing, it’s feedback, it’s… but it’s also about building community.

Elle: I love that aspect of it too. Yeah, that’s right. And so it’s live now when you said a hundred languages.

Robin: Yeah, I think we over a hundred languages now. Yeah.

It’s live right now. Um, yeah, it’s a journaly.com. It’s honestly, it’s, I’ve been blown away by the… it’s only been live for about five months now.

I’m still technically in beta, but we already have almost 10,000 posts. Um, and the biggest thing is that we have now about 130,000 comments have been posted on those eight to 10,000 posts. Um, which, which sounds insane, but it’s because somebody will say, “Hey, this should be this way. Not that way.” And then somebody will respond and say, “oh, could I do this.”

Somebody else will chip in. So you have these gorgeous threads. Um, so that’s been the biggest surprise is that people are willing to do it. And the biggest… I’ve gotten this feedback that it’s addictive, it’s addictive to realize five minutes of my day, just reading someone’s posts, leaving a few comments that just changed their life today.

You know, like that’s solid gold that they couldn’t otherwise get. And so some people just come on every day and just correct like 10 or 20 posts. Um, and that’s my other favorite thing about Journaly is realizing that yeah, I don’t need one Korean native speaker for every Korean learner. I just, I just need a few really enthusiastic, engaged native speakers that can then impact like thousands of learners.

So it’s really cool.

Elle: Wonderful. Yeah.

Very cool. I’ll again, put the link in the description for anyone who is interested in checking out Journaly. Okay.

So for the rest of the year, what can people expect who subscribe to your channel? And now I’m sure everyone listening will go straight to Robin and subscribe.

What can they expect from your channel for the rest of the year and beyond?

Robin: So I do a lot of things where I document myself doing things in real time. So the last two years I’ve been documenting learning Mandarin from zero, right? As an example, right now I’m documenting, developing, spoken fluency, but I also do things in all my other languages.

Um, so there’s a lot of things like watch me become able to understand authentic podcasts, right? And how, how do we do it? How do I adapt in the middle? Things like that? I do a lot of videos just explaining methods. Um, almost like tutorials, like here’s a method for doing this. I’m doing a lot more interviews now and collaborations, which are really fun.

Um, and then I’m also going to be doing more sort of short documentary stuff that I originally was my goal on YouTube. My oldest video is like a short documentary about my life in Japan. So I’m going to be having a lot more artistic pieces that incorporate more interesting filmmaking stuff that has been a deep passion of mine, but I couldn’t do much before with a full-time job and everything else.

Now, this is my job finally. So basically a pretty big variety…

Elle: Those pesky jobs getting in the way of all the fun.

Robin: Everything is in playlists. That’s one thing I try to do on my channel. So like anyone who’s interested, it’s a bit overwhelming.

Uh, I know a lot of people have a lot of videos, so I do try to put them in playlists.

Yeah.

I do a lot of series where it’s like, You know, here’s a series about extensive reading or here’s a series about X, Y, Z. So…

Elle: Fantastic. Well, as I said, I’ll pop the link to your channel and also to your book, How to Maintain Languages and to Journaly in the description. So everyone check those out and Robin, best of luck with all of your projects and your channel.

And thank you so so much for joining me today. It was a great, interesting chat.

Robin: Yeah. Thank you for having me.

It was really pleasant to talk to you and, uh, I look forward to seeing all of your future guests as well.

Elle: Excellent. Great. Thank you Robin.

Robin: Bye-bye.

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

Davide runs the awesome Podcast Italiano. In this chat with Elle he shares the things that make learning Italian tough, the different dialects of Italian and how they are viewed in Italy and he also shares some tips on starting a podcast.

Elle: Hi everyone and welcome to the LingQ podcast with me Elle. Today I am joined by YouTuber and podcaster Davide of the Podcast italiano. How are you Davide?

Davide: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

I’m very, I’m very well. How are you?

Elle: Excellent. I’m great. Thank you. I’m doing well. Um, so you’re joining us today from Italy. Whereabouts in Italy are you?

Davide: I’m in Turin or Turin. I’m never quite sure how it’s pronounced in English. It’s a city in the north Western part of Italy, not too far from France and that’s where I was born. And I’m still, still living here.

Elle: Excellent. And how has May in Turin?

Davide: How is what sorry?

Elle: How is May, how is it right now there, the spring?

Davide: Oh, the month of May?

Elle: Yeah.

Davide: Um, it’s a bit rainy, to be honest. Um, and also, I mean, in terms, if we’re, if we’re talking about COVID, uh, I think it’s good. It’s getting a little better because that’s the main topic, the topic of convo… conversation. These days, it’s been a little better.

Uh, some restrictions have been lifted all over Italy. So, yeah. You know, that’s a bit better. It’s it’s been, it’s been tough these last couple months here in Italy, the whole COVID situation was pretty bad. Vaccination… vaccine rollout was pretty slow. Now it seems we’re, you know, we’re getting a little bit… it’s getting better.

We’re seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. So yeah, we’re more optimistic about the whole situation, but yeah, today it’s raining. So that’s always, you know, a little sad.

Elle: Yeah.

Yeah.

It sounds like, well that’s May in Vancouver, too. That’s that could be any time in Vancouver where I am. It’s very rainy. So that’s great to hear about COVID because of course Italy was in the news a lot and just some really, really sad… stories coming out of Italy, but that that’s good to hear that things are, things are looking up. So Podcast Italiano, uh, you’ve been running it since 2016, right?

Davide: Yeah exactly, yeah.

Elle: Congratulations. Um, what inspired you to start the podcast?

Davide: Well, I was, uh, I was into language learning. Um, I had been for a couple years, so… and I have to say that LingQ played a big part in, in my language learning process because it helped me a lot, especially with Russian.

Um, so yeah, I was already into language learning and I thought, why not create something that can be useful for people learning Italian? Uh, create some interesting, useful content in Italian. That’s not in English or any other kind of, um, you know, like, you know, oftentimes people will explain another language in English and I don’t like that.

You know, I, when I’m my, my idea right from the start was to create content that’s a hundred percent in Italian and that’s hopefully interesting, which is the philosophy that, you know, I think you, you’re trying to pursue with LingQ, you know, having content that’s, that’s interesting and that you can read and, and, and listen to.

And that’s what I did. And that’s what I’ve been trying to do for the past couple of years, I started out with a podcast and then one year later I opened the YouTube channel and I would say nowadays I’m more focused on the YouTube channel, which is called Podcast Italiano because that’s, you know, the podcast came first, came first.

So the name stuck, uh, on the YouTube channel as well. But yeah, so I’m, I guess I’m, I’m probably more uh, focused on the, on the YouTube channel now, but yeah, but yeah, I’m still making lots of content. Um, and yeah, hopefully people will find it interesting.

Elle: Well, I mean, the channel’s doing really well, so I think they are, I was looking around earlier and it’s a real treasure trove.

I’m not studying Italian, but for anyone who is, it’s a real treasure trove of, uh, of advice, information, and, uh…

Davide: yeah. One thing I wanted to say is that my channel is, and my podcast is probably more for people who are at an intermediate level or even at an advanced level. I would say it really depends on the type of video or podcast episode, but most of my content is not for beginners.

And my goal is to create something that can help bridge the gap between beginner con… beginner’s, con beginner content and something that’s for native speakers. So 100% authentic content. So I guess, I guess that’s my philosophy. And I know Steve always talks about the need for that type of content. And that’s what I’ve been doing.

Elle: What would you say to someone who’s just starting out in Italian then? Are there any resources that you think are great for beginners that then they can start with and then move on to your, to your content?

Davide: Good question. Um, I’m not sure actually where, what I would use if I were starting out with Italian.

I know there’s a, there’s a, there’s um, a book called “Italian by the Nature Method”, which is pretty old, but I think it it’s pretty, it’s pretty good because it’s, you know, it’s this idea of learning Italian with, you know, just by pure input, listening and reading a little bit, like what you do with LingQ, which of course is always, is also a great place if you’re looking for content with your mini stories.

Yeah.

uh mini-stories, you know. It’s a little bit like that, actually. It’s a little bit like mini stories with audio, but it was done in the sixties I think. And it’s all up on YouTube for free. So that’s something you could use, but I don’t know actually where people start when they’re, when they want to start out with, um, learning Italian.

Um, yeah, I don’t know. There’s a lot of YouTube channels, uh, that are great for people who have an intermediate level, but it really depends where you’re coming from in terms of your languages, which languages do you know? Because like, if, if you already know Spanish, you can understand most of my videos.

I actually, even if they’re targeted at intermediate or advanced learners, you can understand most of it. At least that’s what I hear from Spanish speakers. They write in the comments. “Oh, I understand. I don’t know why, but I can understand almost everything you’re talking about.” If you’re, I don’t know if you’re an English speaker and maybe Italian is the first language you’re learning, you should probably start with something that’s a little bit simpler. Yeah, LingQ is a, is a great place for that actually, you know, that’s my, and that’s been my philosophy, like, you know, focusing on input, um, and, uh, You know, and that’s why I don’t like apps like Duolingo or those kinds of beginner apps that, you know, are not very enticing.

Um, so, so yeah, beginner content.

Elle: And what about, um, you’ve of course you get, you get so much engagement on your channel and, um, in comments and your podcasts, what are some of the issues that kind of jump out at you that people are having with Italian? What are some of the common, uh, difficulties?

Davide: Uh huh. So you’re talking about the grammar mainly?

Elle: Uh, sure. If that’s something that jumps out, is, is that an issue that people… or is it like pronunciation that generally people are asking you more about?

Davide: Well, I wouldn’t say pronunciation is too hard compared to other European, you know, you’re talking about the, the main languages that people learn at least here in the west.

Um, I don’t think Italian is that difficult when it comes to pronunciation. Um, yeah, so there’s one thing that might be a little that’s, you know, that’s peculiar here in Italy, which is we have, we have dialects. Um, we have lots of dialects, but what we mean by dialects is, is not what English speakers mean by dialects, because I think in English, the way dialect is used is to refer to varieties of English.

So like you have, you know, varieties in the US or in the UK or in Australia or in South Africa. In Italy, we have a lot of sister languages… so languages that are, that were born from Latin and that developed alongside Italian. So they’re actually different languages, but we called them … for historical reasons.

And so people are often afraid that they will go to, I don’t know, Sicily and people will speak Sicilian to them and they will not understand. I don’t think it’s that big of an issue, uh, these days, because everybody in Italy speaks Italian or Standard Italian, if you will. But there’s, there are still a lot of people, especially in certain parts of Italy who, who speak  and who will kind of code switch between or code mix between Italian and the, the regional language or dialect.

The terminology is always confusing because, you know, we don’t mean the same thing with dialect. So, um, I, so yeah, if you go to Sicily, people might speak in Italian, but use some regional words here and there. So that’s something that people are, you know, scared, scared of, but I wouldn’t say, you know, I’m not really sure if people should be scared of that really, because it really depends. And I know that like where, where I live, it’s not that big of a deal at all because they’re, the dialect is not used at all almost. So maybe it might differ a little bit, if you go to other parts of Italy, but yeah. That’s something that comes up a lot.

Something else that, something else that comes up a lot is, um, and I think you wanted to talk about this a little bit, so it might be a segue to a different question, is like sometimes, or oftentimes people go to Italy and try to speak Italian with Italians and they will receive, you know, Italians will speak English to them.

Um, not always, but it is a, uh, it is a common problem problem. I think, especially when I would say, especially in very touristy places and tourist destinations. That’s, that’s common. And also, especially if you have a very strong accent and you come to Italy and you try to speak Italian, and it’s very, it’s very clear that, you know, you’re from, I dunno, the US or the UK.

You know, sometimes, sometimes you might, you might run… run against that problem of Italians answering in, uh, replying in, in English, maybe because they want to practice English. So yeah. So getting Italians to speak Italian with you and not English. Um, yeah. And then, you know, there are grammar, grammar, things that are hard and there are, that are peculiar, um, that maybe other languages don’t have, I don’t know if you want to get, get into that, but, um, it might be a little bit technical.

Elle: Sure. Maybe..Yeah, maybe just one, one grammar point. I’m interested. For sure.

Davide: Yeah. There are two, two particles, which are… two words, uh, that are quite tricky in Italian, which are …  to give you an example, if you want to say something like, um, so if you want to say, what do you think about this? In Italian you’re going, you’re going to say … which is “what” … which is “about this” in one word and … which is “think”. … so this … particle alongside with … is complicated because it’s, um, like a substitute for certain preposition.

So in English you might say to think, “what do you think about”, or “of this? It’s like, if, instead of saying, um, “…about this?” you would have another word that would substitute “…about this”. So, because we can say “about this” as well. …”what do you think about this?”

But you can also say … so it’s like, um, it’s like a, it’s like a pronoun of it, of a preposition. So instead of the full preposition, you’re using this weaker form, if you will. Didn’t do a very good job of explaining what it is, but, you know, uh, that’s something that, um, you don’t have in Spanish, that you have in French, actually. If you know French, by the way, I think you think you’re learning French, right?

Or you mentioned… so yeah. Yeah.

You have the same thing in French because you have …. So, so, so … so that’s the same thing that you have in French, which is pretty tricky if you’re learning French too.

Elle: So again, it depends on what, like you mentioned before, language you’re coming from.

Davide: Yeah, exactly. If you know French, if you know French, that’s pretty easy. Um, Yeah, … I think you would say in French … to think of something, I’m not sure, actually, if that’s how you would say it … So I’m going there …  so that’s, that’s a pretty, pretty, pretty easy thing to like, it’s, it’s a one-to-one correspondence.

Elle: Excellent. To go back to what you said there about, um, Italians responding in English, generally speaking, is that then, and you mentioned because maybe they want to, um, practice her English. How, roughly, how many people in Italy speak English? Is it the majority. I have actually, no idea.

Davide: Yeah the majority speak English, but not very well.

We speak it very, very badly in general, I would say so. Yeah.

I would say actually what I said earlier, I think it really depends on where you go, because like, if you’re going to Florence, Rome, you know, the most popular cities, a lot of people, a lot of people want to speak English there. You know, they’re used to hearing English all the time.

If you’re going to a smaller town, then you’re probably going to have a much easier time finding people who don’t know English at all or speak it very, very poorly. Um, yeah, we’re, we’re no Scandinavia in that regard, like our English is pretty bad in general. It’s a little bit like France, no offense to French people, but like, we’re not good.

We’re not good with English. We’re not good at speaking English in general. So… but still, if you go to places that are very common tourist destinations, you know, that that might happen. But still, I would say that that in general Italians are surprised when foreigners learn Italian, because we have this idea, this maybe it’s like an inferior…

How would you say in English? Inferiority Complex.

Elle: Yeah exactly.

Davide: Yeah. Yeah.

So like Italians, we’ll go “oh, why are you learning Italian? You don’t need to know Italian.” It’s like, nobody speaks Italian. And then you have the, the opposite thing where people will think, you know, Italian is the best language.

It’s the most beautiful language, just super patriotic thing. Or even people will say Italian is the most difficult language in the world. It’s incredibly difficult. Which of course it’s not, you know, it’s a very kind of limited view of world languages, but yeah, but, but yeah, but maybe people are a little bit, um, dismissive of Italian.

Elle: Right. And in terms of what you mentioned back then with dialect too, uh, the different dialects of like say Sicily, is that something… are there, you know, TV shows that people could, uh, watch to help them learn the tiny that adjust in the certain dialects, or is it more, you know, is there content out there where people just speak these dialects or is it more of…

Davide: There’s something. Like some of the dialects or regional languages are a little bit more, have a little bit more, uh, I dunno, culture to them. I mean, they have there’s no, historically there has been like music and literature or sometimes even TV shows. Um, there’s uh, there have been a couple of popular TV shows in Napolitano or Neapolitan. So, uh, and one of them has been popular, has been, has become popular in the US I believe, which is “My Brilliant Friend”, um, which is a cool production between our main, uh, state TV show and HBO.

So, and that’s, that’s almost entirely in the Neapolitan dialect or language. Um…

Elle: what’s it called did you say…

Davide: In English it’s called “My Brilliant Friend”. In Italian. It’s  …

Elle: okay.

Davide: And, uh, so, so yeah, but not that much in general, like there’s not that much content and it’s something that I’m always a little bit sad about. Like I wish there was more content in, in our regional languages, dialects.

I always don’t know what to call them because you know, there’s this idea outside of Italy that, you know, these languages, because we call them dialects, … they’re like, uh, they’re like they derived from Italian, which isn’t the case. It’s like they’re sister languages, they developed, uh, independently, but yeah, there’s not that much content.

Um, I wish there was maybe on LingQ even. That would be, that would be cool. But yeah. So, um, you know, it’s like a little bit, it’s like in Spanish they have, they have, you know, all these regional languages, they have Catalan. And, but, but the difference is they, they, um, they defend their regional languages even legally.

Like they have a legal status that we, that Italian dialects don’t have. And also they, they there, how would you say that in English? They’re in higher regard or they…

Elle: Yeah, they have more status.

Davide: They have more status. Yeah, exactly. And so you will have university lectures in Catalan, but that does not happen in Italy at all.

Like people will laugh at you if you suggest well, maybe we could have, you know, university lessons or lectures in Sicilian. It’s not going to happen. So it’s a very different status. Very different socio-linguistic status, I guess. So. Right. People think dialects or original languages are, you know, you can use them only for if you’re talking to family members or if you’re, I dunno with friends, if you’re doing something that’s not formal, but, but whenever you’re going, you’re doing something that’s formal, you’re going to use Italian. So that’s, and so that’s the main difference.

Elle: Okay. Excellent. Um, so what, um, I wanted to ask you about you now have this podcast and YouTube channel as your, your full-time gig, your full-time job. And I’m not sure if that was always the plan. Um, but what would you say to any listeners –

because I know a lot of people these days are starting their own podcast or want to start their own podcast – do you have any advice for anyone listening who might think “I want to give this whole podcast thing a try”?

Davide: Sure. Well, I think you should first be a consumer of language learning content. Um, so you should see what, uh, what other people are doing on YouTube or on, on, on podcasts, which I was doing a lot already.

When I started out my own project, I was a fan of a couple language learning podcasts and YouTube channels. Um, and then, I dunno, I think you should make content that’s interesting. That’s the main, that’s the main thing. It should be interesting. It should be, I believe it should be in the language you’re teaching, so it shouldn’t be in English, but of course, you know, um, not everyone will agree with that because there are channels that are entirely in English for learning X.

You know, this or, or that language, but so it should be interesting. It should be in the language you’re teaching. Um, what else? Um, having transcripts is something that is really important, I think. Um, and you know, with LingQ, of course you, you know how important it is to have a transcript of what you’re listening to.

So. At first, it’s not going to be the most fun part of the job, like to transcribe what you’re saying. Um, but that depends on whether you’re, uh, you’re talking off the cuff and then you’re transcribing everything later or if you have a script. So that’s something that, um, if you have a script, of course, um, you don’t have to transcribe everything, which is probably the worst part of it.

Elle: Tedious, yeah. There are apps you can use these days, thankfully. Yeah.

But you know…

Davide: Yeah. But still you, you still have to do some work too. Yeah.

Um, yeah, so what else? I think, I think it’s something that, I mean, that you can do, it’s possible to do this as your, as your job. Um, probably… if… something that helped me was to, to teach as well, um, to teach Italian, which I did for, and I’m still doing, but I’m doing less of it now.

And it’s going to be really useful, uh, financially speaking, because for some time, in my case, it was actually for a couple of years, I didn’t really earn anything through my podcast. So my, my podcast wasn’t a financially viable, viable way of making a living, but I was, I was teaching Italian on, on italki first and then privately.

And that was really helpful because if, even if I, if I didn’t have, or although I didn’t have that many followers or listeners, I still had plenty of students who wanted to work with me. So even if you only have, let’s say a thousand people who listened to your podcast, but like, I don’t know, 1% of those people want to, to, to practice the language you’re teaching with you, that’s still going to be like, I think 10 people, right? 1%. If it’s, if it’s more than that, if it’s 5%, it’s, it’s, it’s 50 people. So that’s a lot of people. So even if you have a, if you don’t have a super, super huge, um, audience, you can still find a lot of people who want to learn with you and that’s okay.

That’s probably the easiest way of making money, I think, uh, with, you know, uh, through like the, the audience that you have built. I don’t know if that makes sense. So yeah, so like you can have an audience and then you can find people who want to be your clients, if that makes sense. And then of course you can find other ways of making, you know, make making money with, with, you know, a podcast or YouTube channel. Um, yeah. It’s, I would say it’s good to see what other people are doing. And, um, but I think in the language learning industry, if you will, it’s, it’s easier to make this financially viable, like to make, you know, podcasting or, or video making, um, financially viable compared to other areas because you’re, you’re making something that people find useful that people find value in. It’s not like if you have an entertainment podcast, or if you’re a gamer or something like that, because like it’s, it’s much harder to get people to pay you for anything.

Why would they pay you? There’s so much entertainment already. Like there there’s Netflix, there’s a million podcasts. There’s books. There’s, there’s so much stuff, but you know, in the language learning, in this niche of language learning content, I think what we do can be really valuable, especially if there’s not much content already in, in your language, so it can be really valuable. And then you can find different ways of monetizing that, which is… I don’t love that word, butit’s what it is.

Well, you know?

Elle: We all live in capitalist societies. So ou need to pay the bills…

Davide: yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. It’s just, I don’t love the word to monetize something. I don’t know if there’s a big, dirty about that word.

Elle: I know what you mean. I know what you mean. Yeah.

So what’s in store for, uh, the podcast and the YouTube channel moving forward for the next, for the rest of the year?

Good question.

Davide: Well, I I’ve never done any courses, which is something that’s pretty popular among, uh, language influencers, I guess that’s what we’re called.

I I’ve been hearing that word thrown around lately. So I guess that’s what you could call people like me. So yeah, of course it’s a pretty popular thing and I’ve never, I’ve never made any courses. And I would like to, to make one in the future, I have this idea of making a course about pronunciation, which is something I’m interested in.

Uh, but we’ll see, we’ll see. I’m still early in the process. So, so I don’t know how long it’s going to take me, probably a long time, longer than I think. But yeah, that’s something I would like. Yeah.

Yeah.

So, yeah that’s one thing. Actually I don’t know what else I want to do. I’m I’m, I’m focusing on my YouTube channel a lot.

Um, yeah. I would say the course, the course is something I would like to, you know, to work on.

Elle: Excellent. Well, anyone who is interested in checking out your content, I’m going to pop the link to your website, your podcast, and also your YouTube channel. So anyone learning Italian or interested in maybe starting to learn Italian definitely check out Davide and we’ll keep our eyes peeled for your course, your pronunciation course, no pressure. But now that you’ve said….

Davide: Well, I’ve talked about it, but you know, talking about something and actually doing something is not the same thing.

Elle: Very different things, for sure. Yeah.

Well, thank you so much for joining me today. it’s been an excellent chat and, um, yeah best of luck with, uh, Podcast Italiano.

Davide: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Elle: Thank you. Bye.

Davide: Bye-bye.