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G'day, guys! And welcome to this interview episode of Aussie English. So, today I have a special guest, Christian from Canguro English. It is my pleasure to chat to him today all about a course plan that I sort of have in the future, as well as language learning, differences between Portuguese and Spanish, and we sort of get into the nitty gritty about what the important aspects of developing fluency are. So, I recently had an idea for creating a fluency course, of course, specifically with the purpose of helping you develop your fluency with the English you have now, right? Without you having to learn anything more in terms of grammar or vocabulary, but more developing the English that you already have and working on your fluency.

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And, so I told Christian about that and he was like, 'can we talk about that in an interview episode?'. So, we did this a few months ago, he checked it up on his podcast, but I thought today I'll put it up on mine. This is the first half of my interview with Christian from Kangaroo English. Let's go.

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Mr. Pete Smissen. Thank you very much for talking to me today.

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It's doctor, Dr. Pete Smissen.

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I keep forgetting about that. I'm sorry, Dr Smissen, how are you today?

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I'm good. That's like the only time I can use anything that I got out of twelve years at university. So, I'll have to use it every now and then when people say Mr. I'm like...

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It must be like super satisfying if you go to one of those like web forms and you have to choose, you know, Mr. Mrs, and you do Dr.

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I feel like I shouldn't. I feel like I shouldn't, I'm always like, are they going to be, you know, is it going to come up and it'll be a legal thing? And they'll be like, well, technically, you're not a doctor, doctor. I say, I'm always like Mr. whatever.

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I saw a thing on Twitter where there was this woman and she said that she ran into an ex, an ex-boyfriend, and the ex-boyfriend said, 'I haven't seen you in ages, is it Miss or Mrs? She replied,  'actually, it's doctor', right? Right? But then I was like, boom! But then everyone on Twitter was like, 'he still likes you. He was trying to find out if you're single, you idiot.'

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All of that knowledge and you've lost all of the common sense.

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Exactly. Well, the reason we're chatting is because the other day we were talking on Facebook and and you mentioned that you're thinking about developing this course for people, so that they can actually use the English that they have right now, but also, at the same, time improve their English, but basically immediately.

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Well, I'll get the book, so that I can actually reference it properly because I fell in love, I fell in love with this guy, so this guy's name is Boris Shechtman, I think he's a Russian guy, but he has a Jewish name, so for anyone watching, here's the book., ok? It's called How to Improve Your Foreign Language Immediately, it's a very short read, but it's amazing. It blew my mind because I saw, I obviously was cruising around on Amazon looking for books about language learning and how to, I don't know, I get pretty sick of... And I've got a few books up here on language learning, but a lot of them are always like, you know, these are the kinds of dictionaries you should use and make sure that you speak to people, don't just spend all your time... it's like obvious stuff, but it's never, it never seems like actionable information that you can be like, what can I actually go out there and do to improve the way in which I speak?

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It's always about... It seems like it's always aimed at basic, you know, this is how to learn a language, not how to use it, but this guy's really good because he worked for the FSI, I think it's like the foreign...or FIS.

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The Foreign Services Institute.

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Foreign Services Institute in America, training up diplomats, diplomats to speak Russian. So, and they had to speak like at a native level, if not higher, I think, you know about very complicated stuff, so, you know, it was no holds barred language teaching, but the book, at least this one, which I sort of want to center the course on, the idea that I had, was all of these sort of small ideas that are implementable straight away immediately that you could, you know, learn now, watch a small video, read the book, go outside and use and immediately improve your language.

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So, I thought it was awesome. Yeah. Anyway, one of the things in there, I guess, was I think and this is one of those things we were talking about yesterday or the day before was that his first rule here is 'show your stuff', which is effectively if you're in a conversation with someone, you know, if I were to say to you, 'how are you going, Christian?, what are you going to say back?

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Well, I would say, yeah, yeah, fine. How are you?

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Exactly. So, at least it goes back and forth, but you're not going to just say 'good' right? Like it's going to be a...so, I think a lot of people focus on that, I need to respond and they give you this sort of the smallest amount possible to get like a pass, you know, like in a test it's like, I put an answer in the box and he was saying that you need to change, at least with that sort of rule, 'show your stuff' it was more show what you're capable of. So, you would instead of just saying something like, you know, 'how's it going? Yeah, good, and you?', you would say something 'yeah, I've been great, recently I've been doing this and I've started doing this and my day was like this', you know, you would go down a bunch of different alleys, you know, talk about a bunch of things and then throw it back, so that the speaker it's kind of like a fight, right? Or it's almost like a dance together where it's equal parts, it's not just one person dominates and the other person gets the submissive position, right?

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Yeah. I actually I love that because as you say, this is a technique that doesn't require any new knowledge or any study. It's more of like a mindset.

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Exactly.

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And in fact, I've used this technique myself, but only in a very specific way. I used it when for exam preparation, because what can happen in an exam is because, for example, in a lot of exams, there's this parts where they have to speak with a partner and what can happen is if you have a partner with a very dominant personality or with a very high level of English, they can take over this whole section of the exam, and so you're left basically saying nothing, right? I always encourage people, you know, when you're in the exam and they say, 'how are you?' you just launch into it, big monologue, you know? Let them tell you to stop, you know?

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Exactly. Well, that's it, I had to remember that I remember doing my French exam back in year 12, and I was crapping myself, you know, because I was like, oh, my God, there's going to be two French natives sitting across the desk interviewing me, effectively, about different things in French, and I have no idea what it's going to be about. But it was always that just prepared to have, you know, they're going to ask you about, you know? Generally. Not just go 'what do you think of NASA?' You know? It's going to be something like, 'tell us about your family.'.

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Yeah.

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You know? And, so you just have to have things prepared. And this is sort of a few of those other rules in here is sort of like Build Your Islands, which was develop these sort of islands of subject material that you want to talk about or that you would talk about in your native language cited like your family or your job or your hobbies.

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Develop those so that you're sort of prepared when you meet people and you have a conversation with them and they obviously want to get to know you and say, you know, what do you do? And you're not sitting there crapping yourself like I've forgotten how to use the present tense. And you don't have to think about it because you've gone away. You've practiced.

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You know, I do. This is a job. I go seven days a week and blah, blah, blah. You have a whole lot of information that you can just spit it out. And what we were talking about, I think when the light bulb went off for you, or at least I think I saw it in the in your eyes was when it all of these sorts of rules kind of tie really in deeply with confidence and building confidence. Right. Because it's kind of like we get asked a lot. I assume you get asked a lot. How do I speak more confidently? How do I be more confident with my English? And it's kind of like you can't really just practice confidence in and of itself. Right. It's kind of like you have to practice these kinds of things to be prepared, say build your islands, you know, be prepared, know what you can talk about, about you so that when you speak, it's not so much that you're confident, it's that you know what you're doing and you're not nervous because you have to think and make it up on the spot. And so it's more I think it's confidence of being prepared, right?

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Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And then another thing that's really interesting for me is, is how some of these concepts tie into maybe some of the science about the way that maybe children learn languages because like it seems that, you know, rather than this idea that the children or even adults sort of learn languages by sort of memorizing like categories of words, like verbs or nouns or, you know, maybe, you know, memorizing how to conjugate a verb by adding ED for the past. It seems like children and maybe even adults could learn best by learning things in these big kind of chunks. And it's interesting how these island, this island theory fits in with that. It's like you have this pre prepared kind of like stuff that's just there ready to go. So, I think it makes sense.

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It ties in with the Pareto principle, right? The 80/20 rule of, you know, when when you learn the 20 percent, the most common 20 percent of the English language is going to be used 80 percent of the time by people, right? And the other 80 percent is used only 20 percent of the time. So, you need to spend 80 percent of your time, effectively, focussing on that 20 percent because you're going to be using an 80 percent of the time. So, I think it's that sort of thing where you need to not get distracted by all these unknown words in English or unknown grammar patterns, and really spend your time where it's most efficiently used, because you're studying the things that you're going to be using most of the time. Because there's no point in being able to nail, you know, the the past perfect tense and if clauses or something if you're never going to say it, or at least, you know, it's so uncommon that even if you screw it up, it's going be so rare that people aren't going to... It's not a big deal in your day, right?

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But being able to talk about your family or being able to use the present tense, you know, those sorts of things, it's kind of like, well, you're going to be talking about them probably every other day with someone, right?

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Exactly. And in fact, I wonder if really it's more extreme than the Pareto principle. I wonder actually if it's more like 5 percent, 95 percent.

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I guess it would depend on how many words you say is in English, right? That tail end is probably it.

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Yeah. I mean, there's so many estimates about how many words in total there are, but if they can estimate, let's say...and this is an extreme estimate, but let's say there's a million words in English, you know, and a huge percent of those are archaic or scientific or medical, you know, kind of vocabulary, you know, if you look at like they estimate that that a well-educated college student loans 40 thousand words. Like a normal person like you or me, we know about 20 thousand words.

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I'd probably be a bit less than that.

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Doctor.

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So, if you think that the total could be a million and, you know, we know 20 thousand, but a lot of that's passive vocabulary, maybe on a day to day basis we're only using say five thousand. Not really at lot, is it?

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Anecdotally, when I do my podcast, more recently, I've been taking the transcripts from my podcast and we spoke about this and running it through a program to look at the complexity of the word usage. So, I guess it looks at the frequency of the words.

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Oh really? I didn't know about this.

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Yeah, I was asking, you remember, about the... If it's better to use the CELTA is it? What's it called the CELF measurement. There's A1, A2 or if it was the other version.

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The Lexile level.

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Yeah. The Lexile one. And, so what I was doing was running through all of my transcripts because I wanted to say like vocabulary wise where are they landing in terms of difficulty. And it was really interesting because I kind of had a whole spread from about A2, all the way to C2, but the ones that ended up being the most, quote unquote, simple, you know, for beginners were the sporadic conversations where I was say just talking about my day or something in a podcast or maybe even some of the interviews, which were 40 minutes long. When I was just talking with my wife about our child having our child for the first time, it came up as a level of like be two or be one or something, because obviously the vocab we're using in those sorts of conversations one on one is much simpler. But when I ran, when I read the scripts that I had written pre written about certain topics through the machine, I was getting C1, C2 and so...

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That's really interesting. And I wonder, my immediate thought is that, you know, we know that there's a big difference between writing and and speaking, you know, the language you use. And maybe, you know, when you sit down to write a script, you switch into this, you know, this language mode that's much more advanced.

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100 percent. And because I'm writing them for the podcast, I'm always thinking about how do I use more complicated language? In terms of, say, synonyms for words that are rarer, so that the listeners get exposure to them. Because I know that I'm not just pulling out, you know, certain expressions or even complicated synonyms, you know, 'superfluous', a word like that or something, I'm not just going to really use without sitting there and thinking about it in a conversation, but when I'm writing a transcript out, I can do that and then give the listeners a bit of more complicated language to go and study. And, so that was interesting, it was like when you've got time to think, you can structure things a lot more in a way that's much more sophisticated and complicated, but then when you're just talking one on one, quite often the sentences are broken. The, you know, the tenses are very simple, I bet you, if you looked at our thing today, it would all be probably, you know, the simple present tense, simple past tense. And that'd be about it, right? Maybe some perfect tenses in there as well and that's it.

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Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I think... Well, this is more of a kind of a philosophical question, but you know, when, like, part of my job is to communicate kind of clear messages. Like, if I'm teaching the students something, I don't want them to be focussed on the form of my language. I don't want them to think 'what does that word mean? What does that word mean?'. I want them to be thinking about what I'm trying to teach them. And, but then, you know, so, here's the question. If you have a student and they're only exposed to my sort of limited vocabulary, how does that prepare them to go out into the real world, where people are going to perhaps use words like 'superfluous'? This is sort of, this is a struggle, right?

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That's where you have to mix it up, right? And it is funny because I noticed with some English teachers on, say, YouTube, they it's almost like as soon as they get in front of the camera, they speak differently from when I say speak to them in private and you'll hear them use slang or use..and so I've had to think quite often, especially with doing podcasts, how much do I script it? Because as soon as I do that, it's changing the way in which the language would be used in terms of conversational, everyday English, which is what they're going to run into most of the time. And I'm not really trying to prepare them for, you know, having a really, really wide vocabulary to pass an exam. I want to give them access to the English that's spoken every day in terms of listening comprehension, so that they can be better prepared for that. So, it is difficult, though, because you're like, I want to. I want to dumb it down a bit, but at the same time, if they only get used to that level, they're going to be disappointed when they arrive in Australia, for example, and be like, 'holy crap, no one speaks slowly like Pete. He was too easy to understand!'.

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And I get complaints like that, sometimes I'll be making these episodes and I'm not even thinking about it, and I'll listen back because I'll get complaints 'it's too easy to understand you, you speak too slowly' and I'll be like, what the hell are you talking about? I go and listen, I'm like, man, you've probably been listening to six hundred episodes on my podcast. You're just used to my accent, I'm not dumbing it down. That's just that's just how I speak.

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Listen, even my own family, you know, they say to me, 'Christian, why are you talking to me like I'm an idiot? I can understand English' And I say to them, well, you know, this is how I speak. Like, if we went to the pub and had drinks, I would speak exactly like this. Maybe I'm just accustomed to it. But there was something which I read recently, which was very scary, is that they they did some research about native English speaking teachers who had been in Spain for only one year, And after one year, they had, these English teachers had already started to use kind of Spanish constructions with English words.

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Yeah.

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Changing the way that they that they spoke, so, to kind of accommodate the Spanish learners,.

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That screws me up all the time now. And it's not... It's not, I don't think it's necessarily that accommodation idea there. For instance, I speak Portuguese probably 90 percent of the time now with with Kel in the house. So, I've made that rule a year ago, just Portuguese. I want to get as good as possible, so that when Noah is growing up, he'll speak Portuguese and there's no one else around, for my own sake, I'm just being selfish. But, now whenever I speak English around my parents or, you know, whatever, quite often I have the structures in my head for Portuguese and I'll just blurt out the English version of it and just be like, you know, that's not that's not an expression in English or like, for example, I mean, it would be the same in Spanish, right? You know how they say, like, 'all the two', that was French, they say 'tout les deux' for like 'both'. Right? So, sometimes I remember spurting that out 'yeah, I'll have all the two', and the people... 'all the what?' Like it's gone deep.

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And, so I would love to know more about like cognitively what's going on there because interestingly too, and you probably know more about this than me, but when I speak, I spoke French fluently before I learnt any Portuguese, and then I dropped French and started doing Portuguese full time. So, now when I try and speak French, Portuguese is inserted anywhere I can't think of the word fast enough in French, but I can think of it in Portuguese even before I think of it in English. So, English doesn't get like, English doesn't taint the the well, the waters. It doesn't interrupt anything, but Portuguese seems to be this like big brother that's like beating up his little brother constantly when I try and speak French now. So, I would love to know in terms of like what's going on in my head? Like, is there is a certain area where second languages all get put and then they kind of have to like fight for space, right?

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No, it's more... It's actually more more about suppression.

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That's right. I remember your video with the balls, right? In the water.

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Exactly. So, people think it's the opposite, people think that what the brain is doing is trying to bring up, for example, trying to bring up the Brazilian or bring up the French, but it's the opposite, the brain is actually trying to push down your English and push down your your French, so that the Brazilian can...and so that's what it has problems with because, you know, you have to remember that the brain is just a machine like for making connections and the most powerful thing that the brain can do is repeat stuff a lot.

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Another funny thing is that and I remember... I can't remember where I heard it, but there's a reason people with dementia end up swearing a lot is because apparently that's much deeper in the brain, in the hippocampus. So, I think the area in the brain that stores those kind of emotional like, you know, you stub your foot and you're like 'shit!', you know, it's like a reaction more than a thought and a sentence. Apparently, people with dementia whose brains, you know, they lose the ability to speak English fluently, but they still have those reactions where all of a sudden, you know, they they'll bump their toe or something and say 'shit!', and I think I have the same thing with...what would you call them? Words like 'well', 'like', 'you know', so sometimes when I'm speaking in Portuguese to Kel, I'll be saying something like 'que ta fazendo hoje? Por que eu to achando que like'... And I'll be like... Why did I just...? I know the word, 'tipo', 'tipo' is what they say for 'like, like, like', but I use the English tick for some reason and it just pops in there.

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I think they're two separate things.  The reason that those the dementia patients would would sort of continue to have that vocabulary is because we tend to... That the words that we learn first in our lives are the words that aren't really deep in there. So, you know, the reality is that children hear their parents saying 'shit', you know 'damn!'.

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And they're never going to forget.

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They never forget. So, those those kind of first thousand words are like they become part of your your neurology almost. And the second thing, I think, is that all of those kinds of, those like discourse markers and those kind of the feedback that we give when we're in conversation like... And that's it's like...

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Even the 'um sound'. That 'um' I think I've noticed that with Spanish speakers and I have to quite often tell them 'guys, sort that out straight away', because it's very jarring to use the vowel sound eeee when you're speaking English, you know, you'll be like, 'I was doing this the other day eeeee', and it'll be like, whoa, what? What was that? Get used to that aahhh.

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It's totally, totally automatic, right?

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It takes a long time, right?

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Even now, if I'm walking down the street and I'm sort of maybe on my phone or I'm distracted, if I see someone I know, I go, 'hey!'...then I'm like, no, no, hey, no, 'ola'. Because it's totally automatic even after 10 years here.

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Yeah, I've had that a few times too where I've walked out and I'll hear my mom enter in and I'll hear the.... in the other room and I'll be like, oh, that's mom's, you know, cadence of her voice. She's here. She's here to see Noah and Kel will be talking to her. And I walk out and be like to 'ei, tudo bem, mãe?',' how's it going, mom?' And she'll be like, 'what?' And I didn't even know. And I'd be like, 'why? What? What? What? What happened?'. She's like, 'you said it in Portuguese'. I'm going like, oh my God, it is so interesting what the interplay in the between languages, right? Inside the brain.

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Yeah, exactly. But if you were to become a professional interpreter after a like a couple of years, you would switch so easily with no interference because you just get better at it, you know?

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Well, it's just time on the mat, right? We used to start with jujitsu that the more time spent doing something is you just get so good at it, right?

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And well, so this sort of brings us back to that whole kind of thing about, you're exactly right, there's so many books and you know where the answers seem very obvious, you know, need to practice, need to read more, etc. But there's not very much in the way of practical things, so that's why I think this stuff from the from the FSI guys really interesting.

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Yeah. Well, hopefully we're going to develop it into a course and create something because it seemed like I think you and I have both been talking about it for a while. There's a lot of stuff online that, you know, it's very...how would you put it? Sorry?

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Shit.

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Shit. Well, there's a lot of stuff out there where it doesn't lead to dramatic change immediately. I would say, right? Like it's almost and I find this even with my own content at times. I'm like, I've got a lot in here, but I need to also show people how to get the most out of it, how to get the, you know, pull the best out of it, and so I think with these sorts of things, when people ask me about confidence and fluency and speaking, it seems like you don't need to necessarily learn more English to improve those things. It's more about improving how you have conversation. So, it is interesting how it's more of a psychological thing and a behavioural thing than necessarily an English coach or English teacher, you know. I'll give you one lesson about this phrase or there's some tense and you'll be fine speaking in public or whatever.

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Yeah. Look, exactly. I think there's a lesson for students as well, right? It's like... You know, ask yourself, you know, when you watch these videos that are like, you know, 'top 10 words you need in business' or, you know, '10 different ways to say goodbye', you know, after watching that video, does that really kind of help you do anything? Really?

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It's entertainment, right? Like it's you don't necessarily watch, I don't know, like The Walking Dead to to learn about science or medicine, right? You kind of watch it because it's a laugh and it's good fun. And that's the battle I have a lot of the time with YouTube videos. I'm like, I kind of need to make something that people are going to click on and enjoy watching, but then get sucked in for the long term and are going to end up putting in the time to improve their language, right? And so there's that fine line between entertainment and education.

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It's really tough. It's really tough. I mean, how can you how can you take something that's so big like like learning a language and also that's really hard, how can you make it entertaining? And and in fact, I know that there's lots of teachers out there who would say, well, you know, it's not entertaining, and, you know, if you give people the idea that learning should always be fun, then then that's not good either.

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I was reading a book today, in fact, I will pull it up so that I don't screw up this guy's name and I don't know, can I swear?

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I think so.

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So, the book is called 'Everything is Fucked', by Mark. Mark Manson. So, he's the guy who wrote 'How to Stop Giving a Shit'.

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My sister read that book. She said I was really good.

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It is. He's a really good writer. This one, 'Everything is Fucked' is about is about hope. And he had a big section, I just finished it today listening to Audible whilst out walking, he had a big section about happiness and how he thinks, you know, it's oversold and that we will never, no one's ever truly going to be happy because we are just. There were some really good nuggets in there and one of them was firing a shot at everyone who says, you know, you can get fluent in three months or you can get, you know, you can learn how to...he was he was targeting someone who learnt a few chess moves and ended up beating some high ranked chess guy after a month of playing it and then walked away and was like, yeah, I've done that, tic.

77
00:28:12,340 --> 00:28:50,454
And he's kind of like, it's the wrong attitude to have, you know, because you've got to be in it for the long haul and the improvement constantly in and the fact that there is pain in there constantly, that that's how you get value out of it, right? Because you keep overcoming these things. But two sort of anecdotes that were interesting from scientific studies that were done, he was talking about in this book, there was a blue dot test that they did, a study where they had people come in and they had them press a button saying that the dot they're shown on the screen is blue or it's not blue. And they show them, you know, purple and blue dots. Have you heard of this study?

78
00:28:50,580 --> 00:28:51,580
No, no.

79
00:28:51,670 --> 00:29:32,800
So, initially, I think, they match them at about 50/50 and they show them a thousand of these and they press it. And then after that, they start showing people a range of different colour, different shades between the purple and the blue. And they don't necessarily keep the numbers even and the funny thing was, even when that happened, they kept trying to even it out, saying that half as many were blue. And then after that, they showed them pictures of people who were happy versus sad and they did the same thing. They we're trying to find a balance there, so half was sad, half were happy, but even in the end, after that, they showed them just happy faces and they were still trying to adjust it to show that they were unhappy ones.

80
00:29:33,340 --> 00:29:45,371
And then he said, two, that he had there was another study that, I think, it was back in the 80s or the 90s that people had buzzers, what are the called again? Those things that you put on the...? You get texted or something...

81
00:29:47,938 --> 00:31:01,708
Pagers. I never had one. It was before my time, but pagers and they get paged twice a day and have to say how they were feeling, you know, rate it out of 10. And he was like, no matter what had happened, pretty much everyone said 7:00. So, their mother had died and that would be like for a few days, 2, 2, 5 ,7. Or they won the lottery and it would be like 10, 9, 5, 7, 7, 7, 7. So, the point of that was, I guess, that both these sort of studies was that if you end up balancing out or trying to balance out and find that middle ground. So, even if you do say, you know, win the lottery, or get fluent in English, you have to stop looking at it. Like once I finally get there, I'll be happy and everything will be good, because even if it is, it'll be a very short period of time and then you'll be back to normal, right? The human mind, and that's what keeps us moving forward as human beings. It's almost like where we're cursed to never be a 10 out of 10 permanently in terms of happiness. So, we keep going for it, right? You have to keep, you've got the carrot in front of you, and so I think that there's a story in there somewhere in that mix of stories for working on your fluency in English and knowing that it takes a long time, right?

82
00:31:02,770 --> 00:31:34,522
Yeah. Probably the story is that no matter where your English is, right? If your English is really terrible and you know, you've just started learning English and you can only say basic sentences, you can still feel like a seven, right? Because it's like that initial feeling of it's great. I can go and buy a coffee or whatever. And even after you've been learning English for 20 years and you're and, you know, you're really fluent and you've got a great, great pronunciation, you'll still feel like a seven because there's certain places where you'll struggle. So, maybe the takeaway is that you should feel good all the time during the process.

83
00:31:45,213 --> 00:31:54,131
Or at least realize that, right? And keep aiming to improve and just know that even as you do improve, don't wait for a time when you are feeling 100 percent bliss, right? Because...

84
00:31:56,019 --> 00:31:57,910
It's never going to happen.

85
00:31:58,329 --> 00:31:59,439
It's probably not going to happen, right?

86
00:32:00,520 --> 00:32:09,516
Yeah, exactly. And I think it's definitely one of those things where, you know, the more you learn, the more you realize how much there is to learn, right?

87
00:32:10,540 --> 00:32:43,420
The curse of knowledge, right? Or the curse of wisdom. I find that all the time, did you have that with Spanish when you first started? And this is another tangent we can go off in, but I always feel like I remember walking into my sister's house recently and she's like, 'I don't know how you speak Portuguese like that. I'm so horrible at languages. I could never do that' and I'll be like you're saying that to me in a language fluently. Like, like is there is the contradiction here just not anymore obvious, like, how were we communicating? It's not a sign language. And that's a language. You're saying this to me in English, so you're obviously pretty good at it.

88
00:32:44,950 --> 00:33:06,951
Yeah, exactly. Well, I think part of that as well as, you know, the Australian culture, like most Anglo-Saxon cultures, you know, there's no real culture for learning another language. So, for most people, I mean, like when I go visit, when I go to Australia and, you know, people are like, 'you live in Spain, you speak Spanish. Oh, my God!', it's like you know, it's like I won the Nobel prize just because I can speak another language, whereas...

89
00:33:10,832 --> 00:33:13,479
Bow down to the genius.

90
00:33:14,200 --> 00:33:14,619
Exactly.

91
00:33:14,620 --> 00:33:22,383
It's like, you know, what they don't realize is that most people in the world speak two or three or four languages. You know, we're the ones that are weird, the monolinguals.

92
00:33:23,540 --> 00:33:24,540
Yeah. Yeah.

93
00:33:24,700 --> 00:33:25,659
Exactly.

94
00:33:25,660 --> 00:33:50,559
Well, to answer your question, I remember I'd been living here for about three months and we were looking for a Spanish teacher and we found this American woman who was teaching Spanish, and so we had a first meeting with her to plan the classes and how often we come to class, and she said to us, she said to us in English, you know, 'how's your Spanish right now?'

95
00:33:50,800 --> 00:34:11,350
And I remember saying to her, I can't really speak that much, but my vocabulary is excellent. And back then, I probably knew how to say, like 'dog' and 'car' and 'barbecue'. And, you know, for me, I was excellent. So, my ignorance was enormous in that respect.

96
00:34:11,960 --> 00:35:02,828
Well, feels like that all the time. Kel is always telling me, 'oh, you're Portuguese is so good'. And I'm always like... But, you know? Like, what for a gringo? Right? She's like, 'no, no, no, it's really good', but I constantly am aware self consciously of where where my flaws are, what I don't know. Like, at the moment, I'm reading this book, for example, about one of the worst jails in Brazil and had a tragic story. But anyway, I'm going through it and highlighting all the words in it. And I'm like, I've read a hundred pages and I still haven't hit a page where I don't know a single word.But it is funny when you break that down because it's kind of like for me to get to that point statistically, you know, if you would say each page would have, what, 500 words on it. That would mean I'd have to have the mastery of something like, you know, 20 thousand words in Portuguese, right?

97
00:35:03,090 --> 00:35:04,093
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

98
00:35:04,430 --> 00:35:09,622
And so yeah. You have to remind yourself how far you've come, right? And still be like there's a bit to go, but...

99
00:35:10,220 --> 00:35:18,879
Well, I'm I'm curious how many of those words that you've highlighted can you guess the meaning from the context?

100
00:35:19,390 --> 00:36:00,120
Yeah. Well, a lot of them I highlight because I'm unsure. And, so I want to I want to verify anyway. So, I try quite often I do like, again, we can talk about how to get vocab out of books. My way is generally read a chapter and then read it again and highlight the words you were uncertain about are the expressions or whatever, and then read it again, and write the definitions under them. But yeah, most of the time, probably 50 percent, I reckon, I can sort of, at least it doesn't disrupt the flow, right? But personally it's almost like an OCD thing, obsessive compulsive disorder thing where I'm like I need to know every word in a sentence or else I'm going to be like, did I understand it? Am I sure I know what that was?

101
00:36:01,080 --> 00:36:25,474
Well, it's interesting. I think that that study technique is actually a great combination between combining kind of enjoyment and learning, because this is probably the part of learning that isn't the fun part, but reading the chapter and kind of understanding, you know, 80 percent. That's good, right? Because you get more on that kind of the story, but then comes the kind of the more unpleasant parts.

102
00:36:26,439 --> 00:36:26,940
The push-ups.

103
00:36:26,941 --> 00:36:30,719
Highlighting the words and looking them up, but it's necessary, right? Necessary.

104
00:36:31,230 --> 00:36:41,489
It's like going to the gym. Lifting the weights isn't the fun part. It's walking out of the gym, pumped up, that's the fun part. And it lasts about two minutes, right? It's a means to an end.

105
00:36:42,090 --> 00:36:52,900
But there are sometimes moments, right? Like, not very often those moments, but there are moments sometimes where maybe you could be out on a run and you just had that moment, we like 'man, this is great!'.

106
00:36:53,760 --> 00:36:54,840
Yeah, definitely.

107
00:36:55,020 --> 00:36:56,830
Might just be 30 seconds, but, you know.

108
00:36:57,780 --> 00:37:40,769
Well, and I think it comes back to this book that Mark Manson had written here. He was talking about at the end there, that idea, of course, like the opposite of trying to do something really quickly and just finding happiness in the moment or at least, you know, being pleased in the moment and just keep keep chipping away at it, keep working away at it. So, I'm not trying to beat myself up over the fact that I still have to look up a bunch of these words, but I'm really enjoying the fact that I can actually just read this book in a foreign language and get the gist of it, you know really well and just enjoy that process. And that's one thing I know that you love to talk about. It's always followed the fun, right? It's don't make English learning so boring that you don't want to do it. Make it so fun that you can't avoid but do it, right?

109
00:37:41,190 --> 00:37:57,441
Yeah. Well, I think you know, I think a big part of that is it is kind of doing what you're doing. So, you know, you say, well, I want to I want to read something in English, but I want to read something I'm interested in. So, yeah, obviously, you want to know about this this prison. This is something because you're interested in history, aren't you?

110
00:38:04,260 --> 00:38:28,800
Alright, guys. So, that is just the first half of this rather long interview that I had with Christian. Don't worry, it gets even better in the second half, but that will be out soon. So, I wanted to chop it up because it was well over an hour in length. But yeah, this will be enough for today. Stay tuned for the next portion, which will be out soon. Thanks again for joining me, guys, and I will see you next time. Peace!