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Mark: Hello everyone.

Welcome to another installment of EnglishLingQ.

Alex: Number 273.

Mark: Number 273.

Nice work remembering the number.

Alex: All right.

Mark: I don’t think we’ve ever done that on a show, so that’s impressive.

Mark here with Alex, of course, for those of you who don’t know.

Steve is…

Alex: He’s on a two-month trip in Europe.

Mark: Yeah.

Alex: I think now he’s in Spain, right?

Mark: He’s in Spain.

I just talked to him.

Well, we both talked to him on Skype this morning.

Alex: Yeah, we did.

Mark: He’s…I can’t remember, actually the name of the…Segovia.

Alex: I don’t even know.

Mark: Segovia, yeah.

Alex: Yeah.

Mark: It sounds like they’re having a great time.

Alex: Yeah.

At the time of this recording, tomorrow is going to be the first meet-up in Madrid, a couple of days after that will be Barcelona and there’s another one in Italy, which is planned for some time next week.

Mark: Yeah, sounds like they’re going to be near Florence.

Alex: Yes, exactly.

Mark: So, presumably, it’d be somewhere in Florence.

Alex: It will be in Florence.

Yeah, that’s it.

Mark: Yeah.

So, ah, that’s fun.

Hopefully some of you people out there can find a way to get to some of the meet-ups and talk to Steve and meet other fellow LingQers.

Yeah.

We hope to start to have more of these meet-ups.

We don’t always need to have a member of LingQ there either.

Alex: Right.

Mark: We can certainly organize them.

If you think there are a lot of LingQ people in your area and would like to get together, we’re happy to help try and organize those things.

Alex: For sure.

Mark: So, let us know.

Let us know and we’ll post it on the Facebook page, blog and so on.

Alex: Yeah.

For now, since Steve is only in Europe, it’s only for you Europeans out there, but in the future, of course, we’d like to have meet-ups in different places and even Canada, the United States, different parts of Asia, you know, wherever there seems to be an interest.

We’d love to help you guys organize those and if one of us can be there that’d be cool, but if not no problem.

We’ll still help you.

Mark: Absolutely.

Alex: Yeah.

Mark: We didn’t have anything of grave importance to discuss.

We did want to talk about the latest additions to the site, which we put up probably close to two weeks ago now.

Alex: It was about two weeks ago, yup.

Mark: Yeah, the new changes; mostly the changes on the Lesson page.

Alex: Quick LingQing.

Mark: Quick LingQing for sure.

I think it’s a big improvement, you know?

Certainly it depends.

Sometimes I like to use them, sometimes I don’t.

Alex: Yeah.

Mark: Like if the text is shorter and it’s in a language I’m not as familiar with where I’m LingQing a lot of words but I kind of need the context too and there’s maybe a lot of yellow words I want to look up quickly as well then I’ll use the standard LingQing format.

But if it’s in a language where there are fewer blue words and I really only need to go through and take off those blue words, I find that Quick LingQing works great.

Alex: And that’s one of things.

I mean we put a lot of thought into how we wanted to do this best so that it suited both the users who like seeing the yellow on their text, but also those who like reading it straight through; you know, highlighting and copying and pasting and so on and so forth.

So, hopefully we added enough functionality so that we can tailor to both groups.

Mark: Absolutely.

And one of the big advantages of the Quick LingQs, I know we always had a lot of people asking us, you know, many of you want to be able to copy and paste the text and you couldn’t.

You can’t do that in the standard view, but you can in the Quick LingQ view.

So you can go through your Quick LingQs and actually copy and paste from the adjacent text right into your LingQs as you create them.

So there are advantages to both ways of doing it.

I mean choice, right?

Alex: Yeah.

Mark: Lots of choice for everybody, that’s important.

Alex: Yeah, for sure.

We want to make sure that we can…of course you can’t satisfy everyone’s needs and desires.

Mark: No.

Alex: But, to the best of our ability, to make sure that there is functionality that helps out both parties.

Mark: Right, exactly.

We do apologize, by the way, for the road noise today you’ll hear in the background.

We had two options today.

We could either be on the side of the office where the construction guys are putting up scaffolding and banging and so forth.

Alex: Yeah.

Mark: Or, we could be on the side of the building near the road.

So we thought the road would be less destructive.

Alex: It’s a bit more soothing maybe.

Mark: You can let us know if you prefer the other and we’ll go there next time, because it looks like we’re going to have construction here for the next, I don’t know, six months.

Alex: Probably throughout the winter.

Mark: There are some water problems.

This building was not very well built and a lot of the balconies on the building leak and so the structures are kind of rusting.

The balcony structures are rusting so need to be replaced and then they need to be properly sealed so the water doesn’t leak through and so there’s a whole bunch of restoration work.

Alex: Extensive rebuilding required.

Mark: Extensive rebuilding that’s going on and so, actually, they’re going to enshroud the whole building in plastic or I don’t know what and they’re going to be banging.

Alex: Yeah.

Mark: It’s going to be really pleasant in here for the next six months.

Alex: Oh, well.

Mark: We won’t let it slow us down.

Alex: Yeah, absolutely.

Well, we’ve been a bit slow in doing these recently, but especially with the response on the forums, we see that users really enjoy these so we’ll make it a higher priority to make sure that we get one of these out at least, hopefully, every two weeks; more, if possible, if we have time.

Mark: We do also ask that you let us know.

Let us know if you like things, if you don’t like things.

I mean the more feedback we get the more we feel appreciated.

Alex: It’s true.

Mark: Then the more likely we are to do more podcasts.

Alex: Yes.

It’s always nice to know that you have an audience.

Mark: By the way, with that new update, some of the other things we added.

We added the ability to upload videos for lessons, for specific lessons, so that’s there.

So, whether it’s a lesson that was originally a video, you can now show the original video in the video area or if you want to make a screen cast video if you’re a tutor and you want to explain some of the stuff.

You do not necessarily have to be a tutor, but if you’ve uploaded a lesson and you want to go and explain some of the different terms or grammar or whatever you can use this screen cast program, like Jing for instance, to record some stuff and explain some stuff and upload that video directly to the lesson, which we think can be a really great feature, especially for a lot of beginner content because the beginners they need some help, which on our side can be tough.

Alex: Sometimes it’s a bit tough to jump in there with something like “who is she” like I did with Chinese.

I felt a little in over my head, but you know I think I enjoyed it, at the same time, having that more immersion setting.

I think it does help in the long run in the sense that you kind of develop a natural sense of what’s right and what’s wrong in the language; whereas, with the study of grammar you’re constantly checking based on your knowledge of the grammar and I think it takes longer to develop that natural sense of correctness and appropriateness and accuracy in spoken language as well as written language, so.

Mark: I’m sure that’s true.

You rely on this external object – the grammar – instead of sort of assimilating naturally what you’re hearing.

I mean there’s nothing very scientific about our observations here today.

Alex: Scientists said…

Mark: But I mean from experience and I did the same, actually, with Swedish recently.

I started from, I don’t want to say zero.

Like I’d been to Sweden and I know a few words, but pretty close to zero.

Alex: Almost there, eh?

Yeah.

Mark: I started in with Greetings and Goodbyes and Eating Out and Who is She.

I mean I know I didn’t check any grammar books or anything, but I guess Swedish is close, relatively, to English.

Alex: Right.

Mark: So maybe that’s easier.

Like if I was going into Chinese that’d be pretty tough, because I don’t know much.

Alex: Right.

Well I think, too, that everyone has a different philosophy for language learning and different ways that work better for them.

Mark: Absolutely.

Alex: So that was one of the biggest reasons for us to introduce the video, as Mark mentioned, but also the translations and also the nicer Note section.

Which previously was just stuck at the bottom of the lesson, now is viewable right from…

Mark: Yeah and in the Asian language there’s, of course, the script conversion.

Alex: Right.

Mark: Like the Hiragana, Katakana…

Alex: Right.

Mark: And Kanji.

Alex: And Pinyin for Chinese.

Mark: For Chinese, yeah.

So all those and all this stuff I believe is in the Resources Tab, under the Resources Tab in the new…

Alex: …import page.

Mark: …window there on the Lesson page.

Alex: Yes.

Mark: Yeah.

So you’ve got your Tasks, you’ve got your Quick LingQs and you’ve got your Resources, which is video translation conversion.

Alex: And Notes.

Mark: And Notes.

And, of course, those only show if they exist.

Alex: Right.

Mark: So if there is no video you won’t see the option there; same with translation, same with scripts.

So that stuff is there and then, of course, the Sharing.

You can share those lessons quite easily now.

Actually, Steve, my dad, is quite keen on this in the forum the last few days; talking about how excited he was when Vera sent him the link from her lesson.

He was able to click on it, the lesson opened right up, he did his Quick LingQs and he thought that was great.

We do encourage you.

That Sharing, that’s what it’s there for.

Share it with your friends, share it with other members if you have their email address, share it on Facebook, share it on Twitter and then if whoever receives that message is a LingQ member, they click on that link and that lesson opens right up in their Lesson page and off they go.

It’s just a very convenient thing to do.

I have thought that it would be nice for there to be an easy way to share those lessons with other members using their LingQ user name.

I think, I mean we will build that functionality in, because it is nice.

I mean it can be difficult to find new stuff in the Library.

If you create something new and you’re a tutor, you know you’ve got a couple students who are keen learners and want to read your stuff.

You can send them a quick note: Here, I just uploaded this.

They can all click and get it right away.

Alex: Right.

Mark: That’s coming.

Alex: Yeah.

Mark: Yeah.

Alex: All in the name of optimization and functionality…

Mark: That’s right.

Alex: …usability.

There are plenty of different words for that.

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Steve: Hi Alex, how are you?

Alex: Doing well, Steve.

Steve: You’re back.

Alex: I am. Glad to be back.

Steve: Good.

That’s always good when you’re glad to be back.

Where were you and how long were you away for?

Alex: I was in China and I was gone for the better part of five weeks.

Steve: Aha. And where were you in China?

Alex: I started out in Beijing, took a quick trip to Nanjing and went back to Beijing for several weeks and pretty much, at the very end of my trip, I decided to make a trip to…um, I just realized I made a mistake there.

Steve: Yeah?

Alex: I actually to Tianjin…

Steve: Right.

Alex: …first.

Steve: First.

Alex: Nanjing was after.

Steve: Oh, okay.

Alex: Nanjing was on my trip to Shanghai.

Steve: Oh, okay.

So you were in Beijing then you went to Tianjin.

Alex: Yes.

Steve: Then from Tianjin you continued down to Shanghai?

Alex: I returned to Beijing…

Steve: Okay.

Alex: …where I spent another two or three weeks.

Steve: Right.

Alex: And then I headed down on the train to Nanjing.

Steve: Oh, okay. So this was not your first trip to China.

Alex: No. This was my second trip to China.

Steve: Aha. When was your last trip?

Alex: My last trip was one year ago.

It was about the same of year, August as well, but it was to a southern city called Wenzhou, which is a little south of Shanghai.

Steve: Right.

Wenzhou is very famous, because all of the peddlers that you find in Europe or people who run little sort of dollar stores in Europe that all over Europe they all come from Wenzhou.

Alex: Really.

Steve: It’s amazing. It’s just astounding.

Alex: Interesting.

Steve: Yes.

They seem to have a tradition there of going overseas and starting a little business.

I think they start off as little street peddlers and then they get into a dollar store type thing and then I think some of them probably do quite well.

Maybe they end up with owning supermarkets, I don’t know — Wenzhou.

And what were you doing in China?

Alex: I went there with basically no plans, which sounded good, but in practice was not quite as fun, I’ll say, because I had a lot of free time, which is nice when you’re busy, but not nice when you have only free time.

So I found myself kind of struggling trying to find things to do, wasting a lot of time and, you know, enjoying one day, but the next day staying at home and wondering what I should do; wracking my brain trying to think of things, trying to come up with brilliant ideas of places to go and people to see, but towards the end of my trip I kind of just ran out of things to do.

Steve: Tell me, did you spend any time working on your Chinese while you were there?

Alex: I did, to a degree, but the place I was staying at didn’t have steady Internet access.

So it was quite limited because before leaving for China most of my Chinese studies were done on the Internet, primarily on LingQ, but also communicating with other people via Facebook and various other websites and so having no access to those resources, I found that it was very limited in what I could do.

Steve: And your Chinese was not good enough that you could, say, jump in a cab and have a conversation with a cab driver or go to the store and ask them to help you find some books or that kind of thing.

Alex: Exactly and it’s one of the things that I really wanted to do.

I tried a couple of times, especially at the beginning of my trip; it was just all too unfamiliar to me.

I found that it became a really stressful environment and situation when I put myself in that situation of trying to rely on my Chinese ability to communicate with someone and communicate effectively.

I noticed that I did improve because I did hear Chinese a lot around me, you know, on the bus and on the subway and with friends that I was with and I did definitely pick up several words and phrases.

I think, honestly, my speaking improved a lot in the process as well, even though I didn’t talk much, but, like I mentioned before, I was just limited in what I could do.

The friend that I was staying with was Korean-Chinese, so we communicated primarily in Korean.

Steve: Let me just interrupt you there.

When you went to Korea for the first time, you already had Korean?

Alex: No.

I would say my Korean then was probably about the same as my Chinese is now, so also very limited.

I think the one benefit that I did have was that I didn’t have as much, say, textbook knowledge of Korean.

Most of my Korean was learned from interaction with friends.

Steve: Here in North America.

Alex: Yes, in Vancouver.

Steve: In Vancouver, yeah; Korean friends.

Alex: Exactly.

Steve: So there you would be, again, mostly listening.

Alex: Right.

I think the biggest difference was that I was more familiar with the kind of conversational structure of Korean and I was used to speaking in Korean, even if it was broken Korean, and I was used to listening to people talk to me.

Steve: Right.

Alex: Whereas the difference with Chinese now is that I can read better in Chinese now than I could read in Korean then, because I’ve spent a lot more time reading in the language, but at the same time I haven’t listened as much.

And it’s not necessarily by choice, but because I had a lot of Korean friends.

I was in a very emersion setting where even when I didn’t want to hear Korean I heard Korean.

Steve: Oh, okay.

Now with the Chinese, though, you said that just being in China and hearing a lot of it that you were on a train coming back from Nanjing and you were in a compartment with some Chinese people and you told me you sort of managed.

Alex: Yeah.

I headed to Shanghai from Nanjing and it was on the way back from Shanghai.

I took the night train.

So I got on the train and they have these compartments for the more expensive seats.

There are four beds in one little room.

I walked in there and there were two people sitting on the bed and so I kind of said hello in Chinese and they said hello.

Then I got my stuff and put it away and then decided rather than having an awkward trip where we didn’t say anything that I may as well take the opportunity to try and say something.

Actually, the first thing I asked them was do you speak English?

They said, very little.

So we communicated primarily in Chinese, but also in English.

The guy who was there could speak English; very limited English, but he knew a lot of difficult words, which he couldn’t really express himself with that clearly.

It was really interesting because in the entire time that I was there I probably spoke Chinese, excluding little sentences at McDonald’s or something saying I would like to order this thing, actually communicating and speaking Chinese, I probably only spoke about maybe 45 minutes of Chinese in five weeks.

On my way back from Shanghai, we spoke for probably about an hour and a half or maybe two hours and I was really surprised at what I could understand and what I could actually say as well.

We were talking about all sorts of different things.

We even talked about the differences in the education system in China and in North America, something that I would never have expected myself to be able to talk about.

I mean of course there were words that I didn’t know and things that I didn’t know how to say, but with the help of my iPod Touch as a dictionary and a little substitution of easier words, rather than more accurate words, I found that I was able to express myself quite clearly and, beyond that, able to understand what was being said to me.

Steve: I mean the great thing there is that you’re in a closed space with two native speakers.

Nobody is in a hurry to go anywhere or do anything, so if they’re willing, which isn’t always the case.

I mean they might.

Alex: Right.

Steve: Like I can imagine myself, I’m in a train compartment and I’ve got my books and my stuff and maybe I want to listen to Russian or whatever and the person across from me wants to practice his English.

I’m not sure that I’d be that interested in spending the next hour and a half.

But, of course, in China you’re more of a rarity, you know, so there would be more interest.

Alex: Right.

Steve: You’re lucky.

I mean you’re very lucky that they were so accommodating.

But it is a great opportunity because, otherwise, if you go to a store they’re in a hurry, you know, they haven’t got time for you.

Alex: Yeah, exactly.

Steve: I mean I always this, you know, it’s great to find someone that you can talk to, but you can’t control that situation.

You can’t control whether they’re patient, not patient, have time for you, don’t have time for you.

Alex: Right.

Steve: They come back in English instead of the language you’re trying to learn.

You’ve got no control over the situation.

Alex: Yeah.

Steve: But if you’re lucky and you get a good situation then it’s very rewarding.

When I was a student in France I used to go hitchhiking in Spain.

Alex: Oh, really.

Steve: So, I mean, the Spaniards do like to talk and that’s essentially where I learned Spanish.

You’d be in there with a truck driver for like six hours.

Alex: Wow.

Steve: And he only picked me up because he wanted to talk, right?

Alex: Yeah.

Steve: So, yeah, those are great opportunities, absolutely.

So, now, of course you have excellent Korean, because we were at a meeting where I was able to hear you speak Korean, and you’re studying Chinese and so, in terms of your language learning, you’re goals are what, to continue to work on your Korean or to bring your Chinese up to the same level?

Longer term, are you looking at other languages?

Alex, the language learner, what are your goals?

Alex: My Korean I would call it conversational, but there’s absolutely room for improvement and I would definitely like to improve it as well.

One of the biggest things that I want to be able to do is to go to the library to the foreign language section, find a random book in Korean, pick it up and start reading it.

I can read some books; of course, things like novels are much easier because the vocabulary tends to be similar.

About six months ago I went to the library here in Vancouver, which has a nice Korean section and, actually, a nicer Chinese section, but I picked up a book about China, which was written in Korean which talked specifically about the political aspect of China, historical and all these other different things and I found it very difficult to read.

Actually, it was kind of frustrating because it’s a topic that I’m really interested in, but my ability in the language limited me from actually gaining and absorbing the information that was in the book.

Steve: Right.

Alex: So one of my goals is not so much to focus more on my spoken Korean, but rather to build up my vocabulary.

I think that’s the biggest limiting factor for me now.

Steve: Well, of course, as you know I’m a great believer in vocabulary.

Mind you, it depends what you want to do.

Obviously, people want to have enough of any language to be able to go out and have some drinks and so forth.

That’s fine, but I find that having the vocabulary allows you to cover so much more ground in a conversation and I also like to read.

So I agree with you, to be able to pick up a book.

In fact, that’s where LingQ started because I felt the same way about a number of languages and so I felt a tool like this would eventually help me build up.

What tends to happen is that you say novels are easy, I find novels more difficult.

Let’s say in Japanese, novels are more difficult.

Because when I was in Japan, mostly I was involved in business and I would read the newspaper.

So politics, economics, business, that’s easy; whereas, your background is more conversational and that kind of thing, so you find a novel easier.

I would say, even with Russian, like I’ll find Tolstoy, I’ve read so much of Tolstoy, Tolstoy is easy.

If I pick up another novelist it’s not easy, because they tend to use a certain range of words and expressions.

Alex: Exactly.

Steve: So I think it’s very useful to focus on one sort of subject area or one writer, for a while, to really get good at that and then move to another and then, over time, you build up the vocabulary you need to cover most situations.

Alex: Right.

Steve: Oh, that’s kind of interesting.

China in the summer, phew; in my experience it’s very warm.

Alex: Well, actually, we’ll go back a bit, because there was a second part to your question.

Steve: Right.

Alex: That is, what other languages will I be interested in learning?

Steve: Oh, yes, by all means.

Alex: I do not want to stop with Chinese, absolutely not.

There are several other languages that I would be interested in learning and most of those languages are languages that I don’t yet have an interest in, but I find that once you begin to gain an appreciation for the culture that’s really, at least for me, what sparks my interest in the language.

Because I think that culture and language are tied so closely together that without an interest in one it’s hard to effectively study and learn another.

Steve: I agree with you, absolutely.

The only thing I would add is that sometimes if you say, okay, I’m going to get into this language, I don’t have a great interest in it, but I’ll get started.

So there’s a certain amount of chicken and egg stuff going on there, you know?

It’s like this whole, you know, what they call the salami solution, you know, one slice at a time.

So at first you say gees, like Arabic, like ooh, that’s seems like an awful big task to take on, but if you do it one slice at a time and you start to get used to certain things then you get an interest, because maybe, again, you have good content to learn from and it’s about some aspect of Arabic culture that you find interesting.

Alex: Right.

Steve: It’s this thing that I mentioned, this French expression, l’appétit vient en mangeant.

You know, the appetite comes with the eating.

So sometimes you kind of have to just push yourself in one direction or another, but, obviously, the stronger the motivation the better.

No question.

No question.

Alex: So, was it hot. In Beijing…

Steve: Sorry. Before you get there, what would be the third language?

Alex: Well, it would be…

Steve: What direction?

So far you’re an Asia specialist.

Alex: Yes.

I think I will probably go for another European language, but I’m not sure yet.

I do have a bit of experience with Japanese, but most of it I’ve forgotten, unfortunately.

But…it’s hard to say.

Steve: Okay.

Alex: You know, it could be Japanese, but it could be something like Italian or Spanish.

Steve: Alright, we’ll leave that as a question mark…

Alex: Yeah.

Steve: …and we’ll close out with the weather. How hot was it?

Alex: I arrived in China on the 4th of August and in Beijing it was quite warm.

It’s always humid, regardless of the temperature, but it was very warm, especially for the first about two weeks.

I found that I constantly had to bring a towel with me, wipe my sweat with the towel, stuff it back in my backpack and then immediately pull out the bottle of water.

I found myself drinking, you know, five or six bottles of water a day.

Steve: Wow.

Alex: Constantly having to re-hydrate myself.

Steve: You know it’s not humid in the winter.

It’s very dry once you get to the fall.

Alex: Is it?

Steve: Oh, yes, very, very dry.

Anyway, but in the summer it’s hot.

Alex: Yeah.

Steve: Well, look, we’ve covered a lot of different subjects an thank you very much.

I hope people enjoy this and if you have any questions for Alex, please let us know or if you want us to talk about some subject, please let us know.

Alex: Take care, everyone.

Steve: Bye for now.

Alex: Bye-bye.

Study the transcript of this episode as a lesson on LingQ, saving the words and phrases you don’t know to your database. Here it is!

Mark: Hello and welcome to another installment of the EnglishLingQ Podcast.

Mark here with Steve…

Steve: …and Annie.

Mark: And a special guest today; Annie has joined us.

Steve: Say something, Annie.

Annie: Hello.

Steve: Very good.

Mark: Annie is my daughter and she’s a very keen EnglishLingQ participant.

Steve: And she’s sitting on a Swiss Medicine Ball and making noise.

Annie: Okay.

Mark: But, maybe we thought Annie could tell us a little bit about your summer.

What have you been doing this summer?

Annie: Um, I went to Kelowna at the start for Kyle’s hockey camp.

Mark: Well, Kyle was at a hockey camp and we stayed at the lake.

So, that was kind of nice, even though the lake was a little bit cool.

Annie: Yeah, it was freezing.

Steve: Was the lake cool?

Annie: It was freezing.

Steve: What was the temperature outside?

I thought it was warm up there.

Annie: Yeah, it was really hot.

I don’t know.

The lake was cold, though.

Mark: The lake wasn’t freezing.

Annie: Yeah it was.

Mark: The lake was cooler than usual, because the month of June here wasn’t very warm.

Steve: Oh, I see.

Mark: So the water wasn’t…I mean, even more so than the ocean here, as the temperature heats up the water it’s a more significant change in the water temperature.

But even over the week that we were there, it was hot every day and the lake got warmer every day we were there, so.

I mean it was nice to me.

Steve: Warmer than the ocean here?

Mark: Certainly by the time we left.

Steve: So, Kylie went to hockey school, Annie, and you, Olivia and your friends swam in the lake?

Annie: Yeah.

Well, my friend and her mom were there too.

Because her mom had like a work thing there and so she came too.

The pool was really warm, though.

Steve: What about work thing?

What do you mean by work thing?

Annie: Like she had a meeting or something.

Steve: Aha.

Annie: But the pool was really warm, but it was really shallow.

It was like four and a half feet at the deepest, so.

Steve: The pool was?

Annie: Yeah.

Steve: That’s not very good.

Annie: Yeah.

Steve: Okay. Did you go on hikes?

Or, what other things did you do up there?

Annie: No. Well…

Mark: Ah, we played tennis a few times. We went to the beech.

Annie: What did we do? Not much.

Mark: I went on some nice bike rides around the lake.

There was a pool in our complex where you swam.

Mark: Hung out…Nothing too exciting.

Annie: Yeah, nothing. Yeah.

Steve: So that was one holiday, but then you also went here nearby on a recent trip.

Annie: Yeah, Hernando.

Steve: Yeah.

Annie: Yeah.

That was a few weeks ago.

Um, daddy didn’t come because he had to have work, so it was just me, mom, Kyle, Livia and Gordie.

He loved it.

Steve: Gordie the dog? Yeah.

Annie: Yeah.

And it’s beside Savary Island and it’s called Hernando Island.

And we built big forts on the rocks that we could stand in and they were really big so we could stand.

Steve: And you built forts out of what?

Annie: Wood. Like drift wood…

Steve: Oh, really?

Annie: Yeah.

Steve: Oh, okay.

Annie: …that we found on the beach.

Steve: Aha. And so you built forts. Just one or several forts?

Annie: Um, well, one big one and then Kyle and his friend built like another small one and then…yeah, there were a few, but ours was like the biggest one.

Steve: And did you hide in the forts so other people didn’t know where you were?

Annie: Um, not really. We ate snacks in them.

Steve: Aha.

Mark: Yeah, though, there’s these big rocks on the beach and there’s these sort of nooks in them.

There’s lots of driftwood on the beach, so they can pile up all the driftwood and use a few longer pieces for cross pieces and lots of…

Annie: Except I did pretty much the whole thing, because Michael, he was…he’s really…he didn’t do anything. He’s too lazy. He just sat up there reading the whole time.

Mark: Michael is one of the kids you were up there with.

Annie: Yeah.

Mark: But I wouldn’t want to be underneath one of those four roofs if they fell in.

Steve: No.

Mark: A lot of wood sort of resting on you.

Annie: No. We stood on it.

Mark: Oh, really?

Annie: Yeah.

Mark: On the roof?

Annie: Yeah.

They were pretty stable.

Mark: Oh.

Steve: Did you get a building permit?

Mark: They don’t look that stable.

There’s no nails.

Nail-free structure.

Annie: No.

Steve: So you were there and then, more recently, you were at Hornby Island.

Annie: Well, we went to Robert’s Creek, Hornby and also Nevin’s.

But I went to Sakinaw, too.

But my family didn’t, only me.

Steve: Sakinaw, what was that?

Annie: Sakinaw Lake.

Steve: Aha. You went with some friends?

Annie: I went to stay at my friend’s house…cabin…yeah

Steve: Aha.

Mark: These are all places sort of nearby here up the coast by ferry and then Hornby Island, actually, is just off of Vancouver Island.

Actually, it took us quite a bit of time to get there; although, it’s probably not that far from where we were on the Sunshine Coast.

Apparently it’s like an hour boat ride, but we didn’t have a boat.

We were going by car, so it took us, you know, six-seven hours and four ferries to get there.

Steve: Aha. Tell me, Annie, what are you reading these days?

Annie: Harry Potter.

Steve: Harry Potter?

Annie: Yeah.

Steve: Really?

Annie: Yeah. I’m about to start the fifth one, but it wasn’t at the library.

Steve: Ha. So you didn’t read Harry Potter before?

I thought you had read it before.

Annie: I read the first one like a few years ago — a few summers ago — and then I read the second one this summer and the fourth one this summer and then the third one was like March or something.

It was kind of out of order, but I listened to the audio book, though.

Steve: Oh, okay. Do you like listening to audio books?

Annie: Um, yeah. Well, it’s fun with the whole family when we do it on the car ride.

Steve: Aha.

Annie: But I liked reading them, too.

Steve: Aha.

Mark: Yeah, we listened to the audio book on the way to Kelowna

Annie: No, Big White.

Mark: Or Big White. Okay.

Steve: Oh. So everybody in the car sits quiet and you listen to the audio book?

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: Oh, that’s kind of neat.

Mark: Aha.

Steve: Why aren’t you listening to the audio book in French or Japanese?

Mark: I try to get them to listen to Harry Potter in Japanese in the car sometimes.

Annie: Well, it comes on when you touch shuffle.

You were listening to music and all of a sudden this guy comes on and starts speaking Japanese.

Mark: And they really like it. Everybody else…

Steve: And, Annie, you’re going to be starting high school.

Annie: Yeah.

Steve: First yeah of high school, right?

Annie: Yeah.

Steve: And do you think it will be very different from…is that grade seven or grade six?

Annie: Grade eight.

Steve: Oh, grade eight. Okay.

I don’t know.

So do you think it’s going to be harder?

Annie: Yeah. Everybody says it is.

Steve: Aha.

And are all the courses in French or some are in French and some are in English?

Annie: Well, um, I have a friend, she’s a year older and she was there and she says everything is in French, except for English and then Gym and Art or something.

Steve: Aha. So, lots of reading in French.

Annie: Yeah.

Steve: Right.

But you still prefer to read in English.

I mean you know French at school, but all your reading is in English, yeah.

Annie: Yeah.

Steve: Oh, well.

Mark: Not too summer left either.

There’s ah…actually, there’s still three weeks.

Annie: Yeah.

Mark: Three weeks of summer vacation left.

Mark: Right?

Annie: Yeah.

Steve: What’s that?

Annie: My birthday.

Steve: I’d forgotten.

It’s not this month, is it?

Annie: Yeah.

Steve: Oh. Oh, sheesh! Yes.

And it’s a beautiful day today.

Mark: That’s for sure.

Steve: Gorgeous.

Mark: It’s just about the hottest day we’ve had.

Steve: I think I’m going in the ocean today.

Mark: Aha.

Steve: Definitely.

Mark: I think I’ll take the dog for a run…sneak in down there at the beach; although, I got accosted by the beach ranger — the park ranger — the other day.

Steve: Because you had a dog not on a leash?

Or, you’re not allowed to have a dog there, period?

Mark: You’re not allowed the dog there, period.

Steve: Right.

Mark: And I had the dog there not on a leash.

The guy informed me that each one of those offenses was $150 fine.

Steve: Well, I guess.

Annie: You’re like nice or something.

Mark: But he let me off the hook.

Steve: Well, he should be really happy to see you again.

Mark: I know.

But I went to a part of the beach where there weren’t many people, but then he said well, you’re near the boat launch and, you know, it could be dangerous if a boat ran over your dog.

I mean, okay, the boats aren’t running over my dog.

But, anyway, I’ll see if I can find a spot to go in with a dog.

Because the only place you can take the dog swimming is at the dog beach, which is at the far end and is all rocky and terrible for swimming.

Like, I’m not going to go swimming there because you can’t get in the water.

So the nice sandy part there’s no dogs allowed, but I’ll find a little corner so that I can swim with the dog.

Steve: I hope you don’t end up with $300 worth of fines.

Mark: So far so good, knock on wood.

I haven’t been fined; although, I’ve been hassled a few times.

There’s two different types of people patrolling down there.

There’s the park ranger that patrols the park, but then there’s also the bylaw officer that also seems to patrol, so I don’t know.

So far I’ve been lucky.

Anyway, that’s probably good for today.

Steve: I think so.

Mark: Thanks Annie.

Steve: Because the weather is nice and we’re going to go out and enjoy the weather.

Mark: That’s right.

Steve: Bye for now.

Mark: Bye-bye.

Annie: Bye.

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

Steve: Hello there, this is our EnglishLingQ Podcast again.

A surprise today, it’s not Mark and Steve, but it’s Alex and Steve.

Alex is visiting with us.

Alex is a learner, a member of LingQ and he’s also now helping us in a variety of ways.

He’s a keen language learner.

What are your languages?

Alex: Well, first off, I’ll say hello to everyone. I’m Alex.

I’m a university student in Vancouver and my languages, as Steve puts it, are primarily Korean.

I’ve been studying Korean for a few years and I just started to pick up Chinese about a year ago now.

Steve: I should say, as some of you may know, we launched Korean at LingQ and so we’re trying to drum up a little more content for our library, Alex and I. I know a lady who runs the local Korean language newspaper.

It’s actually a branch of Joong Ang Il Bo which is a major newspaper in Korea.

Alex: Right.

Steve: So we went to see her and this lady doesn’t speak very much English and my Korean is more for ordering beer than anything else, so I brought Alex along and I was very impressed with your Korean.

Alex: Oh, thank you, Steve.

Steve: You’re very fluent.

Alex: Thank you.

Steve: Yeah. How did you get so fluent?

Alex: I mean, I spent a lot of time just hanging out with friends and, you know, really immersed myself in the culture as much as I could.

You know, even before I had the chance to go to Korean, I just met a lot of Korean friends and tried as much to just spend time with them and do whatever it was that they did, whether it was going out and eating food or anything like that, just to get that exposure to the language and try and be able to hear it and slowly be able to understand it.

It was a long process, but I think it’s paid off until now.

I mean, of course, I’m still going, but.

Steve: And you’re in what, third year at UBC?

Alex: Yeah, I’ll be technically starting my third year in September.

Steve: But you’ve got some travel plans this summer.

Alex: I do.

Actually, in about two weeks I’ll be headed off to China and I’m going to be there for almost five weeks.

Steve: Whereabouts in China?

Alex: Primarily in Beijing and, really, I don’t have plans really set in stone, so I can kind of just go wherever I like.

I have a friend I know is going to be there.

He’s actually a university student and we took the same course and that’s how we met.

Steve: Is that Aaron?

Alex: Yes, that’s Aaron.

Steve: Okay. Oh, good. Okay.

Alex: And so, you know, I think I’m going to see The Great Wall of China.

Steve: Right.

Alex: You know?

I mean there are so many different things to see in China.

Steve: But what are you going to do other than that?

You’re not attending a course there.

Alex: No, I’m not.

Steve: Yeah.

Alex: My primary purpose is just to get as much exposure to Chinese language and culture as possible.

Steve: I mean, I think that’s a good strategy because, as I always say, attitude is so important.

So the more positive you are towards the culture and the people the better you’ll learn because you’re not resisting.

You’re just sort of eating it all up.

Alex: Right.

Steve: And so, mostly, I’ll tell you, in Beijing it’s not easy to understand them because they speak Beijing, but there’s a lot of “rah, rah, rah”.

That’ll be good.

Alex: Yeah.

Steve: That’ll be good.

Alex: I’ve had a few friends of mine who are also Chinese language learners and pretty much the consensus is that it’s really hard to speak like people in Beijing speak.

Steve: Right.

Alex: But I think they all want to, you know?

They like the way that they say stuff.

Steve: Well, I think, yeah.

And, as I’ve said, for people who are interested in Chinese learning, get some Xiang Sheng CDs.

You’ve seen me say that, right?

Alex: Right.

Steve: That’s the best.

That’s the best.

Because you can listen to them over and over and over again and at first you understand 20% and then it goes up 30-40-50-60.

Alex: Yeah.

Steve: I wish we could get some transcripts of Xiang Sheng dialogues, comic dialogs for our library in Chinese.

So you’re going to be in Beijing and The Great Wall, of course, which isn’t very far away.

Alex: Right.

Steve: And now there’s a high-speed train in Shang Hai as well from Beijing.

Alex: Oh, is there?

Steve: Yeah. I mean it’s not like when I first went there in 1970.

When I went there in 1970, I mean there was a car every 15 minutes.

Alex: Really.

Steve: And the city, I imagined it was as it must have been in the time of the Ming Dynasty.

Alex: Oh, really.

Steve: Well, it wasn’t really, but there were very few new buildings.

I remember it was October; they piled cabbage on the sidewalk because people would then store all this cabbage to get through the winter.

Alex: Oh, wow.

Steve: It was pretty basic.

Alex: Yeah.

Steve: And you had this impression, I almost expected to see camels come walking down, you know, into Tian An Men Square because that’s the feeling.

Alex: It was rather deserted, hey?

Steve: Oh, yeah.

Whereas, nowadays, you go there and it’s of course a modern city.

Alex: Right. Yeah, I mean it’s amazing.

I had the chance to go to China last year, actually.

It was quite a short trip, only about eight days in China and five or so days in Korea, but I was amazed at really how modern it’s become.

Steve: Unbelievable.

Alex: Yeah.

I mean the photographs I’ve seen in classes taken on China versus what I saw with my eyes when I went there, you know, even over the course of a period of five of 10 years, it’s just radically changed.

Steve: It’s absolutely astounding.

I don’t think there has ever been an economic transformation on the same scale and as rapid as what we’re seeing in China today.

Alex: Right.

Steve: And the impact on the world is just…it’s amazing.

Alex: Yeah.

Steve: China, they say, is going to consume like 40% of all the world’s energy.

Alex: Really?

Steve: Within, you know, five years or something like that.

Alex: Right, right.

Steve: I mean they consume 60% of the world’s iron ore.

Alex: Wow.

Steve: I mean it’s astounding if you have 20% or 22% of the world’s population growing at 10% a year, you know?

And now their economy is already equal to or greater than…I don’t know whether it’s Germany or Japan, but it’s already humungous.

Alex: Right. I think it’s past both of them, actually.

Steve: So it’s a humungous economy and it’s doubling every seven or 10 years.

Alex: Yeah.

Steve: It’s absolutely extraordinary.

Alex: Yeah and, I mean, it’s been growing like that for 30 years now or more.

Steve: Yeah.

Alex: I think it was Dung Chow Ping…

Steve: Yeah, Dung Chow Ping, but I think it didn’t really pick up speed until the ‘90s.

Alex: Yeah.

Steve: I mean it started from such a low level.

Alex: Right.

Steve: So it’s one thing to go seven-10% growth a year, based on a very low level, but as you keep doubling and doubling and doubling and you’re still moving at that rate of growth…

Alex: Yeah, exactly.

Steve: …it’s astounding, absolutely astounding.

Alex: Yeah.

Steve: But, so Beijing, you’re just going to hang around and so forth?

You know, are you going to go to the interior at all from Beijing?

Alex: I’m not sure yet. I’m on a bit of a budget.

Steve: Right.

Alex: But, fortunately, I have a friend who’s there and he’s offered to put me up for the entire duration.

Steve: Right.

Alex: That really takes a big burden off.

Steve: Right.

Alex: So I’ll have a little bit of extra spending money.

I would definitely like to go to, say, XiAn or something like that, if possible.

Steve: Yeah, yeah.

That would be, I think, quite well, you know, worth it.

Although, just exploring Beijing and the Forbidden City and the older part of Beijing and stuff.

Alex: Yeah.

Steve: But it’s just so crowded now.

It’s different.

It’s different.

Yeah, interesting.

So Korea, how many times have you been to Korea?

Alex: I have been to Korea twice now.

The first time I went was about somewhere around six months after I started formally learning Korean.

So I couldn’t really communicate much at all, but because I had so much exposure, you know, for example, one instance I was in a taxi and I was going to the bus station, which was about 30 minutes away because I was in a rural city.

My friend stayed back at his place, so I was there alone with the driver and, you know, we conversed to the best of my ability for pretty much the whole 30 minutes.

Steve: Wow.

Alex: So I had some good opportunities there to really try and push the envelope and see really how good my Korean was at that time.

Steve: You know an experience like that, 30 minutes with a taxi driver in a real meaningful conversation, to my mind, is worth hours of class time.

Alex: Yeah, absolutely.

Steve: Hours of class time.

Alex: Yeah.

And I mean it was very encouraging for me because in the class that I was taking at the time, back here in Vancouver, we didn’t really have the option to speak.

It was more focused on, you know, the textbook and my teacher she did a great job.

I’ve got to give her credit because, you know, she saw what our needs were and kind of deviated from this textbook and would always be willing to answer our questions, even if they had nothing to do with the lesson.

But, at the same time, it was so limited, even the course time, so we didn’t really get the chance to converse that much and especially with native speakers because none of the other people in the class were native speakers, so.

Steve: Right.

So, really, except that you have to pay for a taxi, the thing is to go to the country, get in a taxi and start yakking away, right?

When I was a student in France I used to go into Spain hitchhiking.

Alex: Oh, really?

Steve: And that’s where I learned Spanish because I would just be talking.

If someone picks you up it’s because they want company, right?

Alex: Right.

Steve: So you’ve got truck drivers and stuff like that, so I’d have my little Spanish book and, you know, I’d just talk and so hours and hours and hours.

Of course, nowadays, hitchhiking is not as easy as it was when I was young.

Alex: Right.

Steve: It’s been spoiled, but when I was young, I mean, you just leave any little town in southern France or anywhere in Europe in those days and there’d be four or five people lined up hitchhiking…

Alex: Really?

Steve: …and within 15-20 minutes you’d be picked up.

Alex: Yeah.

Steve: And so you’d just get in there and talk.

Alex: Yeah. That’s pretty cool.

Steve: Yeah. Oh, that’s great.

That’s great.

So, now, you’ve been to China.

Alex: Yes.

Steve: How did you find the China versus Korea culture?

You know, what stuck you as the differences?

Alex: It’s honestly entirely different and I think the biggest reason why is Korea is much more modern.

Although China is very substantial in the global world, Korea is still much more modern, especially in Seoul.

I think there’s just a busyness in Korea, which I’m not really a big fan of.

That’s one thing that the second time I went back to Korea, or rather the first time I went back to Korea, it was something that I wasn’t too comfortable with.

But in China it seemed like there were a lot more people that were just friendly and there was this sense of community, even among these very crowded places.

Steve: Well, it’s funny.

Of course a lot of Koreans who are here in Vancouver, they’ll tell you they find Vancouver boring.

Alex: Yeah.

Steve: Because there’s so much more action in Korea, so it’s a matter of, I guess, what you’re used to.

Alex: Right, right.

Steve: And, I must say, the Chinese are actually quite easy to talk to.

Even when I was in China during the Cultural Revolution, where things were very tense and potentially they could get into trouble for talking with a foreigner…

Alex: Yeah.

Steve: …many people would shy away from you or give you dirty looks, but you’d always find people who were quite content to just “chew the fat”, you know, and just talk about whatever.

Of course I had to be careful not to talk about politics because that might get them into trouble, but we could always talk.

The Chinese, in that regard, I think are quite easy going.

Alex: Yeah, I think that’s, you know, definitely a similarity among rural Korea.

The urbanization of Seoul has just really changed the atmosphere there, but if you do go outside the city and, I mean, it takes a bit of time because the city is so expansive that you have to travel at least an hour outside, but if you do that’s where you find that kind of home country, typical rural friendliness and hospitality.

Steve: Yeah, yeah.

No, China, when I was there of course in the ‘70s, many of them had never seen a foreigner.

Alex: Right.

Steve: I can remember on one occasion I was in Shanghai with my wife and two kids and they were both blond, at that age; they’re dark haired now.

But we were walking down one of the major streets of Shanghai and we were surrounded by 200 people.

Alex: Oh, wow.

Steve: They were about 20 deep.

Alex: Yeah.

Steve: Perfectly, you know, harmless, but they were just like curious.

Alex: Yeah.

Steve: It was a hot June day and my kids started to cry as this crowd was kind of squeezing us.

Similarly, I remember once in northern China in the winter, I was in Harbin.

Not in Harbin, I was in a smaller town up in northeast China…

Alex: Oh, okay.

Steve: …and I went for a walk, as I always do.

I mean when we’re traveling, right, we like to walk around.

Alex: Right.

Steve: It doesn’t matter what it is.

Some little village, I wonder what this village is all about.

So you’re wandering around and I looked behind me and I had 200 little kids following me.

Alex: Wow.

Steve: Yeah.

So, yeah, we were a curiosity in those days.

It’s not the case today; although, I’m sure in China if you went out into the boonies you might encounter the same, but, certainly, you mentioned Xi An or Beijing or any of those major cities, they’re quite used to seeing lots of tourists.

Alex: Yeah.

Steve: So we’re not the curiosity that we once were.

Alex: Exactly.

Steve: Yeah.

Well, now what are your plans with Chinese?

Now you’re in third year Korean.

Alex: No. Actually, I’ve finished fourth year Korea already.

Steve: You’ve finished fourth year Korean.

Alex: Yeah.

Steve: And so you’re going to come back to UBC and work on your Chinese?

Alex: I don’t know if I have any plans on taking another Chinese course and I think the biggest reason is that it’s just so expensive.

Steve: Right.

Alex: You know a year of Chinese is bordering on $1,000 now.

Steve: Right.

Alex: And, you know, I found that in the eight months of the course that I was taking, I didn’t really learn all that much.

Since that semester finished and I’ve just begun this kind of self-study type of learning…

Steve: Right.

Alex: …I’ve found that it’s much more rewarding because I’m the one who chooses what I study.

Steve: Right.

Alex: But, at the same time, it’s so much cheaper.

Steve: Oh, yeah.

Alex: So…

Steve: I mean absolutely.

This is a common theme, you know, and we talk about it all the time, but there’s so…I think…you know I was going to actually break down and tell you this fall I’m going to Italy with my wife.

It’s my 65th birthday and all.

Alex: Oh, congratulations.

Steve: Thank you.

And so we were going to go; in fact, have plans to go to Sardinia.

And I found this Italian language school and they rent out a nice apartment that belongs to the owner of the school and everything.

I thought it would be neat.

We know the local people and ah, what the hell, I’ll enroll in a language course.

And I spoke to the lady there today via Skype.

It’s four hours a day and they begin with grammar and then they have a break and then they have their communications part and then they do writing.

I’m saying to myself, I’m going to be in Sardinia and I’m going to spend four hours of every day for a whole week sitting in a classroom.

They’re going to teach me grammar, which I can look up in a book.

Alex: Yeah.

Steve: It’s not that I don’t know the verbs in Italian, I can’t get them right and sitting in the classroom is not going to help me get them right.

Alex: Yeah.

Steve: So you get a lot of explanation, then they’re going to ask me to repeat it and reproduce it and get it wrong, which I don’t like doing.

Alex: Yeah.

Steve: So, actually, as a result of our Skype conversation, I’m not going to go there.

Alex: Oh, really?

Steve: I mean I’m going to go there.

Alex: Yeah.

Steve: They have a cooking school thing, so I’m going to take the cooking school three times a week.

Three evening a week we cook and we eat what we cook.

I’ll be there with my wife and I’m just going to visit around.

It may be cheaper to get a taxi and just talk away in Italian.

Alex: Exactly.

Steve: But, no, I see what you mean.

It is tremendously expensive, but, yeah.

And the resources that are available, whether it be a book, whether it be the library, whether it be Internet, whether it be LingQ, whether it be using flashcard systems or, you know, whatever, the live mochas.

I mean they all have their different flavor and different people like different things, but there’s less and less justification for sitting in a classroom.

Alex: Exactly.

Steve: Okay.

Well, there you have it.

We kind of diverged from our normal.

We didn’t criticize anyone in Canada or the other stuff that Mark and I normally do.

We were a little more serious.

We talked about language learning with Alex, so thank you Alex.

Alex: Thank you for having me, Steve.

Steve: Okay and that will be the end of our discussion today.

Please let us know if you have any special requests; things that you would like us to talk about.

We had that one request for us to talk about endangered languages.

We were happy to do that.

We will talk about any subject.

What we have to say is not, you know, based on any depth of knowledge, but it does give you some vocabulary.

Alex: Yeah.

Steve: Thank you for listening, bye.

Alex: Bye-bye.

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

Mark: Hello and welcome to another edition of EnglishLingQ.

Mark here with Steve…

Steve: Hello there.

Mark: …on another grayish day here in Vancouver.

Steve: Yet another grayish day.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: We’re not having a great summer.

Mark: Not so far.

Steve: Now, we do have, though, a request from Daisuke for us to talk about saving languages and dying languages and dead languages and that sort of thing.

We should point out that Daisuke hasn’t been very active recently.

Mark: If you’re listening, Daisuke.

Steve: If you’re listening, Daisuke, we’re responding to your question.

I’m sure you’re very busy doing other things, but we like to see our members active.

Mark: Yeah.

We just want to remind you that to get the most out of these podcasts, you should be reading them and creating links on LingQ and reviewing those links and doing all those good things so that you learn better.

Steve: I mean I can never understand why…

Mark: That goes not just for Daisuke.

Steve: Yes.

Mark: That’s for all of you.

Steve: Well, I can’t understand why people create so few links.

I’ve got 30,000 links or more in Russian alone.

I started my Korean and I’m already in second or third place for linking in Korean and I’m doing Portuguese and Russian.

It does work.

Anyway, let’s get back to languages.

Mark: Yeah.

Daisuke, he was asking, he said…I guess we can read what he said.

“Thanks for your interesting podcast.

Of the estimated 7,000 languages spoken in the world today, linguists say nearly half are in danger of extinction and likely to disappear in this century.

In fact, one falls out of use about every two weeks.”

Steve: Well, I mean, I guess I have several reactions.

First of all, I must admit that I would like to see our native languages in Canada be preserved and it would be cool, I think, if the natives actually spoke those languages.

You know, I don’t know why I would like that, I just think it gives them more substance to their search for a special identity.

When I see a native who basically dresses like us, you know, speaks English like us, lives like us, other than the fact that he’s allowed to fish when we’re not, what is there, you know?

So I think a language is pretty important to someone’s identity.

So that’s one side of the picture.

The other side of the picture is we have probably been loosing languages at this rate ever since the beginning of time, because there are all kinds of languages that blend into other languages and new languages.

I mean, the languages we speak today, most of them didn’t exist 2,000-3,000 years ago in their present forms.

So, I don’t know.

What do you think?

Mark: I mean, I think it’s probably likely, too, that in this age of increased globalization, the world has grown much smaller; the Internet and mass media and so forth.

It seems likely that there isn’t as much need for all those languages.

I mean, why do people develop languages in the first place?

It’s to communicate and if you can only communicate with a very small group in your own language and that language ends up dying out for that reason, you’re unlikely to be able to force people to learn that language because the reason to learn a language is to communicate and if it’s only to communicate with a small group or in the case of, you know, the native languages, no one speaks those languages.

Steve: I know.

Mark: You can’t. It’s artificial.

Steve: Well, most people are not…I mean, I like speaking lots of languages and many of our members do, but most people just learn languages for practical reasons.

So, I mean, I was speaking to someone the other day on LingQ, one of our students, who’s originally from Guinea and she said there’s 70 or 170 languages in Guinea and that’s because there’s that many different ethnic groups…

Mark: Right.

Steve: …and that creates all kinds of political problems.

Mark: Right.

Steve: And, probably, you know, European society was like that as well at one point because people couldn’t travel very far, but probably at some point, even in Guinea, they will gradually…and it’s not because of the evil Internet, American imperialists or anything else.

I mean right now they speak French and then their native language, but they may eventually develop a common language for Guinea.

Such as, we now have common languages in, say, France or Germany or Italy; whereas, 1,000 years ago, every little village had its own language.

I agree with you.

Most people don’t like to maintain five languages, they’re quite happy with having one that serves their purpose.

And having one language for a country of 20 million people may be more useful than having one that only works for 25, so, yeah.

Mark: I mean, I think in countries where they’re trying to revive native languages, Daisuke talked about Cornish.

I don’t know anything about Cornish, other than, presumably, it was spoken in Cornwall, I don’t know, in England.

But, I’m guessing, they’re not going to have a lot of success there because England is not that big a place.

So if you speak English, you live day to day in English, you might be forced to learn Cornish in school, but it’s like one hour a week and the rest of the time you’re in English.

I just don’t see a future for a language like that.

Steve: Even in Ireland, where they have a stronger sort of sense of national identity or an attempt to differentiate themselves from the English and Irish Gaelic is taught in the schools, but I remember when I had my dust up with Benny the Irish Polyglot.

Mark: Right.

Steve: I told him that I have an Irish friend who said that very few people in Ireland speak Gaelic and he called my friend an idiot.

But, in fact, there’s this famous story about a reporter who went all around Ireland trying to find someone who was a native speaker of Gaelic.

They’re very hard to find.

Mark: Right.

Steve: And people probably know as much Gaelic, those Irish people who learned it at school, as much Gaelic as the average English-Canadian knows French…

Mark: I was just going to say, it’s the same here.

Steve: …which isn’t very much.

Mark: You’re forced to okay, we’ll study French in school, but there’s no motivation to learn it.

There’s no one to speak to so, every day, what’s important in life is in English.

Steve: Right, in Canada…

Mark: In Canada.

Steve: …for English-Canadians. That’s not the case in Quebec.

Mark: In Ireland, too.

Steve: And in Ireland, too, yeah.

Mark: Right.

Steve: But, there again, that gets sort of politically dicey because their English is the language of the English, so it’s sort of a vestige of the sort of English imperialism and colonization of Ireland and that’s all very bad.

But if you look at Cornwall, I suspect, or even in Wales, Wales has been more successful than Ireland or Cornwall and even there it’s only in certain areas where people speak the language.

Now, you can go to a different region like Catalunya in Spain, where the Catalans, in fact, do speak Catalan and I think the Basques have been more successful in resurrecting their language.

And we could argue that Hebrew in Israel is an artificial resurrection of their language.

Mark: I was just going to say, in Israel they resurrected Hebrew, but I guess they needed a language to speak to each other.

There was no common language there at the time.

Steve: Now, you could say that it might have been more practical for them at that time.

Given that you had people from North Africa, Europe, Eastern Europe, all over the place, they could have chosen English, which was the language of the mandate power of Britain at the time.

Mark: Or Arabic.

Steve: Or Arabic, but they had political reasons for wanting to resurrect that language.

So, I mean, with enough political will, you can make it happen.

Mark: Right.

Steve: Then once it becomes a meaningful language, then it survives.

Mark: Right.

Steve: The trouble we have, say, in Canada, is that there’s so many native languages and there’s no way that Tribe A is going to say okay, I’ll accept the language of Tribe B as my sort of token native language.

Either they’re going to speak English or they’re going to speak their own.

Mark: Right.

Steve: And, so, that’s the difficulty, even with Cree.

Like I think it would be neat, I’m far more interested in Canada in promoting our native languages than in promoting the language of the immigrants.

A lot of the immigrants, where they’re sufficiently, you know, numerous, they say well, we should have schools in, you know, whatever.

In the old days it would be German or Ukrainian or nowadays Chinese or Punjabi and I’m not in favor of that at all because I don’t consider those languages to be sort of indigenous to Canada.

You know Canada, when the country was formed, was English and French and we had all the different what we nowadays call First Nations Groups with their languages.

Mark: Right, yeah.

Steve: Those are the languages that I, for political reasons, would want to promote, but to promote them for political reasons you need a lot of people supporting the idea.

Mark: Yeah and I was going to say, I mean, the window of opportunity for capturing those languages is probably disappearing.

I mean there can’t be many native speakers of those languages left because the younger generations don’t speak them.

Steve: But they’re trying and, you know, all the more power to them.

It’s better this is done as sort of an initiative that really, you know, mobilizes people who want to do it because there’s a tremendous opportunity for just spending just gobs of public money on this.

All kinds of consultants creating grammar books and going and doing studies and all kinds of stuff doesn’t amount to anything, except that it employs a bunch of people and gets the NGOs all excited, but doesn’t really influence very many people.

Mark: Well, I mean that’s where I was sort of going.

The direction I was going to head when we started off here was that, for the most part, all the money and effort spent on trying to maintain or resurrect dying languages, dead or dying languages, is better spent elsewhere.

I mean, the fact is those languages died for a reason; nobody wanted to speak them.

So trying to force those languages back into fashion or into use, I mean, maybe one in 100 or 1,000, but the other 999 are just going to disappear and lots of time and effort will be expended and wasted.

Steve: Yeah.

Now, of course, you say it’s not worth it.

I say that’s a value judgment.

It may not be worth it to you, it might be worth it to some other people and, so, if a majority of people are able to persuade their politicians that that’s something they want to spend money on, then all the more power to them if they can pull it off.

Personally, I’m interested in languages and I think it would be fun to do.

I don’t think you can get a majority of people to do it.

It’s a bit like Esperanto, which sounds like a good idea, but in fact they never generated any momentum.

But every time I say anything against Esperanto on my YouTube channel, of course, I get inundated by very angry Esperanto supporters.

But the reality is that most people are not going to do that.

Mark: I mean once the language is dead or dying, it is, it’s the same as Esperanto or Klingon or any of these.

I mean it’s not a used language anymore and it’s sort of artificial.

Steve: But it is unfortunate.

Like I think it would be unfortunate if all the native languages of Canada disappeared and were never heard again.

Mark: Right.

Steve: But for them to have any of their languages survive, as you say, realistically they’d have to unite and say we’re going to maintain three languages.

Like say there are three language groups, we’re going to put all our efforts in and any native is going to have to learn Cree, even if he’s an Ojibwa or something.

Mark: Right.

Steve: But that runs into other political problems that probably would sink that idea, so, yeah.

But, I mean, there are examples.

Who knows, you know?

I mean never say never.

Mark: There’s also the argument that, you know, the natives maybe should concentrate on English, making sure their English is as good as it can be, and that will probably benefit them, at least economically, more so in the long run than focusing on what makes them different.

Steve: Possibly; although, part of the problem, you know, might be a lack of, you know, pride or self esteem or whatever.

I mean, certainly, when I go to Spain, very proud Basque speakers or Catalan speakers are absolutely fluent in Castilian Spanish.

Mark: Right.

Steve: So the one doesn’t prevent the other.

Mark: That’s true.

Steve: There are, you know, many examples of people who are perfectly fluently bilingual, so I don’t see that as a problem.

I think, personally, one of our slightly hair-brained ideas, when we started LingQ, was that LingQ would be an excellent tool to preserve these minority languages.

We don’t need to spend millions of dollars to write textbook and grammar books; instead, all we need is to get speakers to record themselves so that we could have a whole community of, you know, Cree speakers on LingQ.

Mark: Right.

Steve: I, personally, would love to have native languages on LingQ, once we get through all the other things we’re doing for more learners.

Mark: Don’t let all the people who want Czech and Dutch and Arabic know that we’ll be adding Cree next.

Steve: Ooh, where did you hear that first? No, but yeah.

Mark: I mean, I think that covers Daisuke’s question and, as always, we’re happy to have the feedback and hope you all enjoyed this podcast.

If you would like us to talk about something else, by all means, let us know on the EnglishLingQ forum.

Steve: Not that what we have is particularly useful or profound, but we do generate a lot of words so that you can go and link them.

Mark: Daisuke.

Steve: Daisuke.

Okay, bye for now.

Mark: Bye-bye.

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

Mark: Hi everyone.

Welcome to another installment of the EnglishLingQ podcast. Mark here with Steve.

Steve: Hello. It’s a soggy, dark, afternoon here in Vancouver.

Mark: Yeah, but I think it’s not raining quite as hard as it was half an hour ago, so.

Steve: Yeah, but you can’t see the sky. Anyway…

Mark: Summer weather.

Steve: Summer weather. What, 15 degrees and wet?

Mark: Aha.

Steve: Okay. What should we talk about today?

Mark: Well, there’s a few things.

I know you have one issue in particular that you’re kind of hot to trot on, but one other thing I was thinking, of course, is the World Cup of Soccer that starts tomorrow.

Steve: Right.

Mark: And, of course, the Stanley Cup Finals which ended yesterday, which is a big deal in Canada.

Steve: It’s a big deal locally. There is not of such great interest…

Mark: However, it’s a big deal here.

Steve: Yeah.

Mark: The Chicago Blackhawks won last night, they beat the Philadelphia Flyers.

So, presumably, it’s a big deal in Chicago too and Philadelphia.

Steve: You know I saw on the boards there was an ad for Lukoil.

Isn’t that a Russian oil company?

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: So maybe the Russians were watching that game.

Mark: I’m sure there’s a lot of people that were at least aware that it was on and watching it.

It’s not like it’s a non event, but it certainly pales in comparison to the World Cup of Soccer.

Steve: Well, I think the World Cup of Soccer is a tremendous event, because it is truly international. And unlike…

Mark: I beg to differ.

Steve: Okay.

Mark: It doesn’t take into account the lack of ability of the Canadian Soccer Team to make it there.

Steve: Alright. Canada happens to be pretty inept when it comes to soccer, but the United States are there and they even consider themselves contenders.

Mark: That’s true.

Steve: So, North America, South America, Asia, Africa, Middle East, Europe, you know, it’s pretty international.

I think it’s great that they’re playing it in South Africa and it’s just very international.

I mean North Africa has, excuse me, North Korea has a team.

Mark: Yeah. No, no, I mean it is. It’s amazing.

Steve: And North Korea, they’re the only people who are properly fed, aside from the leadership there, but they devote all kinds of resources to having a strong soccer team.

Mark: Right.

Steve: So, no, I think it’s a great and I hope, as I’m sure will happen, that the whole program in South Africa will come off well and that’s great.

It would be fun to see an African team win.

Mark: Yeah. I mean I’m looking forward to it.

I must say, I don’t watch soccer, normally, but every four years the World Cup.

I think it’s a great event.

It’s just fun.

It’s fun to see all the different countries, as you say, playing.

You start out with however many there are, I don’t even know, is it 30 teams?

Steve: It’s got to be 32. It’s got to be a divisible-by-four number.

Mark: Something like that and then they gradually whittle down to the finals. It’s great.

It’s like a month’s worth of soccer, isn’t it?

Steve: It’s a month, yeah.

Mark: Yeah. I mean I always watch it and it’s too bad that, as I said, Canada can’t make it.

Steve: Canada is not very competitive, no.

Mark: Actually, they made it once.

Steve: One year.

Mark: Didn’t manage to score a goal.

Steve: No.

Mark: What’s amazing is that, you know, not that long ago, Canada and the U.S. were kind of on par; both in it.

Steve: Right, right.

Mark: And the U.S.

has somehow managed now to become a contender; whereas, Canada is still back where it was.

Steve: Struggling, yeah.

Mark: Yeah. Obviously, if the team is more successful there’s going to be more interest.

It kind of feeds on itself.

Steve: I mean there are some interesting teams that are there.

Slovenia is there on the strength of beating Russia, which is amazing.

Slovenia is like two million people.

Mark: Right.

Steve: So…

Mark: Partly, too, you know, there’s like 20 teams from Europe and three from North and Central America or two, whatever it is.

I mean it’s a little bit skewed in favor of certain continents in terms of the countries that are participating.

Steve: Yeah, but the teams from Central and North America are not very competitive, so how many are you going to put there, you know?

Mark: Yeah, that’s true too. But how good can North Korea be?

Steve: They’re good.

Mark: How do you know?

Steve: I mean I remember I was in England in 1964 and North Korea tied Italy and beat Portugal or something.

Mark: I mean 1964.

Steve: I’m just telling you.

Mark: That’s a ways away.

Steve: And I think the North Koreans recently beat some top teams.

I mean some of the teams, I think, they’re quite competitive.

Mark: Yeah, but that’s soccer.

Steve: So what is your point?

You’re saying that there’s too many teams from Europe?

Mark: I’m just finding it a little bit hard to swallow that so few teams from our zone get to go.

Steve: Well, our zone are lousy.

It doesn’t matter whether it’s Barbados or Costa Rica, they’re lousy and Canada.

So the United States is by far the strongest.

There’s probably one other team from Central America.

Mark: Mexico is pretty good too.

Steve: Yeah, Mexico, they’re probably in there and then you’ve got South America: Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Columbia.

There’s lots of them there.

I don’t know who’s there this year, but there seems to be a good number.

Anyway, I don’t worry about it.

We don’t follow soccer.

We don’t know who should be there and who shouldn’t.

Mark: Anyway, I’m looking forward.

Steve: Right.

Mark: It should be lots of fun.

Steve: No, I wanted to talk about something.

You have some other things you wanted to talk about before I launch into my tirade here?

Mark: No, not in particular.

Steve: Alright.

Mark: So, off you go.

Steve: Well, I was reading the newspaper two days ago and there is a university in Ontario.

Ontario is the largest province in Canada, over 10 million people, and there’s a university there that decided to award an honorary degree to the former Premier (Prime Minister or Premier) of Ontario whose name is Mike Harris, because Mike Harris is from that area.

Mike Harris, in fact, himself is a former teacher and so the education faculty at this university – Nipissing University – decided to award an honorary degree to Mike Harris.

The Teachers’ Federation and a number of other teachers’ associations in Ontario publically announced — they sent a public letter — saying that if the university gives an honorary degree to Mike Harris, former Premier of Ontario, they will take retaliatory measures against the university.

And they specifically said something to the effect of “I can’t account for what our members will do, but that, probably, we will not accept student teachers from that university.”

Mark: Keeping in mind that Teachers’ Federation is just another fancy word for a union, which is what they are. It’s a union.

Steve: Well, it’s a combination of…it’s like a guild in the middle ages.

It’s an association that exists to protect the position of the members.

That’s what it is, it’s a trade union.

But the problem with the Teachers’ Federation is that they have this sense that theirs is some noble calling for the public good and every time they speak on education everyone else should listen and follow what they say.

But there is a contradiction there because they are, in fact, more motivated by their own self-interest as teachers and, even more so, their self-interest as the union representing the teachers.

They’re more interested in that than they are in the interest of the students.

The fact that the government and in the case of Mike Harris what he did was he brought in testing for teachers, which of course is a no-no for the teachers, the no-no.

The Teachers’ Association says all teachers are the same.

Mark: Right.

Steve: The good teacher, the bad teacher, there’s no difference.

All teachers are the same.

Since teachers do influence the outcome, we hope, otherwise, why have them, a good teacher has a big influence on the success of a learner and a bad teacher has a negative influence.

And so Mike Harris brought in testing of teachers and he also reduced the power of school boards and did a bunch of other stuff.

Perhaps he reduced the education budget, but whatever, that was his policy.

And for them now, 15 years after the fact, to say that if this university gives an honorary degree to Mike Harris that they will boycott student teachers from that university is absolutely extraordinary.

Mark: I mean it’s just blackmail, but not surprising.

That’s par for the course.

I mean the teachers’ unions are among the most militant.

I mean any public sector union, for that matter.

Steve: And the thing is that when I follow this, I read a book on education in the United States and it said that since 1960 some odd, there has been a 300% increase after inflation in spending on education.

So that as a society, the United States spends three times as much after inflation on education; three times as much as they did before — 40 years ago – and, yet, education standards are not going up.

And, in fact, it also pointed out in the book or maybe I saw it somewhere else, the incarceration rate in the United States since 1970 has gone up 700%.

But one of the arguments in favor of public education is that it brings about sort of a greater equality in the society and gives everyone a chance to get educated and fulfill their potential and so forth and so on.

We have tripled the amount of money on public education and we’ve got seven times more people in jail in the United States.

Mark: I mean there’s no correlation there, but I guess you’re just pointing that out.

Steve: No, but there should be. There should be.

If you’re spending three times more on education there should be some results.

Mark: Well, yeah, but I don’t think your results should be judged by the number of people that are in correctional institutions.

Steve: I’ll tell you exactly why there’s a correlation.

Because a high percentage of people who are in correctional institutions in the United States and I assume elsewhere — in Canada — are people who have trouble reading.

Mark: Right.

Steve: In other words, there’s a direct relationship between effective literacy…

Mark: Right, but there could be other causes for that.

I mean, yeah, it’s possible.

It sounds like a good hypothesis, but there could be other causes.

Steve: Let’s put it this way, it has no impact.

Mark: Right.

Steve: Like one of the things that teachers always say is spend more money on education, it’s a good investment; otherwise, you’ll be spending it on prisons. No. We spend three times as much on education and we’re spending seven times as much on prisons.

Mark: Well, it certainly hasn’t reduced the cost of prisons.

Steve: It hasn’t reduced and the number of kids graduating from schools in the United States, again on these statistics, who have trouble reading has not changed and the number of kids who have practically no knowledge of history and geography on all these tests has not changed.

Mark: I mean, I must say, it doesn’t surprise me to hear that.

Yeah, I mean you hear the teachers’ unions, their big thrust all the time is smaller class sizes, which just means more teachers, of course; more union members, more jobs for their members.

You know, I know we’ve obviously had the experience whenever we approach anybody in the teaching establishment to look at what we’re doing that the top most in their minds is not necessarily what’s good for the learner.

Steve: No.

Mark: That’s down the list.

Steve: Well, you mentioned class size.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: There is no research to show that whether you have 22 kids in a class or 28 kids in a class or 32 kids in class that there’s much difference in outcomes, but there is research to show that good teachers, that’s the most important influence.

But every effort to improve the quality of teachers by weeding out the poor teachers is resisted and what the teachers like to say is no, we need more credentialing, tougher credentials, more training.

If the person is a poor teacher, you can give them all the training you want, give them three more levels of credentials, he remains, or she, a poor teacher.

And apparently there’s research to show that the most effective teachers are the ones who have good verbal skills.

That’s what you need to measure.

People who can talk with enthusiasm, who can create enthusiasm, who have good communication, verbal skills, that’s seems to be the most significant factor.

Mark: Well, I mean, I think that sounds like it would be a significant factor. We don’t know, necessarily.

Steve: I have to tell you, there’s research that says that.

Mark: Right.

But one thing that’s for sure is that in most other fields those people that are good at what they’re doing are promoted, are hired, are paid more and those who are not good at what they’re doing move on to do other things and maybe there are other things they are better at doing, so why should teaching be any different.

I mean the benefit of having a system like that is that you get better results.

So if the teaching system was more like that and the better teachers were rewarded and sought after and identified then the results would be better.

I mean I have no doubt that’s true but, unfortunately, at least in Canada and it sounds like the U.S.

is the same and I would imagine in most countries it’s probably fairly similar, the people that run education are not focused, actually, on doing what’s best for their customers.

They’re focused on protecting their patch.

Steve: Well, to be fair, there are undoubtedly teachers who don’t like the way the teachers’ union operates and I’m sure there’s lots of teachers in Ontario who are appalled that the teachers’ union would try to blackmail and boycott, you know, two generations after the fact, student teachers.

Mark: Right.

Steve: I mean it’s just absolutely extraordinary that they would have the gall to say that.

Mark: Right.

Steve: But the fact remains that public sector unions have too much power.

We know that in Canada for the same job, electrician, plumber, clerk, you name it, a public sector employee earns 40% more.

Once we factor in the pension and benefits, 40% more than a private sector employee for the same job and that is part of why we have such a huge problem with public debt in countries where they have allowed the public sector…this is like the Court of Louis IVX in Versailles.

I mean this is the burden that modern societies, the monsters that they have created.

I really believe this.

Mark: And, what’s more, the public sector employees, quite often, don’t work as hard as the private sector employees in terms of hours or benefits or whatever the case may be.

Steve: Yeah.

Mark: Leaving that aside, I don’t blame those employees.

I mean that’s natural, human.

That’s how people react when you’re in a situation like that.

I mean you’re in that union environment, it’s all about getting the most for us and once you’ve got something you’re not about to give it back and you feel entitled.

I mean that’s just normal, human behavior and, somehow, it’s kind of spiraling out of control in a lot of countries.

Steve: Absolutely.

Mark: I mean we see it in spades, obviously in Greece and Spain, I guess, to a lesser extent.

I mean Greece, their country is practically bankrupt and they’re out there protesting a pay cut.

Steve: And that’s not to say the public sector workers work less.

I’m sure there’s lot of lazy people in the private sector.

But there was a program on television where they interviewed some private sector nurses in Greece and they compared their situation with the public sector nurses.

And the private sector nurses worked three times as hard for half the money and retired at, whatever, 65 and the public sector nurses were so heavily overstaffed they were sitting around wondering what to do and they got paid more.

But one thing I wanted to mention and that is you said something about, you know, the…what was it?

I can’t remember.

Because I was listening again to my favorite Russian radio station and they were talking about the need for industry in Russia to basically meet the needs of their consumers and to stop worrying so much about catering to the needs or trying to curry favor with the bureaucrats.

Because there the government has such a dominant position in business that business is more motivated to try and get a special tariff or a special subsidy or a special break or a special, you know, law or whatever.

They spend most of their time trying to curry favor with the bureaucrats rather than producing better products to satisfy the consumer and I think the education system is a bit like that here.

Rather than, you know, coming up with better ways of educating children, they’re looking at ways of how they can secure a stranglehold on public money.

Anyway, I think I’ve kind of beaten the subject to death.

Mark: I think we probably have.

Steve: We’ll probably have some public sector employees that are going to come and criticize us but, hey, we want to have a divergence of views.

And I think the fundamental problem with the Ontario Teachers’ Federation…the issue is not that they disagree with Mike Harris.

They’re entitled to disagree with Mike Harris and every one of them is entitled to disagree with me.

We don’t have to agree, but they have a right to their opinion and I cannot penalize their children because of their parents’ opinion.

That’s the thing that most of all bothers me in the position that they took.

Mark: Right. Well, you heard it here.

Steve: I feel very strongly on the subject.

Mark: Alright.

Steve: Alright.

Mark: If you have anything to add to this discussion, please let us know; otherwise, we’ll catch up with you again next time.

Steve: Alright, bye for now.

Mark: Bye-bye.

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

Mark: Hello everyone.

Here we are for another EnglishLingQ podcast.

Mark here with Steve.

Steve: Hello there.

This is the Mark and Steve talkfest.

Mark: Mark and Steve Show.

Steve: The Mark and Steve Show.

You know what are we going to talk about?

Before we get on to things that are less serious…

Mark: We’re kind of in mourning today, because our Vancouver Canucks lost in the Stanley Cup Playoffs.

Steve: Yeah.

Mark: Most people out there probably have never heard of the Vancouver Canucks, but here in Vancouver hockey is king.

Steve: No longer.

Mark: So the City is in mourning after our team lost to the Chicago Blackhawks.

Steve: We won’t go into details.

Mark: No.

Steve: It’s too annoying to talk about, but, mind you, you know, in sports you can’t always win.

Somebody has got to win and somebody has got to lose.

We’ve got the World Cup now in South Africa and there’s, I don’t know, how many teams and only one team is going to win, so.

Mark: That’s absolutely right.

Steve: There you go.

Mark: And some teams that are not expected to do as well will come and will do well and some of the top teams will not do well and will get lynched by their respective media.

Steve: I read in the paper that somebody, I think it was the ABN Bank, which is a Dutch bank, said the best thing for the world economy is if Germany wins, but their prediction is that Spain will win.

Apparently, it has to do with the size and power of the economy of the country.

Mark: Right.

Steve: Because the most powerful economy that’s playing in the World Cup is Germany.

Mark: Right.

Steve: So if Germany wins the impact on the economy and spending and so forth.

Mark: Oh, I see. I see.

Steve: So, well, who knows; all these different theories.

While we’re on the subject of Europe, of course, we’ve had a change of government in the UK.

For the first time in a long time they’ve got…like, typically, we think of the UK as having two parties…

Mark: Right.

Steve: …the Conservatives and the Labour Party and now they have a Coalition Government.

Mark: Right.

Steve: Because the Liberal Democratic Party has formed a coalition with the Conservatives.

Mark: But the Liberal Democratic Party kind of came out of relative obscurity to get a significant percentage of the votes so that they became a player in the political scene over there.

Steve: Exactly.

Now there always as been that third party, the Liberal Party.

I think there was a coalition in the 1930s when a Canadian, actually, John Bonar Law, was prime minister, if I remember my history.

But the big issue in the UK, as is the case in Canada, why there’s typically either one party or the other, is that they have this First-Past-The-Post election system.

Mark: Right.

Steve: So, in any riding or circumscription or whatever we call it, only one party will win.

Mark: Right.

Steve: But there are systems elsewhere; in fact, I think it’s more common to have this proportional representation system where, even little parties, if they end up with 15% of the vote then somehow or other they’ll end up with 15% of the seats.

Mark: Right. Which, I guess, seems more fair, in a way.

I know that here in British Columbia for the Provincial Government they had a referendum on whether to move away from the First-Past-The-Post system to more of a proportional representation-type system and it got defeated.

I think, mostly, because nobody could understand the system that was proposed.

Steve: Well, that’s right.

It wasn’t simply a matter of, you know, whatever percentage of the vote you get.

It’s factored in and divided and subtracted from and no one understood it.

But, you know, I understand that one of the demands of the Liberal Democrats in the UK is to have a referendum on switching to a proportional representation system because, obviously, the Liberal Democrats, I mean, those parties that concentrate their votes in certain ridings are going to win those seats.

Mark: Right.

Steve: Those parties that are kind of evenly distributed and have 35% everywhere or 20%, they’re never going to win a seat.

Mark: Right.

Steve: So the Liberal Democrats would benefit by proportional representation and one of their demands is to have a referendum.

But I think people don’t understand the issue and I think they’ll probably vote for what they know.

I don’t know.

Mark: I mean that’s certainly what happened here.

That’s certainly what happened here.

I think, yeah, from what I’ve read, the Conservatives are not necessarily that keen on changing the electoral system because it obviously benefits them right now.

Now they have to form this coalition, so they have to give up something to form it.

Steve: Right.

Mark: But it will be interesting to see.

I mean, for starters, they have to come up with a simpler formula for the proportional representation than the one they came up with here so that people can at least understand what it is they’re voting for or against.

Steve: Yeah.

I mean some countries like France and I think the Ukraine, because I followed their election, there they have a second sort of turn, right?

So you have one election and then whoever… There are eight parties and then the top two or three are in a runoff.

So there’s actually a runoff, a second election, so people have to go, you know, to vote twice.

So I don’t know what they’ll come up with.

But one of the things that David Cameron — the new leader — is talking about, which I think is highly overdue but whether he actually pulls it off or not I don’t know, is this idea that in the UK they’ll have to get away from the idea of entitlement.

In other words, everybody, whether they are government servants, in other words, public employees or even the electorate, they all feel they’re entitled to this and entitled to that.

Mark: Right.

Steve: I should have five weeks holiday.

I should have this.

I should have that.

All these countries are going bankrupt in a hurry and he’s saying we’ve got to talk about what we can put in rather than what we’re going to take out.

Easily said.

Mark: Lots of people say those things, the problem is you get into power and then it never feels…

Steve: You like to stay there.

Mark: You like to stay there and, I mean, human nature is that if you were given something and then it’s taken away from you then you feel hard done by and you’re going to complain, just like in Greece where their country is going bankrupt and they’re out in the streets protesting that things are going to have to be tightened up on them.

Steve: Mind you, the situation in Greece is probably no worse than the situation in California insofar as government debt is concerned.

The bigger problem with the politicians is that the business model for a politician is I take the taxpayer’s money and I use that money to buy his support so that he’ll vote for me next time.

Since a small percentage of the people pay most of the taxes, therefore, in a situation of majority rules, if 20%…10% of the people, I think, pay 55% of the taxes.

Mark: Right.

Steve: So, 10-15% of the people are unhappy, 60% of the people are happy they’re getting something for nothing, however inefficient the delivery of that service and entitlement is.

Mark: Right.

Steve: Anyway, we’ve been on that subject before.

Mark: For sue.

Steve: Yeah.

Listen, speaking about health, which we weren’t, but it’s a public service, both of us now have gone to visit this Chinese acupuncturist.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: And I’ve decided to give up on the guy.

You’ve got your bad neck, which you can describe.

I have a situation where sometimes I think the circulation to my fingertips, it’s not the blood circulation, but it’s the nerves or whatever are such that my fingers get cold and sometimes a little bit numb and my thumb is sometimes a little bit sore, so I thought this would be something for acupuncture.

Mark: Right.

Steve: Because I haven’t been able to find a doctor who’s got anything useful to say other than wear gloves, you know?

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: Now it could also be carpel tunnel syndrome, I don’t know.

So, anyway, I’ve gone there twice.

The first time I went there he sits you down, doesn’t say anything.

I was about to tell him what was wrong, “ssshhh, ssshhh, don’t tell me.” And then he kind of squeezes my fingers, looks at me, “stick out your tongue”, then he draws a little stickman and says “you’ve got this, this and this wrong, now follow me.”

Then he makes me lie down, sticks a bunch of needles in me and I lie there for an hour.

Then I didn’t feel any better and then I went again and the same thing happened and I still don’t feel any better.

So even though I’ve heard great stories about his guy, I’m not going again.

What’s been your experience?

Mark: Well, I should explain that the reason you went there is because I went there and the reason I went is because a friend of mine had gone there.

And this friend of mine had had back problems forever; I don’t know what, disc problems in his back.

He couldn’t walk.

He couldn’t golf.

He couldn’t do the things he liked to do and he’d had surgery, I don’t know, three or four surgeries, like a lot of surgeries and didn’t get better.

He was recommended to go see this guy and after I don’t know how many treatments, how many times he went to see him, but he said the guy cured his back, like he’s fine now.

So, I mean, you hear stories like that, that’s pretty convincing.

So I’ve had this problem with my neck, so I went and saw him and same experience as you had.

You know, he flicks your fingers, looks at my tongue, draws a little picture, but after he drew his picture — and he doesn’t ask for any input — he gave me a list of four of my problems, one of which was my neck.

So, okay, fine, we’re on the right track anyway.

Let’s see what you’ve got.

So he did what you described.

He sticks needles in you.

You lie there for a while.

He flips you over.

A couple needles in the problem areas and I’ve got to say that after that first treatment the pain that was in my neck in the one particular spot for at least a few years is now gone.

So, I mean…

Steve: But gone forever or is it still sore?

Mark: It’s gone. It’s gone.

Steve: So that’s worth it.

Mark: That’s worth it.

I still have, you know, muscle tightness and whatever in my neck and shoulders and I don’t know that anything can be done about that.

That’s just how it is.

I mean I’ve been a few more times and it’s done nothing additional.

So, I mean, I’m done there too, but it did fix that one spot.

Steve: Yeah, well that’s good.

Mark: When I’m in that situation, the guy doesn’t ask any information.

Steve: No.

Mark: And he’s there flicking your tongue, flicking your fingers, look at your tongue.

I mean I have to admit that I’m there trying not to laugh.

Steve: Right.

Mark: It’s, ah, but…

Steve: And yet…

Steve: It’s interesting, too, when you’re lying there and you’ve got the needles in you and I had needles in my arm, too, I don’t know if you realize it, but if you move your fingers it’s very sore.

Mark: Oh yeah, you don’t want to move.

Steve: Don’t want to move and the same with the stomach.

If you move, because he puts that terrible blanket over you, it can be sore.

Mark: I know.

Steve: As long as you don’t move it’s not sore.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: Yeah.

You know, speaking of China, I was at a breakfast this morning where the Canadian Ambassador to China, who is visiting here in Canada, gave us a bit of a presentation on China.

It is amazing the growth in China.

China will surpass Japan as the second economy in the world.

It’s growing at eight or nine percent a year.

Apparently, they’re building a new power station every week, a new electrical power station every week.

They import 65% of the world’s iron ore and produce 50% of the world’s steel.

I was at a forest industry conference yesterday and we were talking about the growth opportunities for wood in China, but China produces 50% of the world’s cement, maybe it’s even more and, of course, for every ton of cement you produce a ton of CO2.

So there is some awareness that if they are to meet their CO2 obligations that switching to wood away from cement would be a benefit.

I mean that’s just unbelievable, a power station a week.

Mark: Can that really be?

Steve: I don’t know.

Maybe that’s one of those things people repeat, I don’t know.

Mark: Yeah. I mean that’s an awful lot of power stations.

What kind of power stations?

Steve: Well that we don’t know.

Mark: Coal?

Steve: Maybe it’s a diesel generator, I don’t know.

Mark: Fire?

Steve: No, no, these are big power stations.

I mean they’re just gobbling up resources.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: It’s unbelievable.

And, I mean, if they’re growing seven or eight percent a year…you know if something grows seven percent a year it doubles in 10 years, mathematically, so, yeah.

In other words, that would mean adding the economy of Japan every 10 years.

Mark: Right.

Steve: Amazing.

Mark: Now at some point they’re going to slow down, they can’t maintain that rate forever.

Steve: You would think so.

Mark: They probably have a ways to go yet.

Steve: Well, they seem to be generating the wealth.

I mean there’s talk now about their overheated economy and speculation in real estate and all of these bad loans and stuff.

It seems like the whole world is full of bad loans.

Mark: Yeah, yeah.

Steve: Well…

Mark: Well, I mean, if they can build up that consumer demand in China that creates a whole new marketplace for goods.

That can only help the world economy that’s been sort of dependent on the American economy for so long.

Steve: Well, exactly. I think this opens up a whole new engine of growth.

Mark: Right.

Steve: Speaking of China and growth and stuff, I was in my car on the way back from my appointment downtown.

I was listening to the history of Sweden in Swedish and, so, a number of thoughts kind of went through my mind.

First of all that, really, the quality of, you know, mp3 players is such that, you know, I just plug it into my car radio and I’m listening to this phenomenal audio book on the history of Sweden.

My car is my university lecture hall.

Mark: Right.

Steve: It is.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: And, yeah, occasionally, I tune out, so I don’t run over someone.

Mark: Right.

Steve: You know?

I mean you can’t be 100% concentrating, but then I thought to myself, when I’m sitting in a lecture hall I’m gazing out the window half the time.

I mean how much do people concentrate in a lecture hall?

Mark: Yeah, for sure, I mean you can’t.

Unless the professor is particularly gripping, it’s hard to concentrate for that full period.

Maybe part of the reason why you take notes is to keep yourself focused so you continue listening.

Steve: Right.

Plus, I find myself listening to this and I notice that I missed some things, but I have the book at home and that makes me want to read it.

So I think there’s a whole tremendous learning opportunity just through listening.

I’ve been talking about it on my blog.

I’m quite big on it.

I think we do far too much of just sitting people down and talking at them.

Let people listen in other places.

Mark: Right.

Steve: Let them listen while doing other things, driving, whatever.

But the other interesting thing about the history of Sweden is that it talks about Sweden over the last however many thousand years and at different times it was covered in ice and then it was warmer than today.

Even as late as when they were sort of a more hunter-gatherer society, let’s say 6,000 years ago, there were like, I don’t know, couple of thousand people in the whole of Sweden; not very many people.

It is amazing.

And that’s like fairly recent in terms of the total history.

That’s still the 11th hour.

Mark: Right.

Steve: You know?

So, I mean the rate at which we’re growing now, but I’m not a believer that we’ll run out of space.

Mark: No.

Steve: There’s still a lot of space, but it’s a different world, absolutely.

Mark: Although, I think population growth will eventually peak.

At least demographers suggest that it will peak and then start to decline worldwide.

Steve: Yeah, I mean I think it requires…

Mark: It is declining in some countries already, in Europe and Eastern Europe.

Steve: Yeah.

It declines in those countries where certain economic, you know, transformations have taken place where it becomes economically, you know, more advantageous to have smaller families or, you know, women are in the workforce and stuff like that, but it’s precisely in those countries today where they are not able to provide for themselves, where there is no proper economic infrastructure…

Mark: Right.

Steve: …where there is continuing to be this incentive to have more and more kids to look after you in your old age, whatever, and so forth.

And in those countries I can see where they would reach a point where something’s got to give and we’re seeing it now through this massive migration, but migration is not going to solve the problem.

Mark: No.

Steve: You’re not going to take a billion people and move them to Europe, so.

Mark: No, but I think those countries and I think, you know, the Internet is going to have a profound affect there; getting more knowledge into more people’s hands…

Steve: Well, that’s true.

Mark: …and helping people everywhere sort of advance, despite the infrastructure and the situations in those countries.

Your average resident of those third-world countries may have a better chance now to raise themselves.

Steve: Well, you know, you raise an excellent point about how the third-world countries are going to leapfrog the technology.

I was talking to a friend of mine who was in Paraguay and he said down there everyone has a cell phone.

It’s much cheaper than here.

The phones are cheaper; it’s like $10 a month for unlimited access.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: So everyone is connected quite cheaply so that the old issue that you had to build in a telephone infrastructure and all this kind of stuff and I think in Africa, as well.

I hear that cell phones are becoming more and more common.

Mark: Yeah, I heard that in Kenya they’re the most advanced in payment-by-cell-phone systems or something.

Steve: Because no other payment system works.

Mark: No other system, I guess, works.

Steve: Well, no, that’s right.

So, no, you’re quite right.

Now maybe then with the iPad, mind you, then we hear that in countries like India they’re developing the $1,000 car and the $100 computer.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: So if they come up with like the $100 iPad or the $50 iPad.

Mark: I mean those types of things will come.

Steve: They’ll come.

Mark: They’ll come and the more people that are sort of plugged in and have access to all the resources that are out there, which certainly wasn’t the case in the third-world before or is much better now with the Internet with access to all that information that is accessible online.

Steve: Mark, do you realize something?

Mark: What’s that?

They can access LingQ?

Steve: Exactly.

Mark: I know.

Steve: I mean, think of it.

Mark: They’re all going to be speaking 10 languages.

Steve: Think of it.

How many people?

I mean those are our growth markets, like Niger and, I don’t know, wherever the population is growing.

If they can all get on LingQ and we’ve got to develop whatever language they need there, you know?

Mark: Right.

Steve: Yeah.

I mean in Africa they’ve got all these different languages so they’ve got to learn each other’s languages with LingQ.

Steve: We’re going to Africa.

Mark: We’ll send a research team to…

Steve: That sounds like a good idea.

Mark: Yeah.

Anyway, that’s probably about as much time is required for people to go for a jog or do the dishes, so we’ll end it there and we’ll pick it up again next time.

Steve: Thank you for listening.

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

Mark: Hello and welcome to another episode of the EnglishLingQ podcast.

Steve: Hello there, Steve here.

Mark: Mark and Steve here, as usual.

We’ve had a bit of a hiatus from the podcast since you’ve been traveling.

You were in Europe during the whole ash cloud excitement.

Steve: Yeah, it was quite interesting.

I flew out of here, I think it was the 10th of April or so, went to Sweden and kind of crisscrossed Sweden, but we were up fairly far north in Sweden in a place called Skellefteå.

Flew up there flew back down and the very next day all flights were stopped out of the Stockholm Airport.

So we were quite lucky in that we weren’t stuck up there, because that’s like about a 15-hour drive from northern Sweden to Stockholm.

Mark: Right.

Steve: That would not be so much fun.

This was all related to the wood business.

We were supposed to fly from Stockholm to Hamburg and then from Hamburg to Vienna.

And it was kind of interesting.

At first we didn’t believe it — that the airports were shut down because of this ash cloud.

Mark: Well, I remember you saying that it didn’t look like anything and the sun was shinning.

Steve: There was no evidence of any ash cloud over us.

Maybe, sitting here in North America, you thought Europe was covered in this haze.

Mark: Well that’s kind of the impression that I had.

Oh, it must be really pretty dark over there.

Steve: No, not at all.

Mark: Ash blowing around.

Steve: Sunny days, every day was sunny.

Except that we would look on the Internet and you’d see the map of Europe with this brown sort of extent of the ash cloud and all the airports that were shut down, but, no, we had no evidence of it.

We were supposed to fly down Sunday night to Hamburg and we decided we’re not going to wait; we’re just going to assume that the flight isn’t going.

We have a representative in Sweden, so with his car we drove down to Hamburg.

It was about a 10-hour drive.

No problem.

No major traffic on the roads.

Stopped for a sandwich here and there and that was it.

Mark: Right.

Steve: Then we were supposed to fly from Hamburg to Vienna and, there again, the planes weren’t flying so we rented a car this time.

The trains were hard to get on in Germany, because a lot of people who normally fly were taking the trains.

So there were two of us at this point and we just rented a car and drove south, stopped and spent one night in the medieval town of Dinkelsbuehl, it was very nice, visited a sawmill and then drove to Vienna and then flew home.

Mark: And you were lucky, I guess, on your flight home.

The day you were scheduled to fly home from Vienna was the day the flights were allowed again, so you didn’t end up…

Steve: Well that’s right.

Mark: Because anyone who had been trying to fly home in the days preceding was now on a wait list; whereas, you came along on your scheduled day, got on your plane and off you went.

Steve: Right.

Mark: All the people that had been waiting a week, or however long it was, are there on standby…

Steve: Out of luck.

Mark: …which must has been not that great.

Steve: You know it was interesting.

We were driving and I spoke to my travel agent and the way my ticket was written, because I always go on the cheapest possible ticket, my farthest point was Vienna and if you don’t show up for one leg they might consider you a no show and therefore you would lose the rest of your, you know, reservations.

But it looked like planes were flying out of Frankfurt and they weren’t flying out of Vienna, so my travel agent said that he could arrange it with Lufthansa so that I wouldn’t have to go to Vienna because at this point we no longer had a meeting in Vienna.

But, in the end, I just was afraid of doing that because, first of all, the fellow I was with we couldn’t get him on a train to Vienna, so I had to go to Vienna with the car for his sake; although, I could have given him the car, I guess, and taken a train back, but it was hard to get on trains.

We went to the train station in Munich and, you know, we asked them what time are the trains to Vienna and oh, yeah, there’s one at 15:59 and one at 17:22 or something and I said are there any seats?

Ah, he says, you’ll have to line up to find out.

Go and take a ticket.

There were 40 people ahead of us for two trips.

Mind you, they’re not all going to Vienna, but it was very crowded.

We figured our chances if we waited — 40 people before we got to speak to a ticket agent — maybe that wasn’t so smart.

So we just drove to Vienna hoping that we could fly out the next day and we did.

So that worked out well.

Mark: Yeah. No, I think it worked out alright for you.

Steve: Yeah.

Well, on the flight from Frankfurt people came onboard.

You know, as we got onboard there were people who’d started their flight in Frankfurt.

A fellow sitting beside me said that they had come to the airport three consecutive days on standby.

The first day they arrived at 11:00 and other people had arrived at 7:00 in the morning.

Mark: Right.

Steve: So the following two days they came at 7:00 to be first in line and finally on the third day they got on a flight.

Gee, I think that’d be kind of tough.

You’re spending all this money on a hotel.

Mark: I know.

Steve: You’re traveling to the airport every day.

Obviously, you’ve got to bring your luggage each time.

You wait and then you’re standby and oh, no, you didn’t make it.

Go back home.

Mark: Yeah, that’s pretty tough.

I understand that the rules in Europe are that European airlines are responsible for hotel costs for any passengers inconvenienced by schedule changes; although, I understand the European airlines are fighting this because that would be a horrendous bill.

It’s not just the people that are in Europe stranded, but the Europeans that were abroad that were stranded as well, people in wherever, Thailand or whatever, you heard about that, I guess, had an extended holiday, whether they wanted to or not.

But, apparently, the laws in Europe do say, if I’m not mistaken, that the airlines are responsible for all those costs and they’re trying to, obviously, fight it.

I mean how can you blame the airlines?

I mean the government made the ruling – government organizations – that no flights could fly and then the airlines have to pay for that?

Steve: Well, I was listening, as you know, to my Russian on Echo Moskvy and they were interviewing two Russians who were stranded.

And, of course, the view of the passenger is, you know, I should be compensated and the interviewer from the radio station was very sympathetic.

You mean they didn’t look after you?

They didn’t pay for your hotel room, isn’t that terrible?

And so forth.

But, as some would say in the lumber business where we sell lumber, sometimes there can be wood that’s less than perfect or there can be circumstances often beyond our control.

Maybe there’s a strike or a company goes bankrupt and doesn’t ship the wood.

And so, yeah, it’s very uncomfortable as a company when you get hit with these very, very heavy charges for things.

Obviously, if our lumber is not on grade that’s a problem, but if there’s a strike or if one of our suppliers goes bankrupt, these are things beyond our control.

The customers are unhappy and they want us to compensate them.

I mean the airlines are all half broke anyway, where are they going to get the money?

Mark: Well that’s the thing.

I mean people are very quick to complain about the airline should do this, the airline should do that, but at the same time if they can save $3.00 by going from one airline to another they will.

I mean I think the margins in that business are very low because it’s just so cutthroat.

I mean it’s just a commodity business.

It’s cutthroat.

Everybody tries to sell their tickets for as cheap as they can and then if something like this happens then they are now on the hook to look after everybody?

I mean it’s not realistic.

Steve: People are so unreasonable, so unreasonable.

They complain about service on the airlines.

They complain that there should be more service.

There should be more planes.

There should be this.

There should be that.

And, as you say, they’ll shop around for the cheapest possible flight and then they’ll complain that they’re not put up in a five-star hotel when something like this happens, so.

Mark: If it was possible for an airline to charge more and provide a full service, you know, great food, whatever, full compensation if you’re inconvenienced, yeah, we charge more but we provide all this, I think if it was possible to do that and make money someone would be doing it.

So, therefore, you can’t have your cake and eat it too.

Steve: Right. That’s a good English expression.

Yeah, but, I mean the consumer is the consumer.

As long as the consumer has a choice, but if all the airlines go broke then the consumer won’t have a choice.

There won’t be any airlines flying.

Mark: It was interesting.

Kate here in the office was saying that a friend of hers had bought a charter ticket.

Steve: Oh, they’re the worst.

Mark: They’re the worst, yeah.

So they had a charter bought during that period to go to Europe for a week.

Whether it was flight and hotels or not I don’t know, but they had bought their charter and then they couldn’t go because no flights could go to Europe and apparently they just lost their money.

Steve: Yeah, same in Europe.

Mark: There was no refund, no nothing.

Steve: Same in Europe; people in Sweden.

And there are lots… I mean if you’re in a country like Sweden, the land of the midnight darkness, in winter there are a lot of people planning to go to Cyprus and North Africa or Egypt or whatever — that’s what we kept on hearing on the radio – all those people just lost those, gone.

Mark: How’s that possible?

Steve: Reservation at the hotel…gone, nothing, zero.

At least with the major airlines you can fly at some point on your ticket.

Mark: I mean why wouldn’t those charters be responsible to give that money back?

That’s what I don’t understand.

Steve: I don’t know. I don’t know.

Mark: I don’t know. Anyway, it sounds amazing.

Steve: But, you know of all the things that I worry about the vacationing Swedes or Canadians who lost their charter, I don’t.

It’s tough.

Mark: You don’t worry because…

Steve: It wasn’t me.

Mark: It wasn’t you. I know.

That’s the thing.

I was surprised to hear that.

Wow, they’re allowed to do that?

I was surprised to hear that.

It’s not their fault, but it’s not your fault either that they weren’t able to fly you.

You didn’t fly.

You didn’t go for your holiday and yet you’re still out that money.

That’s amazing.

Steve: But, you know, it sort of makes me think.

You know we do live in an extraordinary world.

If you consider the however many hundred thousand years that humanoids have been wandering around on the planet and probably for most of that period most of them didn’t wander very far; although, some of them wandered far because they spread out to basically settle the whole globe.

Mark: It might have taken them a while.

Steve: It wasn’t an afternoon stroll.

Mark: I don’t think it was one guy went from Africa to Sweden.

Steve: No, so over 10,000 years they moved a couple of thousand miles, maybe.

But here we are today, just jump on a plane and fly somewhere.

Anything that happens is news everywhere.

You know I was thinking.

This morning we had a little bit of a glitch on LingQ and we alerted our guy in St.

Petersburg and he starts working on it.

We got another guy working on something in Bolivia.

A fellow in Croatia did our design.

We’ve got members in every country creating content for our libraries of different languages.

We have a community of people working together.

We have a project of people from 20-30-40 different countries working on different aspects of this thing.

I mean talk about globalization.

It’s amazing.

It’s absolutely amazing.

Even 10 years ago it wouldn’t have been possible.

You would have to be in a major corporation with branches all over the place, you know?

Mark: Right.

Steve: And here we are today, just a little fly by night.

Mark: Yeah. I mean the Internet is amazing.

Steve: Not fly by night, by-the-seat-of-the-pants operation.

I wouldn’t say that, but small is the word.

Mark: Right.

Steve: Small, but very professional, of course.

But we have a group of collaborators on just about every continent.

It’s extraordinary; globalization.

Mark: Yeah and if you figure Serge before was in Antarctica.

Steve: Was he in Antarctica?

Mark: Yeah or down there somewhere.

Steve: Was he listening to LingQ?

Mark: Maybe not in Antarctica, but…

Steve: Do they have the Internet in Antarctica?

Mark: This was before he was on LingQ, I think.

Steve: Okay.

But we certainly have people from Africa on our forum, from Egypt, from I think the Ivory Coast we’ve had, lots from Asia, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Latin America, Chili, Argentina.

Did I leave out a continent?

Mark: Australia.

Steve: Australia, yeah, Australia and New Zealand we have, probably some lost island in the Pacific.

Mark: I’m sure. I don’t know.

Steve: Amazing.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: So, anyway.

Mark: Anyway, you made it back.

No more ash cloud concerns that we’ve heard.

I mean the ash cloud thing, I guess the thing about it is nobody is too sure if it was that serious an issue or not.

Steve: Well, no.

Mark: There was a plane affected in the ‘60s.

Steve: I mean they’ve got to air on the side of safety.

I have no trouble with that.

Mark: Right.

How many planes do they wait to go down before they…

Steve: Right and then the fact that they sent some planes up there with some pilots just to test it.

I don’t know much about it, but do you want to be the pilot of that plane?

Mark: I didn’t know that they had done that.

Steve: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

Lufthansa, KLM and a few other airlines sent some planes up to see, so.

Mark: I might have wanted a parachute.

Steve: Yeah, anyway… But you know the other thing I think about is Iceland, like they’re right beside this volcano.

There’s an even bigger one that’s going to erupt that often erupts a few weeks or months after the little one.

Iceland… First of all, how would you like to live in country called Iceland, you know?

But apparently it’s not that cold.

Greenland is arctic.

Mark: It’s a little misleading, the two names, really.

Steve: I know, Greenland.

Talk about the original real estate promotion.

You know, buy some land in sunny Greenland.

Mark: I’ve got to assume that it wasn’t always arctic.

Wasn’t it, in those days, it was…

Steve: Well that was the little warming period.

Mark: It was warmer, so it was green.

Steve: Yeah, they grew grapes in Newfoundland or something.

Mark: Right.

Steve: And this was followed then by the cold period; those paintings of Bruegel where they’re skating on the canals in Holland.

It led to tremendous famines in Europe and so forth in the 17th century, but earlier, whenever it was, I can’t remember, 11th or 12th century, it was warm; whether it was green or not I don’t know.

Mark: I have to assume.

They didn’t just call it Greenland for nothing.

Steve: I don’t know. Why would they call Iceland Iceland and then call Greenland Greenland?

Mark: Maybe they weren’t discovered at the same times.

Steve: No.

I think if I remember history, Eric the Red or Leif the Ready or whoever it was, Leif the Lucky, they went to the one place and then to the other and from there they went on to Newfoundland and Labrador…

Mark: Right.

Steve: …where they were annihilated by the local, friendly, natives.

Mark: Beothuks

Steve: Beothuks who, unfortunately, got annihilated in their turn by some other unfriendly invaders, anyway…

So, yeah, I’m back.

It was interesting.

You know the other thing about travel is it is quite stimulating, you know?

I always don’t like to go, because it’s a disruption to your routine.

You know you’ve got your things that you’re doing.

I’m playing hockey or we meet for a family get together and whatever, friends then all of a sudden you’ve got to break that routine, so it’s always a little bit…I hate kind of tearing myself away, but once you get out.

Unfortunately on the flight out I couldn’t book my seat, so I sat not in the aisle where I like to sit, but one in from the aisle amongst the four in the middle and the guy beside me probably weighed about 300 pounds and was 6’8”.

Mark: Yeah. That’s tough.

Steve: He had a great big gut and kind of overflowed into my seat area.

And the Lufthansa seat configuration is not very user friendly, so when the person in front leaned their seat back then the reading light didn’t come at my book, so I had to kind of bend.

Mark: Oh yeah.

Steve: I was trying to avoid this large fellow on my right and I was moving my book over to where I could read.

Anyway, what can you do?

Mark: Yeah. All those things make for a much longer flight.

Steve: However, once you’re there and you see a different country and you’re traveling, there’s something about it that’s definitely stimulating and I think it’s good.

It kind of recharges your batteries to travel, so.

And if you can’t travel then learn a foreign language.

Mark: It’s almost like traveling…

Steve: Almost.

Mark: …in the LingQ Library.

Steve: Well that’s right.

You’re traveling in terms of culture and what better place to do that than at LingQ?

Mark: I think we’ve said it all right there.

Steve: Right there we have, yeah.

Mark: We might just want to wrap it up then.

Steve: You know I do get requests, but I can’t remember what… We’d had the one request, which we did on homes.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: I think we’ve had a request on food.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: We will respond, so if there is anything you would like us to talk about, please let us know.

Mark: Absolutely. Talk to you again next time.

Steve: Bye for now.

Mark: Bye-bye.

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

Mark: Hello and welcome to another edition of the EnglishLingQ podcast.

Mark here with Steve.

Steve: Hello there.

Mark: We thought today we would talk a bit about our language contest, which we’re running at LingQ, which we have been running for the last, I don’t know, week and a half, which will be running through until June 1st.

The contest is to see which language we will add next to LingQ.

Steve: Now it’s been very interesting.

We had five languages there – Cantonese, Dutch, Polish, Czech and Korean — because those were five languages that people had requested.

Mark: Or were the most commonly requested.

Steve: I mean people have asked for Arabic, but it’s just, technically, we aren’t quite yet ready to tackle a language that we can’t read and goes from right to left.

There are a few curve balls there, but we will eventually, hopefully, do Arabic and Hindi and so forth.

But it’s interesting that Cantonese is in first place right now, which is quite surprising.

Mark: Yeah, it is.

Although, you know, it was fairly commonly requested.

We did get a lot of emails asking us, you know, when are you going to have Cantonese?

I mean that’s why it’s in that top five list and you think maybe it wouldn’t be, but it’s a language that people requested so it’s up there on our list; a lot of people asking for Thai as well.

Steve: Thai is quite popular. Korean has been popular.

Mark: Oh yeah.

Steve: Polish has been popular.

I’m kind of keen to learn Czech.

It’s in last place, I think, right now.

Mark: Well, don’t be afraid to try and get the vote out.

Steve: Right.

Mark: Go find some Czech learners forums and get them to vote.

Steve: I know.

I mean it’s amazing how many people are learning different languages around the world.

I have the feeling that there’s more interest and enthusiasm in language learning now then, you know, 10 years ago and I think the Internet is a big reason.

People are just keen to learn languages and there are some great resources, but, as people say, there aren’t good places to find audio and text.

I think one of the reasons why people want, say, Cantonese at our site is that they’re hoping to find lots of content, but, of course, we want them to find us content.

We can’t start a language if people don’t contribute, but I think one of the things that LingQ does is it’s a place where people can come and create content or find content and collect it so that everybody can use it.

Mark: Share it, obviously.

I mean that’s why we say we’re sharing, you’re sharing with others.

So your efforts you can share with others and then you can benefit by sharing their efforts as well and together build up that library of content.

We talk about adding languages, I mean we’re reluctant to add languages because it’s just more work for us and there are so many other things that we need to do, want to do.

Steve: Well, it’s the whole 80-20 rule.

I mean, you know, how many more people are going to come because we add.

Mark: Right.

Steve: We’ve already got 10 languages.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: I think Swedish snuck in there because on the lumber side of the house we have an employee who’s in Sweden and we wanted him to learn Swedish; otherwise, it’s obviously not a major.

You know, there’s not a lot of demand, but all the other languages we have like, obviously, English and Spanish and French and Portuguese and Russian and German and I don’t remember what other languages, Italian and so forth, they’re very much in demand

Mark: Right.

Steve: You know, Japanese and so forth.

So now, when we start to get to some of the more esoteric languages, we don’t know how big the demand is going to be and it will be more work.

Mark: Well, it’s the same work.

It’s the same work, but the return probably isn’t there.

At the same time, we do feel that our system will work well with all languages and is easy to set up, relatively easy, compared to other types of learning systems that require, you know, data logs and grammar rules…

Steve: We don’t have to write a course.

Mark: …and write ups and courses and all kinds of overhead.

Ours certainly wouldn’t be like that.

I mean we just need content and dictionaries.

Steve: And the dictionaries, I think, typically are available for most of these languages.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: It’s interesting when it comes to content.

You know, for example, here in Canada there’s a lot of interest in trying to revive the native languages and so typically what happens is a group of people get together.

First, they go to Government, they get millions of dollars so that they can write a grammar book and write courses and stuff like this, all of which we feel is unnecessary.

All we really need to do is to find some people who speak the language.

Now in the case of the native language of Canada, you probably can’t find grammar resources on the Internet, but any of the major languages.

You Google Italian verbs, bingo, you’ve got all the information you need.

So the grammar resources are out there, you don’t need to write a grammar book.

Then the other thing is content.

We’ve found that people will contribute some easy content — 30 seconds long — podcasts, just a variety of stuff and it’s interesting.

I always get a kick when I hear teachers.

You know I’m on this teacher forum and they’re talking about oh, I like to teach poetry and I like to teach this and they’re always imposing their content on the student.

Mark: Right.

Steve: And then they want to follow up and ask them questions about the symbolism in the poetry and all this other stuff, but we don’t do that.

Mark: No.

Steve: You like poetry, load up poetry; if you don’t, don’t.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: And if you read the poetry and you’re not interested in the symbolism and you just like the sound that’s great, nobody is going to ask you questions on it, which some of you may know is kind of our approach to language learning.

Mark: But it’s interesting on this poll or on this contest the comments that we’re getting.

(A) it’s interesting that Cantonese and Korean are so far…

Steve: Korean doesn’t surprise me.

Mark: …in front…

Steve: Yeah?

Mark: …but the numbers of people that are voting.

And, obviously, I know the Cantonese for sure was posted on some Cantonese learner forums and so, you know, here, let’s vote Cantonese up so that it gets added to LingQ so we have a place to go learn Cantonese and that obviously is effective.

I mean, obviously, for Korean to have that many votes someone there has also put it out to get their friends voting in places where Korean learners or potential Korean content providers or tutors gather to get that number of people out and voting.

All I can say to those of you who are supporters of Dutch and Polish and Czech is you’ve got to find similar locations to get the word out because that’s just the nature of the Internet.

Steve: But, you know, it is interesting.

Like if you took a course in something you would know 20 people in your class.

Now, with the Internet, people are reaching out across the world to people and saying let’s get behind getting Cantonese launched on this language-learning site so that they’re involved in actually helping make a course of study available.

I was looking at our forum today and one of the new members, who was studying one of our new sort of introductory lessons, you know, where they can get the free discussion and everything else and they had a problem.

They said I did this and this happened.

What do I do now?

Please help.

And like three people are on there very quickly.

So you’ve got this community of learners helping you when you run into a problem.

In a classroom, yeah, you could ask the person beside you, but here you can ask the world.

Mark: Plus, if you’re not in your class and you’re doing your homework who do you ask.

Steve: Right, it’s extraordinary.

And now that I have my iPod Touch I’m just in seventh heaven.

I mean it’s amazing that I can just carry my little flashcards around with me and take advantage of dead time.

Waiting for my wife at the airport the other day, I’m sitting there working with my flashcards and I got into trouble because she walked through, you know, where all the passengers come out.

And I was making a point of, you know, looking up every 30 seconds just so I wouldn’t miss her.

Mark: Thirty seconds or so, I guess, obviously.

Steve: I thought I saw everybody walking out, but I missed her.

And so she walked through and she’s wandering around and she doesn’t see me.

By the time she found me — 15 minutes later — she was mad and I’m still hearing about it.

Mark: Because I know you were just eagle-eyed there watching.

Steve: Hanging on the rail.

Mark: Oh, I guess I should do my flashcards.

I’m sure you saw her the second time before she saw you.

Steve: No.

Mark: She came up on you as you were happily flash carding.

Steve: I tell ya’, I’ve always said, you know, flash carding no more than five percent of the time.

I’m much more into sort of listening and reading, has always been what I have said, but the new flashcard app on the iPod Touch it’s just addictive.

And now I do it in conjunction with my lessons and it works really effectively.

So I’m doing more and more flash carding and getting me into trouble at the airport.

Anyway…

Mark: That’s good.

Steve: Well, it is good.

I mean, yeah, it is good; I get the feeling, yeah.

Anyway, it’s this whole new world of learning.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: It’s extraordinary.

Mark: Getting back to the vote issue.

I was going to mention that some comments on the blog or on the forum related to the contest have been sort of negative along the lines of, you know, it’s no fair, these guys are just getting all their friends to vote.

We should change the contest or whatever.

But the fact is, they’re getting…okay, there are some people that are figuring out how to vote twice and that’s…

Steve: …unfortunate.

Mark: But, fundamentally, somebody has put the word out to a larger audience who are then chipping in and making it happen for them.

That’s the power of the Internet and it’s interesting, just observing the contest.

We thought it’d be a neat thing to do and so far it’s been a neat experience observing what the reaction is to the contest and it’s generated a lot of response.

Steve: Oh, one should mention, too, that it’s an absolutely spectacular day in Vancouver.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: I was driving back here and the mountains here are covered in snow.

And, you know, the snow level is actually quite low on the mountains.

Mark: I know.

Steve: I mean it’s unbelievable, this would have been ideal for the Olympics.

And when we had the Olympics they were trucking snow in from 100 kilometers away.

Mark: Wow.

I mean they’ve had something like 200 centimeters of snow in the last two-three weeks.

Like they had 70 centimeters two nights ago overnight.

Steve: Just 20 minutes from where we are.

Mark: Well, Annie and Kyle are both skiing today.

Their friends wanted to.

Steve: Unreal.

Mark: They phoned them up, let’s go. Up they go.

Steve: We could be playing tennis outside it’s so warm and sunny.

Mark: I know.

Steve: And, yet, you can drive 20 minutes away and go skiing.

Mark: I know.

Steve: It’s pretty amazing, pretty amazing.

Meanwhile, I guess around the world what’s happening… I think the economic news is getting a little better, at least here in North America.

People are a little bit, still, somewhat apprehensive is the recovery for real, but we’re seeing some better employment numbers.

I think the housing situation in Canada has been strong; some modestly-cautious indications in the U.S., which is important for our lumber business.

I’m going off tomorrow.

I’m off to Sweden for a week on lumber and then probably into Germany and Austria.

Mark: So any of you Swedish, German, Austrian members…

Steve: Yeah.

Mark: You should create a few meet ups while you’re there.

Steve: If I have time, yeah.

Mark: Put them on the Facebook Fan Page and then maybe you can meet up with Steve on his travels.

Steve: Yeah, right. And then there was a coup d’état in Kyrgyzstan?

Mark: Oh yeah.

Steve: Right.

Mark: No.

I mean I’ll take your word for it.

I hadn’t heard that.

Steve: And what else is there…anyway.

Oh, there’s the whole Tiger Woods soap opera.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: I mean he’s just the best golfer that ever was, so he’ll win or come pretty close.

Mark: Yeah. I mean today I guess he didn’t do as well as he did yesterday.

Steve: Oh, is that right?

Mark: I think I heard that, but we’ll see.

He usually comes on strong the last couple days as opposed to the first couple days.

So, I mean there’s no question that there’s a lot of interest to see him back golfing.

Steve: But, I guess, for most of the world the big issue is going to be the World Cup of Soccer in South Africa.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: When do they start?

Mark: I don’t know.

Steve: In the summer, I think.

Mark: In the summer sometime?

Steve: Yeah.

It would be interesting to see an African team win.

You know it’s always been either the Europeans or the South Americans.

It’s in Africa…

Mark: Right.

Steve: …and they have some strong teams.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: I can’t remember now, Nigeria or Senegal or whoever…South Africa.

Mark: I mean it’s fun.

It’s fun.

I must confess to all the soccer aficionados out there, I don’t watch a lot of soccer, but I always do watch the World Cup.

I guess the format and the fact that different countries are playing each other, it’s exciting.

So I’m looking forward to it, whenever it starts.

I’m sure we’ll have lots of warning.

I think it’s in June; middle of June.

Steve: Yeah.

You know the World Cup has moved around.

They had it in Korea and Japan and that was, I think, very successful.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: And well-organized.

It was interesting, too, that the Japanese fans were very, very sportsmanlike.

You know, they applauded for all the different teams.

I’m not sure that sort of evenhanded sportsmanship is that widespread in the world.

Mark: No.

Steve: Most places they just cheer for their own.

Mark: Right.

Steve: So they’ve had it out there.

They’ve had in Brazil.

No, they haven’t had the World Cup in Brazil.

Mark: They had it in Mexico.

That was the one year Canada went.

Steve: Oh, okay, they’ve had it in Mexico.

So it’s nice to have it in Africa.

Mark: Yeah.

I mean they tend to move it around.

They had it in the U.S.

Steve: That’s true. Yeah, they had it in the U.S.

Mark: And then, obviously, in Europe.

I don’t remember it being in South America, do you?

Steve: Maybe not.

Have they not had it down in Argentina and Brazil?

Mark: I’m sure they must have.

Steve: Maybe.

Mark: I don’t know.

Steve: I don’t know.

I don’t know.

You know it is amazing how the world has changed.

It’s phenomenal.

I love it.

I remember when I was quite young seeing pictures of the Japanese Bullet Train.

I’d think like wow!

You know, I imagine Japan, this country – like when I was whatever, 15 – this country, all rice patties and stuff and they’ve got this high-tech train.

Mark: Right.

Steve: The next thing you know you’ve got Japanese cars showing up in the North American market, which was, again, amazing.

Wow, they make cars out there.

I was reading in the paper today and, apparently, one of the leading countries in the world for sort of high-speed train technology is China.

And China is now talking to the U.S.

about providing trains and the technology and, apparently, their engineering and their technology is right at the very, you know, cutting edge.

So all of those different development and new technologies and new ideas, a lot of which has tended to come from the U.S.

or Europe, I think increasingly is going to come from other places, which is exciting.

I mean, you know, we’ve got so many issues that need to be addressed, whether it be energy conservation or health and medicine and so forth – technology.

So, if we end up with many centers of this innovation happening, it’s quite exciting.

So I thought that was quiet exciting to see those pictures of those Chinese high-speed trains.

Mark: Well, I guess that would be a place where…

Steve: They’ve got a lot of people to move around.

Mark: They’ve got a lot of people to move around, high-speed trains make a lot of sense.

Steve: Yeah.

Mark: I mean here…

Steve: Canada, no.

Mark: Canada, no. Nobody travels by train at all.

Steve: No. I mean the Chinese should be good at that.

Mark: They should be.

Steve: Because they’ve got such a tremendous number of people.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: I heard on the radio that there are 120 cities in China with more than a million people.

Mark: Wow.

Steve: One hundred-twenty cities with more than a million people.

Okay, connect them all with high-speed trains to start with.

Mark: Well and they’re not that far apart either.

Like here, you know, there’s a million people in Calgary, but it would be quite the undertaking to put a high-speed train in from here to Calgary.

It’s…whatever it is…1,000 kilometers or whatever it is.

Steve: Oh, it’s more and it’s across the Rockies, so they’re not going to bother.

Mark: That’s the next closest city.

Steve: But the Chinese, they’re talking, first, initially, of course, they’re building a connection between Beijing and Shanghai, which is all flat.

Mark: Right.

Steve: Okay and there’s a lot, like, whatever, 300 million people, you know?

Mark: Right.

Steve: There’s lots; no shortage.

So then they’re going to go from Shanghai presumably to Guangzhou, but then they’re talking about building a high-speed train from Beijing to Moscow and also a high-speed connection from Shanghai through Burma or Myanmar or whatever it’s called right down to Singapore.

I mean why not, you know?

I mean if they have the technology and there’s certainly the population there.

Mark: Well, the thing is, what would prevent you from doing that and I don’t know how long the high-speed train will take from Beijing to Moscow, but if you can fly there.

Steve: There’s not much population between, yes.

Mark: You know, I mean if it’s going to…

Steve: It can’t make economic sense.

Mark: It can’t make economic sense.

Steve: No.

Mark: If you can fly there, why would you…

Steve: It almost becomes a political thing that the Chinese Governments wants to do, you know?

Mark: Right.

Steve: Now that it has this technology it wants to sort of “demonstrate it” kind of thing.

Mark: Like how long would it take? You have no idea.

Steve: Well, I don’t know.

It must take forever, but the point is that there’s no traffic in between, right?

I mean even in Japan the high-speed train goes in the areas that are or, at least initially, it was only in the areas with…

Mark: …high traffic…

Steve: …high population.

Mark: Right.

Steve: You go travel an hour you’re in Nagoya.

Mark: Right.

Steve: You travel another hour it’s something else.

Mark: In an hour is a good time, but once you’re five hours on the train, if you can get there…

Steve: Five?

Once you left Beijing and you hit Mongolia, until you hit, I don’t know, Irkutsk, it’s a long way.

Mark: That’s what I mean.

Let’s say one hour, two hours even on the high-speed train, that’s better than flying, but once you’re three, four or five, eight, 10…

Steve: I think you’d be 20 hours on the train.

Mark: Twenty hours, what’s the point?

Steve: Yeah, you may as well fly.

Mark: Get in a plane. It can’t be much cheaper.

Steve: No.

Mark: Those high-speed trains, they’re still not cheap.

It’s not cheap in Japan to ride the high-speed train.

Steve: No, they’re not cheaper.

It can’t be cheaper.

Well, the relative cost is going to depend on the cost of building the thing and the traffic.

Mark: That’s right.

Steve: So it can’t possibly be.

Mark: Now maybe in China they won’t make you pay the cost.

Someone is going to eat it, right?

Steve: That’s right, the Government, yeah.

Mark: Anyway, that’s probably long enough.

That’s long enough for most people to finish their workout or finish the dishes, so we’ll finish off with that and we’ll pick it up again next time.

Steve: Okay. Bye for now.

Study the transcript of this episode as a lesson on LingQ, saving the words and phrases you don’t know to your database. Here it is!

Mark: Hello and welcome back for another episode of the EnglishLingQ podcast.

Mark here with Steve.

Steve: Hi there. Hello everyone.

Mark: Today, we thought we would talk a little bit.

We had a request on the forum from Hiroko, asking us to talk a bit about housing or houses or different rooms in houses.

So we thought we’d spend some time right now talking a little bit about houses.

Steve: Well and that’s, perhaps, a good opportunity to say that today you and family are leaving.

You are going skiing in the interior over the long weekend, the Easter weekend.

So, Hiroko — I spoke to her in our chat when I tutored her – said that she really enjoys our EnglishLingQ podcasts and when is the next episode?

And I said, well, you know, we get no fan mail.

We get no response.

It’s just like talking into the emptiness, so to speak, of the blogosphere or whatever.

Mark: Right.

Steve: But if she is going to encourage us then we will, in fact, do them more often.

And then Hiroko specifically asked for something about houses, so I am now at Mark’s house.

He’s busy packing, getting ready to leave and we’re sitting in your study.

Mark: Yeah and just before we get into the discussion one thing you said, you mentioned the Easter weekend which, of course, is this weekend, coming up.

I just thought I would mention that a lot of non-native speakers that I’ve run into refer to this weekend as “Eastern” weekend.

Steve: Yes.

Mark: So I just wanted to make that clear that it’s Easter with no “n” on the end.

Not to be confused with the geographic…

Steve: …direction or location.

So there’s no Western weekend, Northern or Southern weekend.

Mark: Exactly.

Steve: There’s only Easter.

Mark: Easter — which has nothing to do with Eastern.

Anyway, so, yeah, that’s right, we’re going away for the long weekend.

We’re going skiing, it should be great.

I think they’ve had a lot of new snow and we’re packing up.

There’s not much in the way of restaurants or shopping where we’re going, so we bring all our food with us.

It’s a condo.

It’s a great family holiday, actually.

We go skiing during the day and then hunker down in the evenings and play games or do various thing to wile away the time.

Steve: I should add, by the way, for those of you who followed the lead up to the Olympics and the problems we had here with snow, even the local mountains — like 20 minutes from where we live — have now been getting snow.

So all the snow we didn’t get for the Olympics and we were trucking snow in, the Green Olympics, spending God knows how much money for trucking, if the Olympics had been two weeks later…

Mark: Yeah, that’s the amazing thing.

I mean I can’t remember a stretch of warm weather like that in a long time.

Steve: Right.

Mark: Just checking on that blender noise in the background which, in fact, was a blender.

Steve: Right.

I though maybe they were doing some carpentry here in the house.

So, anyway, we got the snow that we didn’t have.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: Yeah.

Now talking about a house, I guess, you know, we’ve lived in a number of countries.

Typically in North America, people like to live in a single-family house, but not everyone can afford it.

And, of course, people who are single or couples who are just starting out and older people who are retired — sometimes called “empty nesters”, because their nest has become empty as their kids have gone out to set up their own sort of homes — they’ll live in apartments, but overwhelmingly people like to live in single-family homes.

Mark: Yeah.

I mean, at least North America wide, wood-frame construction is the norm, which is a cheaper way of building than in a lot of other countries.

I know in Europe if the home isn’t built out of concrete they don’t feel safe; I’ve heard that issue raised.

I know that Igor is always not comfortable – one of our programmers – living in a wood-frame house.

He kind of felt that it just wasn’t as strong as a concrete house or apartment building, which is, I guess, what he’s been used to living in his whole life.

I mean it’s interesting the impressions that people get, because my understanding is that the wood-frame construction is very strong if not better, in some applications.

Steve: Well, certainly, any form of construction you can reinforce it, I presume, to some extent to achieve whatever you want, but, certainly, if brick is the structural element that, by itself, is very vulnerable to earthquakes; also, it’s more difficult to insulate a brick building, but you can add insulation.

You can add reinforcing steel or other members and stuff, so you can, more or less, achieve what you want, but the wooden construction, which we have here, works fine.

Some of the issues like fire they have dealt with.

There are very few fires.

I remember once playing golf with a retired fireman and he was saying that they really very rarely get called out on a fire, mostly it’s somebody who has a heart attack or something and then the fire engines have to go out and administer first aide.

So the wooden homes that we have here work just fine.

In those areas where people like brick, they’ll just put on what we call a brick veneer, like a brick exterior.

So you will often see an exterior of a building which is brick, but, in fact, structurally, it’s all wooden construction.

Mark: Right.

Steve: Yeah.

So in terms of the size of homes, I think a typical house probably in Canada is around 2,000 square feet, would you say?

Mark: Oh, I would guess, yeah.

Steve: Two-thousand.

Getting larger 2,500 – which in terms of square meters is just divided by 10, roughly, so it’s 200 square meters, 250 square meters — but a lot of people build larger homes, 300-400 square meters and so forth.

Yeah.

I mean in Japan people like single-family homes.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: People are very surprised to hear that over 40% of the houses being built today in Japan are single-family wooden homes, not high-rise.

Whereas, you go to a country like Russia, which is the largest country in the world, unlimited space and they build concrete high-rise.

Mark: And lots of wood they have there.

Steve: And they have lots of wood.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: That is a mystery to us – why they don’t build with wood.

Mark: Yeah.

But, I guess, I mean that’s what they’ve been accustomed to for so long.

That’s kind of what they think of as a home is a concrete apartment building and maybe, obviously, it’s a function of wealth, too, and resources.

Steve: True enough.

Mark: To buy land a build a house has got to be a bigger cost.

Steve: Well, I think they’re not used to the idea, too, of having sort of privately-owned land, perhaps, because of the previous system.

We’re partial to wood, because I’m in the wood business, of course.

The country with the highest per capita consumption of wood is Finland.

And I would think that there are many areas in northern Russia which are very similar to Finland in terms of the nature and the availability of the wood.

So, anyway, hopefully one day they’ll use more wood.

Mark: That’s the idea.

Steve: Good for my business, yeah.

One thing that’s perhaps different here, talking about culture, in your house you have your kitchen and then there is a counter and very often you’ll eat at the counter.

Mark: Right.

Steve: And so the people…I mean your kids and you and Kindrey…or Kindrey might be in the kitchen preparing the food and gradually putting things out onto the counter.

The kids are often in a hurry to start eating, they’ll just start eating.

If you have guests then the dining area is just beyond the counter.

Mark: Right.

Steve: I remember in Japan, some years ago, when we were comparing house designs in different countries and we explained that in North America it’s quite common to have a kitchen counter and that way things can be passed over to either eat on the counter or eat at the table and the Japanese couldn’t understand that because, from their point of view, the wife should bring the food out from the kitchen.

Mark: And the kitchen is kind of tucked away and hidden.

Steve: Tucked away somewhere, but I think all of these things change.

Mark: Oh, for sure.

I mean I think it used to be the case here where the kitchen was more of a separate room.

But the one thing that you do find is that if you have a party, whether your kitchen opens out on a…our kitchen is quite open, but even if it isn’t, people tend to gravitate toward the kitchen.

Steve: Right.

Mark: People always end up in the kitchen.

Steve: Absolutely.

Mark: Which is, I think, how this type of living came about or this type of design came about.

Because people want to be in the kitchen, so why not make the kitchen part of the living area.

Steve: Right.

Mark: And that’s, in a sense, what we have and what you have, which is very common here now.

Steve: I mean absolutely.

When we have guests, people have their drink of whatever — a beer, a glass of wine, a glass of water — and they gravitate around the kitchen because, first of all, the lady of the house is still cooking.

Mark: Not always the lady.

It doesn’t have to be.

Steve: No, I’m sorry.

Excuse me, whoever is preparing the meal.

Mark: That’s right.

Steve: Yes, we mustn’t have these stereotyped gender roles.

Mark: That’s right.

Like my son out there right now, he’s watching the Cooking Network, maybe it will be him.

Steve: But that would be one thing that might be somewhat unique.

What other things are there?

I think, generally speaking, one thing that has happened all over the world is the increased insulation value of walls and windows.

People are much more conscious of not only conserving energy, but also the fact that you can live more comfortably in a better insulated house.

The standards here in Canada have become much, much tighter with regard to insulation.

In Japan we’ve noticed the same trends.

I think the Scandinavians were probably the leaders for a long time and possibly Germany.

But that’s a general trend and I think that’s going to continue.

Mark: I mean I do know from when I was in Japan — and it could have just been the houses that I was in — there was not a lot of insulation.

Steve: No.

Mark: It’s interesting the way…like in Japan they don’t have central heating, they space heat.

Steve: Right.

Mark: I know things may be changing there now.

But, at least where I was living, the house had no insulation and then you sort of heat up the room that you’re in.

Steve: Right.

Mark: And if you have more than two or three heaters going the circuit breaker would go.

So you can’t heat the whole house, you can only heat where you are.

But then the rest of the house isn’t insulated, so that heat just dissipates very quickly.

And I know that some Japanese people felt that it’s a bit wasteful or feel that it’s wasteful to heat the whole house if you’re not using the whole house, but I’ve got to believe that the way we do it here is more efficient — where we insulate the whole house, heat the whole house, but you don’t lose nearly the same amount of heat, so you’re more comfortable and more efficient.

Steve: I mean if you have a very well-insulated house you use very little energy to keep that house warm.

Mark: Right.

Steve: Also, if you have a poorly-insulated house and you are heating only one room, you have the possibility of creating serious problems with condensation, which (A) is uncomfortable, (B) could lead to mold, which is unhealthy and which can also cause structural damage to any of the building components.

And, of course, you were in Nikko.

Nikko is near Tokyo, but it’s a higher elevation, it’s colder.

It’s cold there in the winter.

Mark: Oh, for sure.

Steve: And, yet, somehow in Japan — and this may have changed — the coldest part of Japan, which is Hokkaido that’s where you’re the most comfortable in the winter, because that’s where people build for the cold.

Mark: Right.

Steve: They know it’s cold, so they have to build to stay warm.

It’s in those places where it’s kind of not arctic cold, but it’s still cold that they don’t spend the money on insulation, they don’t spend the money on proper windows, they don’t put in central heating and they’re uncomfortable.

So you’re more comfortable in the winter in Hokkaido than you are in Tokyo.

Mark: Right.

Steve: But, anyway.

Mark: Yeah.

No, I think that people just have to understand what’s out there.

And, I think, partly it’s the builders in Japan.

Steve: It’s the builders.

Mark: They don’t provide the option.

So people don’t know any better, that’s what you get.

But I think it’s one of those things; over time it will change.

Steve: I think all of these things are a function of an increasing demand, the increasing awareness.

I remember when I lived in Japan there were a few builders that were starting to offer a very high-quality, well-insulated home, so that then provides some choice.

Then people start demanding this of the other builders, but none of this happens overnight.

In any market there’s a gradual changeover, just the way the American car or, at least, the Japanese car industry forced the American car industry to provide better-quality, better-engineered cars.

So competition is a good thing.

Mark: I mean it was no different when I was Italy in Asiago; we were pretty cold in those little concrete buildings.

Steve: Oh yeah.

Mark: And that’s up in the mountains, I mean that’s a cold place too.

Steve: Oh, I know, it’s cold.

Well, even when we visited you in Klagenfurt.

Mark: Yeah.

Steve: There if you have a shower or if you cook there was water running off the walls in the whole apartment.

Anyway, so we think that our wooden homes are pretty comfortable, but the people who come here from other countries think they’re just shacks.

So there’s no arguing with culture.

Mark: Well, I mean I think when they’re inside they don’t realize, necessarily, how they’re built.

Steve: Right.

Mark: It’s only when you see a house being built where they think, oh boy, that doesn’t look very sturdy.

Steve: No.

Mark: I mean once it’s built and completed and the siding is on and the interior finish is on I mean to people it looks solid, feels solid.

Steve: One of the things that really used to get to Japanese visitors was, here, most houses have a basement and so you use forming — plywood, typically, sometimes boards, but mostly plywood as the form for the concrete.

Alright?

Mark: Right.

Steve: Once you’ve finished with forms, that plywood is then used on the walls to provide structural, basically, lateral strength to the building because you have rigidity.

You have your posts and beams, if you want, and the posts are sometimes called studs because they’re small, little posts spaced every, you know, 16 inches or 18 inches, whatever it may be.

So the lateral strength comes from the plywood, but of course the plywood now looks dirty because it was used for the concrete forming.

Mark: Right.

Steve: And the Japanese visitors say ah, we couldn’t do that in Japan.

I mean the customer would complain.

But why would they possibly complain?

The fact that the structural plywood has a little bit of leftover, you know, grayish-looking bits of concrete has no affect on anything.

Mark: No, exactly.

Steve: But, there again, it’s a cultural difference.

The Japanese home buyer that’s ordered this home wants every piece of wood to be absolutely clean and so they have these expectations, which people here don’t have.

So these are some of the cultural differences.

Mark: Otherwise, I mean…I’m trying to think in different countries what the differences here would be.

Steve: I think one of the interesting things is this whole issue of earthquakes.

A lot of countries that have earthquakes suffer a lot because they build with concrete and brick.

That was the case in Italy.

Italy is a very earthquake-prone country…

Mark: Right.

Steve: …and in certain areas in China as well.

First of all, the walls themselves, unless they’re properly reinforced, are weak and if you then have a heavy super structure, like the floors and the roof system are all made of concrete, it’s pretty heavy when that comes falling down on you.

Mark: Well, yeah.

Steve: Whereas, you can design wooden homes to be very, very earthquake resistant with a lot of extra lateral support and cross bracing.

Plus, then the roof structure can be a lot lighter, you can use trusses rather than heavy beams.

That’s another thing, a heavy beam, a wooden, heavy, beam falling down on you is not too nice, but if you build with trusses, which are these sort of web construction of smaller pieces engineered to specific loads.

Whether they be snow loads or, you know, the kinds of stresses that would happen in an earthquake, I mean that’s much better.

I would love to see Italy and China start using more wood.

Mark: Absolutely.

Steve: So we’re using this podcast here to promote wood around the world.

Wood is renewable.

Wood is healthy.

Wood is good.

It’s CO2 neutral.

Come on there.

Get out there and start using wood.

Mark: I think that’s probably a good place to finish off.

Steve: Okay.

Mark: Thanks very much for the suggestion Hiroko and we’ll talk to you again soon.

Steve: Thank you, bye-bye.