Languages are created to deliver your thoughts, but those are created. Think about the possibilities in life. There's way more possibilities, way more things. There are. Than languages, than vocabularies. There are. Even though it is a accumulative things, it's inherited for from thousands of years ago, but still, life is way more complicated.
SPEAKER_07Well, I had the delightful pleasure to sit down and talk to Phoebe about her language learning experience in and outside of China where she grew up. She is a local from Shanghai, China, and she grew up with Haize and Mandarin slash Pudang Kwa. Learned English when she was five years old, then at university learned German, Finnish, Cantonese, Italian, and Latin. Did I mention that her university experience was in Ireland? Or actually, that is the wrong verb tense. It is still happening in Ireland. She is currently doing a PhD program in audio engineering. Yes, she may sound intimidating, but she is one of the most lovely, down-to-earth, kind and gentle people I have ever met. Phoebe and I talked about language and identity, language and accuracy and fluency, and where do you decide where one ends and one begins? And how important is communication? Why do people forget that that's the whole reason why we're talking or writing in the first place? Phoebe's perspective coming from Mandarin Chinese into all of these other languages is a gem for me. I'm still very, very much so stuck in learning Mandarin Chinese at a low level, and I will probably someday eventually move on. But hearing someone who they speaks so eloquently in supposedly a foreign language is what we call this when she's speaking English. It's a foreign language for her. But honestly, the emotion in her voice and the clear and precise way that she uses the language, I could get lost in her voice easily, and I could get lost in her thoughts. So here's Phoebe. Thank you so much, Phoebe, for joining us on the Changing Scripts Podcast.
SPEAKER_05Thank you for inviting me over here.
SPEAKER_07So, can you give our listeners a quick overview of the languages that you speak, have learned, have studied, any of those?
SPEAKER_05Um the French language I've learned is obviously English, I'm late at Chinese, and I've learned German and um a little bit of Italian at the moment, Finnish, um, and Cantonese, if that counts as a language? It does. I I think it does, does it? I think so. Yeah. If I'm not politically wrong.
SPEAKER_07Well, it's I mean the sound system is very different than Shanghai's or Pudanghwa, right?
SPEAKER_05Yeah, yeah, same as uh grammar. They have different grammar systems.
SPEAKER_07Right, right. Okay, so yes, that counts. Uh-huh. And your your native language or languages? I would say Shanghainese, because I'm born I was born in Shanghai, but I speak Mandarin.
SPEAKER_05That's the language I was wanting.
SPEAKER_07Oh my gosh, that's quite an array of languages you've got there.
SPEAKER_05For us, it's very normal, but yeah.
SPEAKER_07Excellent. Okay. Well, let's uh let's break this down. Let's start as little Phoebe. When you were growing, you grew up in Shanghai, right? That's what you said. Okay, so when you were growing up in Shanghai, uh you used Shanghai's at home? Is that right? Okay. Mostly. Mostly. And what else were you using at home?
SPEAKER_05Mandarin.
SPEAKER_07Mandarin and Shanghai's. Yes. Okay. Did everybody in the household speak Shanghai's and Pudonghwa?
SPEAKER_05Yeah, yeah.
unknownOkay.
SPEAKER_05Those of them, but for the older generation, their Mandarin isn't that good. So they might speak uh the they might use um not so authentic Mandarin.
SPEAKER_07Yeah. Okay. And um when did you when you started school did they use Shanghai's in schools?
SPEAKER_05I don't think so. Uh because in schools here um we have to show respect to everybody. And Shanghai is a very multicultural city. So we're literally not allowed to use Shanghai's because that would show um like exclusiveness. Right, right, right. Okay. Um that's one of the concerns of the um younger generation right now is people said if Shahainese is not allowed, um people are concerned that language is dying. Right. If you don't speak that in school, then kids wouldn't, if their parents are busy, they wouldn't have any chance to practice speaking.
SPEAKER_07Exactly, because they spend so much time at school that if they don't use it there, where did they use it?
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
unknownOkay, I'm very impressed.
SPEAKER_07Whereas normally I'll just I'll talk on the street, I have no problem with noise, I'll be to like so anyway, okay, so let's just keep going. Okay, so when you went to school, uh Mandarin or Pudon Kwa Mandarin um Chinese was the I swear that roof's gonna cave in at some point too. Um that was the language of instruction, and when did you s learn your first third your your first foreign language?
SPEAKER_05Oh, I started very, very early since I was in kindergarten. I went to a it's not bilingual, but they started to teach us English songs and English, I don't know, English storytelling from very on. I didn't know the meaning of that at all. I was very keen on acting them out, just mimicking whatever the teacher was doing. Quite enjoyed that. That's that that uh I started learning English since I was possibly five years old. That was a way ahead of um the proper kind of age you're you're required to learn English in Shanghai.
SPEAKER_07That's a beautiful age to learn a foreign language, even though I don't know the meaning and and I don't know how to translate grammar or anything. Yeah. But you said that the teacher was like acting out the the story. Yeah. So you were getting a physical connection to the meaning of the words.
SPEAKER_05Yes, and I started to appreciate the how to say prosody of that language itself. I like the rhythm, I like how it pronounced.
SPEAKER_07That's the first connection I had with English. Do you study sound? Oh my gosh, you're gonna have to define that for our listeners. Some of them study linguistics, but a lot of them aren't familiar with all the terms. Can you explain to them very simply what prosody is? Oh, probably by the time I publish my first paper.
SPEAKER_05Stay tuned first. To put it in a simple way, I don't know um how to say that. It's your first uh instinct or um intuitive response or appreciation of particular sound of a language without thinking about the meaning. You simply appreciate the sound, the how um I would try to say um the very fundamental or uh the very basic level of particular sound without putting into any semantic or synthetic structure into the processing of the sorry I haven't become very academic, but just how you process how your brain react to language.
SPEAKER_07Is it I I do I have to admit in grad school I studied more writing than I did sound. Uh-huh. Uh prosody, prosody, prosody. I can't even spell it at this point. P-R-O-S-I-T-Y.
SPEAKER_05It sounds like the emotional connection with the language, is that kind of and also uh the different features and characteristics, uh-huh, like different phonings and uh the rhythms, like in Italian you got intonations within each word. Right. And when we're speaking English, we have intonation in the sentences. And you when you read poems or you read some sentences, you usually have something in in Chinese we call yeah, I mean something with the same um consonant or um vowels, uh it it contains though those patterns, even if for people who don't know that language they would start to feel oh, there's something repetitive, there are some rules, there's something beautiful out there. Right, right.
SPEAKER_07Because most well, all languages have like a set of sounds that they use, and they just keep rearranging how they're used. So this is a good time to introduce your background and what you're studying right now, I think, because that'll give the listeners a little bit of hard to different.
SPEAKER_05I'm a researcher in sounds.
SPEAKER_07There you go. So Phoebe is very, very keenly aware of uh of audio sounds and and language sounds and all of that kind of stuff, which is so amazing to me. Thank you. Alright, so let's see. So English at wow, five years old. Other than singing songs and kind of doing the movement to go with them, when did what what other ways were you taught the language?
SPEAKER_05Oh, um, after that, after my kindergarten um period, I just follow what everybody else did in school. Yeah, I don't know what that is.
SPEAKER_07Um okay, I kind of do, but the listeners might not.
SPEAKER_05So can you describe compulsory English classes? Uh it's it's it's it carries the same equivalent importance as Chinese mathematics and physics, something like that. And you just take classes for credit and then you answer questions, pass exams.
SPEAKER_07Can we zoom in on the English language classroom in in elementary school? What what happened? Was it the teacher describing the language or were you using it? Was there talking? Was there listening?
SPEAKER_05Like, can you give us an a little snapshot of what the like every language study you got reading, listening, writing, and speaking? Speaking. Yes. And you got exams on all of them. I gotcha. Okay. And you do something you you'd accumulate vocabularies and you were taught different rules of grammar and then you do exercise. Gotcha.
SPEAKER_07So there was a a fair amount of speaking in the classroom.
SPEAKER_05Um not really.
SPEAKER_07Okay. Not really. So it's more the listening, reading, and writing.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_07That seems to be the case globally. Even in communicative classrooms, it still seems to be a lot of those. Especially in large. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. Because if you have 30 and 40 people, it's very difficult and noisy to have conversation groups.
SPEAKER_05Even if you're asked to pair up with your um uh classmates, you you are simply using something the other person would understand. Right. And yeah.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, exactly, exactly. Um when did German come into the mix?
SPEAKER_05Oh, that's not until I entered university. Oh, okay. So uh I I felt like after I started my bachelor's degree in Ireland, um I started in my a new whole new journey of learning languages, including Chinese English and all the other languages I picked up.
SPEAKER_07Okay, so you moved to Ireland and started learning German and English. And English Chinese. Okay, okay. Wow. Okay, wait, did you learn all of those at the same time? Uh I picked them up one after another, but hmm, quite quickly after I mastered one.
SPEAKER_05After I've turned into new ways of learning languages.
SPEAKER_07Oh! What what new ways?
SPEAKER_05I found I I before I went to Ireland to study, um, I feel like the whole all the effort I spent, most of my life, I spent all of my life studying English, which was not that effective. And then I found out, oh, probably I should change to a new way of learning different languages. After I pick up German and a little bit of Italian, oh, also a little bit of Latin. I found oh there is actually connections between different languages. If you understand where that comes from, then you understand a lot of things a lot deeper. And also my experience of studying in Ireland made me more tolerant of language itself. Because I met lots of people, they speak English natively, but they're from different places like Indian and Australian, American, British people, Irish people. All of them speak English very confidently, but the way they deliver, the way they articulate is all different. Then I wouldn't stick to the very harsh rule, single rule of what is correct, what is not correct. I would just pick whichever both like pronunciation or grammar, I would just choose the one I feel comfortable with. And whatever people are talking to me in English, I'm more tolerant. I wouldn't just take out the grammar mistakes. I'm very uncomfortable to hear anything that's not proper from the text. Sure.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, it is a shock the the first few times you hear different varieties of English.
SPEAKER_06Yeah.
SPEAKER_07And and again, from someone who's very, very fluent and knows exactly what they're saying, and a lot of people can understand them, and it's like, wait, why don't I understand them?
unknownExactly.
SPEAKER_07I remember the first time I I went to Scotland, I had to seriously adjust to the accent and the vocabulary. And uh not so much with Australia because they mostly just shorten things, so that wasn't too bad. But there were some there's some cockney rhyming slang in the UK that some of my co-workers abroad in Asia would use, and I'd just be like, I can't, I just don't know what know what you guys are saying. Like I understand we have a common language, this is not it. There must be varieties of Chinese as well, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_05Um within China, yes, and even for uh people from like Southeast Asian countries, uh like Malaysian Chinese and Singapore Chinese, and um some of my friends from Taiwan, we all speak Chinese, but we understand each other, but there are obvious differences in the usage of words, sure, vocabularies, and sentence structure even. Uh when you when I realize that then I become more tolerant of my usage of English. I was really, really harsh on myself. Oh, I'm not grammatically perfect, I haven't studied English loud enough.
SPEAKER_07That's awesome. Yeah, the ability to to kind of ask and get clarification on things and go back and forth becomes much more important than the perfect grammar and the perfect vocabulary at that point. Because even like you said, even native speakers are speaking different versions of the language. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so it's yeah, very, very cool. Uh, where are we? German, finish, finish, finish. Why finish? Gonna go to Finland for a short conference thing. Oh, that's so cool. Mother daughter, Pia, uh, this Finnish woman that was in uh Shanghai. Hi, Pia, was in Shanghai with her daughter Lota. Pia was a woman a woman I met when her family moved uh because of her husband's job to Shanghai, and her daughter Lota, and I her other daughter who I never met came here. Um, and Lota was studying Chinese, and Pia was studying Chinese a little bit and mostly just exploring like crazy. She was having such a good time. And I interviewed Lota for Expat Rewind, which is now Bookish Expats, and Lota I actually interviewed for this podcast, Changing Scripts.
SPEAKER_05Um I did a lot of travel in within European kind of area wherever I went to, I wanted I wanted to speak the local language. I don't want to use English all the time. So um after I pick up German, I traveled to all the German-speaking area. Wow, all? You said all, really? Most of the German-speaking area, including Switzerland. Yeah. The only only German-speaking part of Switzerland and Austria. Uh after I picked up some other languages, probably I'll visit more places.
SPEAKER_07Why did you want to go to so many places there? Did you want to hear the varieties of it?
SPEAKER_05Or yeah, I just wanted to explore, uh pick up different mindsets and then see because within Europe it's you you take a bus one hour and it it'll send you to a totally new country. People speak totally different languages and then they have different mindsets and they have different traditional, which is wow, awesome. Yeah. Only one hour you don't know.
SPEAKER_07I know, I know, someone from China and someone from the US. For us, it's like you have to fly.
unknownYou have to.
SPEAKER_07I mean, I yeah, I could go up to Canada, but and that's a little different. But sorry, Canadians, but let's be real, it's not insanely different, like a different country that's not a different language, except for the A thing that they do. He but but no, the drastic uh cultural changes in Europe, especially from West to Eastern Europe, it's it's really different. It's so close to each other. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_05I also feel like if I don't speak local language and we can get the most out of that place, people wouldn't be so keen on showing what's authentic or but they're you have to, even if you're not fluent, you have to show some effort. Yeah. Absolutely.
SPEAKER_07So, okay, wait, let's go back to little Phoebe first. Most people have an affinity towards one part of a language versus another when they're growing up. For example, I loved to read when I was growing up. Some people liked speaking or they liked listening to certain things. Where were what was your happy place in language as a child?
SPEAKER_05I always say reading things out loud because the first attachment I had with English is prosody, and same as Chinese, because my mom she encouraged me to and read poems, and then um she's a very voice person. She she likes me. She taught me to read things emotionally from very young age before I could actually read stuff. So I really enjoy listening to people reading stories and poems. After I can read a little bit of ping ying, I started to read things by myself and act it out. Um so for all languages, I just love hearing those languages. Yeah. I I I love hearing those sounds. Me too, me too.
SPEAKER_07There were now that I'm thinking about. I'm a little bit older than you. So when I was growing up, like I didn't get the internet, uh the internet was not common until I was almost out of university. And so when I was growing up, we had what record players and tape players later on. So audio stuff to go with the readings wasn't super common yet. So I kind of had the voices going on in my head. And I think it because I love audiobooks and podcasts now, so I can only imagine if I was a kid with all of that stuff, nobody would ever see me. I'd be like, I'm in my room, I'm gonna listen to a million things today. Bye.
SPEAKER_05That's why I was so uh attracted to your podcast, because I just simply love your voice. Oh my god, thank you.
SPEAKER_07I I have issues, I've I've talked about this on the YouTube channel of the changing scripts because I have immigrant parents from Italy and I grew up in New York and Pennsylvania, and then I moved to California. I have a weird mix of vocal characteristics. I seem like I have a flat tone, but I've got really weird intonation for someone who has a flat tone.
SPEAKER_06Oh really?
SPEAKER_07Yeah. It throw I it's not a huge deal until I hit some sound people that only want that flat tone with no weirdness. I've had people literally want me to repeat stuff. Like if I was if they were interviewing me, they want me to repeat repeat a phrase because it didn't sound as normal as it should. And I said, Yes, but I'm on your podcast as a guest. This is me. This is how I sound. Well, thank you. That's very nice of you. I'm like, no, there I I do make lots of mistakes, but that was not a mistake. That was that was my intonation.
SPEAKER_05Just the way people.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, yeah, yeah. But because it's a little different and it's not like standard, super flat, non-I have a little bit of my parents' influence, a little bit of New York influence. Very subtle, but it's there. And for the very fine tune ear, it throws them off, and they're like, Oh, it's not, it's not standard enough. I'm like, ah how did I get on this? How did I have this experience? So it's it's a little thank you, is what I meant to do.
SPEAKER_05But it has to be BBC or CNN standard.
SPEAKER_07I know, I know. And even and then even on the local news, because we call it like very, very standard English, we call it like newscaster English. That very, very flat, you can't tell where someone's from. But even on the local news channels, you'll hear different accents. Right. So it's not even libraries, libraries, libraries or bookstores. When you were growing up, did you go to libraries or bookstores very often?
SPEAKER_05Not really to tell the truth, but I really love bookstores and libraries.
SPEAKER_07So where did you get the stuff you were reading?
SPEAKER_05Hmm. Yeah, from the bookstores, usually. Ah, okay, okay, okay. So more bookstores than libraries. But at that time there aren't man as many as right now. Yeah. I really like the bookstores right now in Shanghai. Yeah. I love them.
SPEAKER_07They're beautiful.
SPEAKER_05I spent days and weeks all my holidays. I want to live there.
SPEAKER_07What's your favorite for the listeners that might come to Shanghai to visit? What's your favorite bookstore?
SPEAKER_05Oh compared to some of the bookstores outside of Shanghai, I would prefer some outside of Shanghai.
SPEAKER_07Okay, can we give them one in and one out of Shanghai?
SPEAKER_05The 24-hour ones in Guangzhou, which is really, really awesome.
SPEAKER_07There's 24-hour bookstores in Guangzhou. Yes. What? Do we have names of a bookstore that's a board?
SPEAKER_05Uh if I'm not wrong to put the 1200 hour bookstore. And they even have Airbnb in that.
SPEAKER_07In the bookstore.
unknownYes.
SPEAKER_07I did not know until this very moment that I wanted to sleep in a bookstore and I didn't. Shut down the Wi-Fi, they told you we're going to be. Oh my god, I love this place. I see why you had a hard time picking just one in Shanghai. But if if you had to in a false world where you were restricted just to Shanghai, what would you say is your favorite bookstore here? Let's do it in two categories. One just for the books.
SPEAKER_05I miss the one it used to be um underneath the Shanghai Library. Yes! It is.
SPEAKER_07It's still technically a bookstore, but it's not the same. It's not. They've really remodeled it.
SPEAKER_05I really love the uh collection.
SPEAKER_07That was a very cool one, yeah.
SPEAKER_05I don't like the very trendy ones, to tell the truth. But yeah. It's it's good to go there every once in a while, but.
SPEAKER_07Jermi Tian is a writer-translator, like all-around word badass. And he was on the show a few months ago. And he's from Singapore, grew up with English, speaks Mandarin Chinese. I don't remember if he speaks Cantonese. He's he's got a lot of languages at his disposal, and he plays with languages for a living. And he wanted to know, this is his question, he wanted to know what people felt what language they felt they had ownership over, what language they felt was theirs. Because sometimes when we learn a language we feel like, okay, I can use it, but it's not really my culture, it's not really my mine. So he wanted to know what language people considered their language.
SPEAKER_05Any language that's within the realm of your specialty or you're owned professionals.
SPEAKER_07What languages do you feel that you own?
SPEAKER_05It depends on um what I'm talking about. Oh, I'm talking about sound or academics, probably English, because uh learn everything I I could deliver all the concepts and different things in English more confidently if I'm talking about Asian literature or I don't know any um any other things or family issues or daily lives, probably Chinese or in some other situations. Um I I wouldn't say I would have the feeling of having an ownership of any languages because for me moving from one place to another, um switching language for me is quite difficult. Sometimes I I'm actively searching for one word to represent my thoughts and I always felt um it it depends on the confidence of delivering your thoughts in different realms.
SPEAKER_07Right, right.
SPEAKER_05Um and I I would say for a lot of friends around me they always have like identity issues, especially for those who's coming from a very complicated family. Right. And uh some of them they told me they would train in one language and they deliver a speech in another language, or they could train in in different several different languages. But when you're talking about something philosophical or something related to your value system, I don't think language itself could align perfectly with what you're thinking. Uh that's why we need uh gestures and languages beyond the spoken ones. Exactly. Beyond the exact ones, so that people actually can communicate their thoughts by indicating their behaviors and different um how do I say that, uh nuanced um signature or um indicators, shall I say? Um language um is a defined system. Yeah. And I will never want to own a language. I'm not in pursuit of any languages right now. Before that, uh before I enter college, I'm always pursuing fluency uh or I don't know, ownership or mastery of wrong language, please English, but now um articulating your idea to another person, even though your common language is different, or the mastery level of a common language is different, as long as you can make the other understand, then it's fine.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, I think that is that is fluency, and that is exactly what I I agree with you nine million percent, and that's not even a percentage. I think so many people get caught up in having it come out perfectly that they don't communicate and they don't make those connections, and I think that that it stops something beautiful that could happen. Yeah, yeah, so that's that's really cool. But yeah, it is an identity thing, and you you have me thinking because I I grew up monolingual despite having parents that were bilingual, and I've always been slightly jealous that despite trying to learn different languages, I understand that is not my strongest cognitive skill. That's fine. I have other ones, I'm good. Uh I will continue to try, and hopefully at some point I'll get to fluency in some language, hopefully Mandarin. But I do put people who grow up with multiple languages a bit on a pedestal, and I think what a glorious life that must be. But after reading about like third culture kids lately and the complications that come with having multiple cultures and multiple languages, I'm beginning to rethink the admiration and I'm wondering if it makes it more complicated. Do you think growing up with multiple languages opens up a lot of things or makes life more complicated? I personally don't have an experience like that.
SPEAKER_05So I don't really know. I can't really comment on that. But for me, I kind of quite often switch from one language to another. It does complicate things. In some way, it helps you to find the connections between different languages. There's connections between even Eastern languages and western languages, and then now you're quite more tolerant, and then you understand the other a lot better if you can tell what's the origin of language and why people use the sentence structure like that. Yeah, and due to different structures of uh rules of grammar, and then you can tell why people think this way, why people prioritize one to another because the way they speak.
SPEAKER_07Like you were using English in China, but it sounds like you were you really, really became comfortable using English when you moved to Ireland. Not really, actually. Really?
SPEAKER_05No.
SPEAKER_07Wait, do you feel like you're still not at a comfort level?
SPEAKER_05No, not at all.
SPEAKER_07What? You're to me you sound amazingly fluent. It doesn't seem like anything, it doesn't seem like you don't understand. That's such a double negative. Let me try that again. It seems like you understand everything and you're just going back and forth so quickly and easily.
SPEAKER_05That's because I was talking to you. You made me so comfortable.
SPEAKER_07Oh my god. You still feel slightly uncomfortable in speaking English. Yes. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. No, I can only imagine how hard that is.
SPEAKER_04Hi, I'm Tanya Crossman. I'm a cross-cultural consultant working with international schools and other international organizations, but I'm most well known as the author of Misunderstood: The Impact of Growing Up Overseas in the 21st Century. In Misunderstood, I explore how growing up between countries and cultures and languages impacts the way a young person sees and understands and experiences the world around them. And how this different experience can create tension or misunderstandings between them and friends and family who didn't share that same cross-cultural childhood experience. I wrote it partly for young people who grew up this way to see that it's not just me, I'm not the only one. Other people feel the same way I do, and I make sense in this context. But I also wrote it for parents who felt anxious and stressed and even guilty for bringing their kids overseas and worrying what this was going to do to their kids long term. So I interviewed and surveyed hundreds and hundreds of TCKs about their experiences, so I can say to parents, look, I don't know what your specific kid's going through, but here's what hundreds of other kids in similar situations have said about their experiences. The book is full of their stories, what's helped them and what hasn't, what support they need from the adults in their lives. I love talking about this stuff. I love talking to parents, to TCKs, to anyone in this cross-cultural world. So you'll find me all over social media. I'm on Twitter as TanyaTCK. I'm on Facebook and Instagram as MisunderstoodTCK, and my website is misunderstoodbook.com. Misunderstood is available as a paperback and an ebook pretty much everywhere online.
SPEAKER_07I can't, yeah. I I should I should use some of my Mandarin now so you can understand how bad and how un impossible it is for me to um oh I really really will. Okay, so so like the the word I mean woo, I still have problems with that. I generally can't build sentences, I know words. That's as far as I've gotten.
SPEAKER_05But but that even in a sentence, um why do you think it's problematic or is that because it's so far back in the throat.
SPEAKER_07Okay, so English is very, very much here.
SPEAKER_05I am yeah, yeah. So how how far apart is your pronunciation from a local person?
SPEAKER_07Oh, from a local? Oh, probably night and day. You tell you tell me.
SPEAKER_05I don't know, because everybody, every Chinese, they speak uh they say a word in different ways. I kinda understand.
SPEAKER_07And maybe that's some of the problem. Because even street names, I'll say to many different people. Okay, taxi drivers, I understand they're from different parts of the country, and so there's a natural disconnect there. But even people who say they're from Shanghai, and I'm talking about different street names, will still have to like tone it out back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Tell me I'm the same place.
SPEAKER_05Okay, so I don't know. Talk to every kind of they speak differently. Yeah.
SPEAKER_07Well, maybe that's it then. Maybe I am thinking there is a way because I still get a little confusion when I try to use the language, and the little that I can use, so there's a lot of confusion, and they'll s and I don't have enough navigation language to to say it a different way, to ask them what part was confusing. Like I I can't navigate back and forth to figure out what went wrong in what I said.
SPEAKER_06Okay.
SPEAKER_07And so it's either here's what I want to say, and if it falls apart, I just stare at it.
SPEAKER_05For native language speakers, we don't know the correct way to pronounce it because we didn't we didn't study that, we didn't study the position where you should put your tongues and then your the structure. What? Okay, wait, you did but everybody think about the way you study English. Yeah. Um you just learn by mimicking everything you heard.
SPEAKER_07We did we were taught sounds extensively. Yeah. Really? Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_05Um I might be wrong, but it's not in my memory. No, no, no. Well, we're also different generations. So we're the same. I still listen to tape and then recordings, so we're the same generation.
unknownOkay.
SPEAKER_07No, but even my husband, who's only eight years younger than me, he has a very different educational experience. So I, in my generation, in the US, on the East Coast, they taught sounds very explicitly. We had posters, we would practice individual sounds and then words and then stuff. Yeah. We would look stuff up in dictionaries and read the phonetics.
SPEAKER_06Wow.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, so we were taught that. We were also taught grammar. We used to have to circle, underline, like really identify the parts of speech. His generation didn't do it. So there even in the US.
SPEAKER_05Well he speaks proper English and you find he's from Idaho.
SPEAKER_07Ah, I get that. Proper, define proper. We both we both can speak proper English when we want to, but we had a very different experience learning English in the US. I see. Yeah.
SPEAKER_05Same. Similar uh applies to Chinese and if we are not if for for people who are not taught in the strict way to pronounce, but we still uh pronounce correctly, correctly. Right. And um people understand each other, right? We wouldn't think, oh, you're not a native speaker. Um why? Even though people speak different uh uh well uh the same word with different variation because uh people from the same place they would group things that sound similar. In machine learning we said categorization, it's a categorization, you have a range, you have a huge sample, and you categorize them as you label those as the same category. Right. So if you as long as you do not lie outside of that range, you're within the correct zone. Sure. And so for you, I would say, because everybody speaks slightly different, um, you just pick the one you appreciate the most or uh pick the group of people, a group of pronouncing because people from Shanghai and people from the northern area, every everyone's so different, so different. Yeah, so you just pick the one you appreciate the most and then mimic them. Yeah, it doesn't mean you pronounce wrong if you pick another group.
SPEAKER_07Agreed, agreed, agreed. But for but for months I was saying, because it's W O in pinion, I was saying whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. And very in the front of my mouth. Whoa, whoa, whoa. And there were and people were like, really, huh? And then I realized I didn't even need to use it most of the time.
SPEAKER_06Uh-huh.
SPEAKER_07So then I just stopped using the word because a lot of times you can pro job, so it's no big deal. So anyway, that's just one one word. So I I appreciate you coming on and being uncomfortable during this whole thing.
SPEAKER_05I don't want you to be. Oh, uh another thing uh to mention is uh when you pronounce when you learn a uh a a language, uh a a foreign language, you will usually learn it based on what um you've learned before. Imagine learning we use is we'll use transfer learning, use your past experience, like uh you have a wow sound in English, then you probably when you hear people in Chinese say woo, you will say or you will relate that pronunciation to something you've learned, but uh probably you don't have that word or alternative like wah. I agree in English, but you would find something similar enough to replace that. That's where the problem or you I agree, I agree.
SPEAKER_07I think British English has more of a wa than we do in American English. I think we're much more in the front on that because they do the like the R, you know, the uh what's it called? The rhotic R. They would drop that and they'd be like wah, wah, wah. They have more of that. I can't do it right because I can't do a British accent to save my life. But they have much more of the that that A that almost sounds like R. They have that, and that's kind of a little deeper. But in American English we don't, and we have we we pronounce, over pronounce sometimes the R, so it's it's a little tricky. But that was just one example of just yeah, on some of the sounds that we don't have, it's it's tricky, but just in general, it's yeah.
SPEAKER_05So for me, a lot of uh people gave me advice as saying do not stick to the correct pronunciation because for me when I was learning German and people said people think Germany they speak differently, you don't have to stick to the uh yeah, and they said even German, a lot of them couldn't pronounce it. It's so true, it's so true. They said just uh you don't have to uh spend hours and hours. Um it depends on the people, but they said you don't have to stick to the pronunciation class for like 18 hours. Oh my gosh, and the position and everything, yeah. Just keep on mimicking and find um the difference, and then every time you mimic them, yeah, you become a step closer, and then the more you mimic, the better you become, or the closer you become to the one that you appreciate.
SPEAKER_07Exactly. And I think that's one of the disservices that's done in classes in China that where people are teaching foreigners Mandarin Chinese, is they spend so much time on the tones at first. And it's like I think a good like maybe a week would be good. So you get an idea of the tones, you start to hear the differences a little bit, but then you need vocabulary. You just need a ton of vocabulary, a ton of writing, you need to get in there and you need to get some actual language. But they spend so much time on getting the tones perfect. And I've had so many people tell me when in doubt, speak fast, use third tone. Because the tones change when you put other things next to it sometimes. So it's like you think you know it perfectly one individually, and it's with something else and it changes, and you're supposed to remember that. Nobody learns that and even in the first language. Yeah, so it's it's no so speaking quickly is one of the things that I adopted.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, yeah, yeah. When people ask me how to learn German, what are some listening resources? I said anything except for the slow German. Yeah. Did I listen to the slow ones? Well, it might apply for some, but no, definitely.
SPEAKER_07My my uh expat friends in Germany tell me that Germans dub everything in German on TV and in movies. So there must be a lot of resources to hear German. Yeah, yeah. That's brilliant. That might actually come in handy. I am kinda jinx myself now, but I'm looking for work in Germany, and I'm really hoping that I have to learn German soon. So we'll see, we'll see what happens with that.
SPEAKER_05I don't care.
SPEAKER_07I don't care. Honestly, I'm just I'm ready, I'm ready for a new, I'm ready for my first case language. Although, I studied German in high school. But by studied, I mean I went to the class and I hated the book. So I barely passed the class and I don't I didn't have a love affair with words yet. So it was it was a very different, very different experience. Am I a German teacher in high school? How should I put this? I don't think she liked people. Yeah, so it kind of made a big dent on me. But everybody has their own reasons why they do things. So do you what languages do you think in? Like, okay, it sounds like when you're doing your sound research, you're thinking in English, I think, right? Yeah. When do you when you're having like when you're having an emotional moment? Are you thinking in Mandarin or Shanghai's or when I'm thinking I'm thinking I'm not using any language? You're not using any language. No, I don't think so.
SPEAKER_05Because thoughts are really, really abstract and personal. And I don't think um words or any languages versatile enough to replicate people's thoughts. Languages are created to deliver your thoughts, but those are created. Think about the possibilities in life. There's way more possibilities, way more things. There are than languages, vocabularies. There are. Even though it is a accumulated things, it's inherited for from thousands of years ago, but still, life is way more complicated.
SPEAKER_07The problem, PB, is that I see language as I'm thinking it.
SPEAKER_05Uh-huh.
SPEAKER_07And because I'm such a visual person.
SPEAKER_05Uh-huh.
SPEAKER_07And so for me, if I'm thinking something, I'm kind of like reading it on a page in my mind.
SPEAKER_05I see.
SPEAKER_07It's very, very strange. I don't know if there's even a word for that. But so for me, it sounds very cool to experience a of an emotion without or a thought without there being a word attached to it. That sounds cool.
SPEAKER_05I'm not a hundred percent sure because probably when I'm thinking deeply, I'm not aware of. What I was doing is my flatmates, they usually pointed out, Baby, why are you talking to yourself in English? There's also how easy to see a Chinese talking to yourself in English, unconsciously. And but still I talk to myself in Chinese sometimes. Sure. I'm pretty sure. Yeah. Yeah. That's what my parents told me I'm not aware of that at all. That's so funny. That's so funny. And sometimes I would use German.
SPEAKER_07I stopped at HSK 3. There's like six levels of HSK test, right? To the China formal Chinese language test. I stopped at three, but I barely passed it. So I'm probably like a strong HSK 2, which basically means I can read 300 words, which is really a little. But in sentences, when I was trying to say a full thought to someone, uh because I studied Spanish a little bit, and I more so I used Spanish when I traveled in Latin America and when I dated in Latin America. And so I have an interesting vocabulary in Spanish. So when I'm trying to say something and I don't have the Chinese word for it, Spanish comes in. Because it's not English, it's the other part of my brain. Does that happen to you?
SPEAKER_05Yeah, yeah. Depends on your experience, where you acquire that experience. Yeah. And what s under in what situation you acquire that experience? And you would find the proper or the initial kind of language or vocabularies, regardless of the language you're using.
SPEAKER_07Have you ever studied linguistics? Yeah, or no, but that's always something I wanted to learn. I it feels like you have studied linguistics because you're so not properly, but that was on my list when I was applying for colleges. So what did you spend your undergrad studying? Economics and sociology. Wow.
SPEAKER_05So I'm still a social science person.
SPEAKER_07Barbara, right. And then did you get master's or are you doing masters and PhD together? I did a master's and then PhD. What was your master's in? Oh, electronic engineering. Oh my goodness. Right now. I adore you so much. You make sense to me. Growing up, I was very strong in the arts and music and and and writing, reading, all that kind of stuff. I loved it. Theater, I loved it. But I wanted something challenging. So I just started taking lots of classes at university. Yes. And I fell in love with chemistry, but I couldn't see myself in a lab. And now I know it's much more interactive than that, but I just really couldn't see myself that alone. So I was like, eh. So then I saw the engineers and I saw how interactive engineering was. Oh, but I wasn't good enough in the math to be one engineering. So we had like this engineering, business engineering degree where we did a bunch of different kinds of engineering and a lot of business classes. And so I took that for my undergrad and it was beautiful. Uh but then I started teaching overseas. So my master's, like I have business engineering for my undergrad, teaching English is my master's, and part of a um combination of the two, actually. It was a program that was um teaching English through technology.
SPEAKER_05Wow.
SPEAKER_07So it was like combining the two.
SPEAKER_05It's a beautiful transition.
SPEAKER_07But I didn't finish it.
SPEAKER_05That's probably one of the best of those programs.
SPEAKER_07But I love switching subjects.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, same, same thing.
SPEAKER_07Do you do you learn in these languages?
SPEAKER_05Learn.
SPEAKER_07Because it sounds like you like to explore and you like to learn new things. Yes. Are you doing that in languages other than Chinese and English? Like are you reading things to learn information in German and Finnish?
SPEAKER_05Yeah, I read German and newspapers, and then when I when I was very into philosophy, I did read philosophy books. Really?
SPEAKER_07Wow. Which philosophers did you read? Kant. You read Kant in the original language. That's oh painful. Oh, it's painful in translation too.
SPEAKER_05And my friends told me you'll never get it. Trust me. Stop thinking that.
SPEAKER_07That's why did you pick him of all the philosophers?
SPEAKER_05Oh, that's the course, only the the only course that's offered, and people say the translation is very, very different if you read the English and the German. If you know German, try it once, but the guarantee I wouldn't understand him.
SPEAKER_07But you did. I tried. When you were reading it, did you have like a Chinese or an English translation nearby that you could kind of look at if you got stuck?
SPEAKER_05I had an English version nearby, but I never opened it.
SPEAKER_07Wow. I am tipping my hat to you and I'm not even wearing a hat. And that was a class that you took it for?
SPEAKER_05Yeah. That the TA was very, very frustrated. Because every time I went to the tutorial, I literally turned that into a language class. Yeah. I asked him, oh, uh uh I was using German, but I I asked him, what does that mean? What does this word mean? What's different from the English alternative?
SPEAKER_07Right.
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
SPEAKER_07Although I I had to take a philosophy class from my undergrad, and Kant was one of the people that we studied. Uh-huh. And even in the translation, I still felt like it was partially a language class. Because philosophers, you know, they have to define things and group things and and deeply dig into things. So they're kind of making up words and ideas anyway.
SPEAKER_05And also when I was uh studying um the contemporary music and the contemporary uh like sound music or sound design movement, um the avant-garde ones are mostly in um Germany, either Germany or France. So I had no choice but to read the original German or French transcript. I gave up all the French ones. Great because I don't have any basic kind of background in that. Right. But Ger the for the German ones are really try hard.
SPEAKER_07That's amazing. I don't think we've talked about your learning process because you said you learn languages differently after you arrived in Ireland and stuff. You you learn languages differently than you used to. What is your process? How do you learn these languages?
SPEAKER_05I started from an experiment trying not to translate things. I found translating things probably made it very unefficient. From my childhood, I was taught in a very strict way, so you have to be correct. After I entered college, I found I I I figured out I never I could never finish any reading list, even though the um the highlighted once, because I paid too much attention on the sentence structure and then uh looking at the word I didn't know, because that's the kind of the learning habit I cultivated throughout the year, and I found that really inhibited my ability to acquire knowledge because I read everything in English. I treat those transcripts as a English learning material instead of a textbook or anything um informative.
SPEAKER_07So it's mostly through reading things that you're learning these languages?
SPEAKER_05Reading and listening.
SPEAKER_06Okay.
SPEAKER_05So after that I force myself not to look into the dictionary and then read really, really fast and do not analyze the sentence structure or grammar or anything, just grasp the impression of that. Yeah. Don't don't look into the details of the language.
SPEAKER_07To grasp the impression of that.
SPEAKER_05I I really force myself because I had that ability like for 10 years at least, because that that's something English teacher required required us to do, and I really um grasped the benefit out of that. I always the best uh English uh I I rank really high in my English classic on high because I did that. I read everything in detail. After I entered college, I found, oh wow, no, no, I shouldn't treat English text like that. I should really be tolerant on the English.
SPEAKER_06Yeah.
SPEAKER_05And um, so when I pick up German, I stopped, I kind of stopped going into too much details, and I I didn't take any like English tall. I I started learning German using German only. I don't use any like like what you call them like a language or some. Oh, graded language, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I don't use translation, just force myself to read, and then gradually uh I think the first difficulty you have to tackle is um the barrier in your mind. Think, oh um, I'm I'm reading a new language, uh, it should be slow because I'm very odd. Once you've overcome that set, when you open up, you try all means to understand the meaning. You look at people when they talk to you attentively, yeah. Take wild guess, try to see what they're intending to deliver, then you will understand them. Yeah. Once I get what they mean from a very initial state, then I build my confidence. Yes, I could communicate with them. At least I can understand them even if I can't speak any of their native language. After that, I I force myself to read newspapers, and then I can my ability of guessing the meaning of words become a lot better.
SPEAKER_07Because you started to notice the frequent, the the frequently used words, and so those guys started to help you, yeah.
SPEAKER_05Yes, yes. Um it is a very hard process for me because you have to overwrite your old habit, but you really gain you you you gain the um well you you you gain the feeling of the language and then you can started to speak some of the most frequently used ones, phrases, um, almost naturally, like in native.
SPEAKER_07So you started learning English very young. When you switched and started learning German, was there any one thing that was really hard to to get used to?
SPEAKER_05Just my old habit of going into the details and figuring out why people say it in this way. What's the rule of that? I have to stop asking myself these questions. These are good things I have to stop doing.
SPEAKER_07Yeah.
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
SPEAKER_07Yeah. The why is very hard not to ask. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes. That's not how a language is built.
unknownI know.
SPEAKER_07It's not most languages are not logical. Although I've heard German is more logical than English. But I don't I don't know. It does it feel like it's more logical.
SPEAKER_05I think it's very, very logical.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, I think English has more exceptions than yeah.
SPEAKER_05But now the stage, uh, if uh in the academic English, when we are correcting people's essays and things, um, my advisors always taught me uh the the difference between British English and American English, but when we look into like different uh books and guidance, uh they differentiated the two, but at the same time they said, oh wow, uh in modern American English, people kind of use both in British English right now. They're starting to use some Americanisms. Exactly. A lot of the phrases are ta are acceptable, become acceptable today. So and do we really have to do phrase? Exactly.
SPEAKER_07And oh gosh, who was it? There used to be this terminology of like inner circle, outer circle, an inner circle with the um like the American English, Australian English, British English, all the all the white Englishes were inside, and then everybody else, like Indian and uh and Singapore, Malaysia, all of those people would be like on the outside. It's like, why why are we putting this us them thing with the language? If people use the language, they use the language and they are included in people that use the language. Yeah.
SPEAKER_05It's a dynamic thing.
SPEAKER_07So saying there's British English and American English leaves out a lot of people that use the language fluently and natively. Like they grow up, that's their main language.
SPEAKER_05And I wouldn't be confident saying my Chinese is correct, because sometimes I just use things in a kind of uh clever way, which is possibly very likely grammatically wrong.
SPEAKER_07Oh, but it's so much fun to play with language that way. Absolutely. Yeah, I make up blends all the time. I'm using that. Oh, my favorite blend in English was from a linguistic one linguist linguistics class I took, where the professor he came in and he decided he wanted to talk about blends that day. And he's like, My favorite one is coffee dance, and it's like confidence and coffee. Wow, the confidence you get from coffee, and I'm like, I love you. You're you're wonderful. This is a class. I spend my entire life making up blends all the time, and I'm like, I get to study this today, yes. No, playing with the language is beautiful. That's what we do as humans. Yes, yes.
SPEAKER_02Good morning, you beautiful ladies and gentlemen. If you're not indifferent to the video games as a medium, as art or just as a way of spending time, you probably know how good games are a rare commodity lately. I noticed it too. And here in Duckin Games Podcast, we try to dig deeper into the understanding of video game design so that more people will know about good and bad game design practices. And maybe one day there will be more good games because someone knew those practices. Or at the very least, people will stop spending hard-earned money on bad games. So, see you around, guys.
SPEAKER_07So, well, okay, as you've been learning different languages, do you feel like you've lost any of the other languages you knew better?
SPEAKER_05Yeah, um, my parents put it out in w whenever I write everything in Chinese, they said, Oh, if they can tell my sentence structures sounds a bit awkward. Really? It's not as natural as if it put them in English. Right. A lot of the structures that you said, it's very English structured.
SPEAKER_07Oh so your your your grammatical structure has you're you're writing in Chinese, but you're doing it with like English grammar. Kind of. Yeah.
SPEAKER_05My mom she can tell that. Yeah. Still feel um people understand. Yeah.
SPEAKER_07Okay, because both, and keep in mind I'm at a very low level in Chinese, but both kind of have subject-verb-object construction. Kind of.
SPEAKER_05Do you have a lot of clauses in in English in Chinese? I haven't studied Chinese grammar very well. Um, don't know if we have clauses. Yeah, possibly we do, but in an English way. So I can put a long, long sentence in English, but in Chinese probably rather just cut them out into split them into different small sentences. That makes sense. Yeah. I wouldn't use a lot of which that of which. That's true. Yeah.
SPEAKER_07Although I'm glad you brought up punctuation. I have issues with Chinese punctuation. Partly because punctuation is overly complicated in English, but I do want more commas in sentences in Chinese. Mostly because there's no spaces.
SPEAKER_05Exactly. That's a hard thing because you can't tell which one, which character belongs to, which is the lines as a word.
SPEAKER_07Guess where the words are?
SPEAKER_05I don't know where the words are.
SPEAKER_07It's like first you find the words, then you find the phrases or the part, the chunks that go together, the lexical chunks, and you're like, okay, so those go together, and that goes, and then you've got a period. The only thing I say is a period most of the time. I'm like, okay, that sentence is over, but look at all that stuff in that sentence.
SPEAKER_05But that comes very handy when you read pinyin, I think. They would group things together.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, but nobody reads pinyon.
SPEAKER_05Really?
SPEAKER_07I mean, do they? Do you ever read in pinion?
SPEAKER_05When I was very young, yes.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, but that's only to learn the language. You don't stay in that interlanguage or yeah, but if you walk on the street, the the the signs and the labels should group everything, right? They're in pinyon with no accents. There's no tones on the streets. Shanghai, why? Actually, it's it's all of China, it's not just in Shanghai. Okay, China, why? Probably it looks better without all of the new intonations. With all of the there's five tones. Without knowing the right tone. I mean, again, talk fast and use third tone, you'll be okay. Okay, fine, but what? There's no tone. So it's kind of in pinion, but kind of not because without the tone. It's yeah, it's it's kind of romanized for people who aren't going to use the language.
SPEAKER_05They're way more complicated.
SPEAKER_07Way more complicated.
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
SPEAKER_07I don't know anything about Finnish punctuation or no, I'm not at that stage yet. Okay. They do have quite long words, I've heard. Oh yeah. Same as German. That's true. Yeah. Agglomerative language, is that what they are? They like put more things on the end of the word to think so. Yeah, Turkish is like that too. Some of the words are like this long.
SPEAKER_05Very, very logical.
SPEAKER_07Very, very logical. Italian, why Italian? Just lots of friends are Italian recently. That's right, because you haven't been to Italy yet. Not yet. Oh my gosh, you're gonna love it. You're going to love it.
SPEAKER_05Um and I've learned a lot of it in Latin previously, so probably picking up Italian wouldn't be that hard.
SPEAKER_07It won't be. But it's still a bit hard. Yeah, and there there's definitely, oh my gosh, there's definitely different dialects and different speeds of speaking it, depending on where you go. Sure, you have wait, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, eight languages at your disposal. Do you want to learn any more in the future?
SPEAKER_05Um, we don't want to master the one I've not been learning at the moment.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, I think that makes sense. That's crazy. Yeah.
SPEAKER_05Uh and tell me, I just picked it up recently. So let's finish.
SPEAKER_07We talked a little bit about fluency before and if you're uncomfortable in a language. How do you know when you get to fluency? What does that feel like? What does that sound like for you? Because it's a very personal thing.
SPEAKER_05I don't really know actually, because I still I I feel sorry. I feel I still there's still a lack of confidence when I'm presenting paper and when I'm writing academic things and whenever I want to write something, do some writing, proper writings in another French language. My supervisor is very um old school. I I I love him. I really love him, but he's really really old school professor. He taught me Vivi, you have to really articulate uh your thoughts better. I have confidence in you, but it takes time, so you still have room to improve. He corrected a lot of my grammar mistakes and the expressions as well. So um now I've become kind of previously I was very anxious. I really want to rush and then uh force myself to I'm I'm active I'm actively seeking ways to improve my language skills and when I can actually reach the stage of freedom, but right now I'm just um I don't know, take time and then really pay attention to a piece of writing I really really like and then learn a little bit of from that, and then probably when I encounter another one, I appreciate and learn a little bit from that. If you bec uh are more tolerant, if you love yourself better, then everything becomes better. If you force yourself, I have to reach that stage at some time, you're really killing yourself.
SPEAKER_07You do, yeah. Because the stress just blocks out all learning completely, yeah.
SPEAKER_05And the fluency, spoken ones, uh it really depends on what I'm talking about and whom I'm talking to. Um, I can talk to you because you made me at least, you made me feel really, really comfortable, but um, I still get very nervous and I found it hard to articulate myself in very formal settings. Yeah, I can't uh I don't know, use a proper think of a proper word. It really depends on person.
SPEAKER_07So we really have chemistry here. Yes, we do. Because you you seem so incredibly eloquent and and I can't I can't at all sense any lack of confidence going on in her very often. No, I hear you, oh I hear you. Hey, look, I oh gosh, I grew up with serious language shame. So I grew up with immigrant parents who everybody looked down upon, and they put that condescension on us as kids, and I was very, very sensitive child. I'm still a sensitive person, but I'm not no longer a child. I had that kind of on me, and I was always very self-conscious because they already thought less of me because of my parents, which was ridiculous. So anything I was going to say, they were going to critique more. So I was very, very self-conscious, and I initially went into books as an escape, but then I loved them. And I was like, I'm I don't care why. I'm a book person. I love books, I love learning, I love reading, I love the different worlds that are in them, people's ideas, I love them. But initially it was because I couldn't communicate in other ways, and that's kind of why I started writing and all this kind of stuff. So I grew up incredibly shy. Incredibly unable to speak. When we had to do speeches in school, I would be physically ill. Like that's it's just yeah. It was actually teaching that helped me get over that and realize how many mistakes most people made, and it just didn't matter. Yeah. But I was an awful, awful, awful speaker the vast majority of my life. In in the only language that I had, yeah. So it's just yeah, it's all about practice. Yeah. That's it. It's just using it constantly and not being, like you said, not being like caught up on perfect.
SPEAKER_05Right. Yeah.
SPEAKER_07Because that just doesn't exist.
SPEAKER_05I don't know, you just brought it in by yourself, and it's not even logical.
SPEAKER_07And nobody has it. Nobody. I love when you see like bloopers on TV or and like in podcasts, some people put bloopers where it's like the mistakes, and you hear these very eloquent people, and they're like and they say things really goofy, and you're like, they made a mistake too. And it makes me feel so good because it's like, yeah, everybody makes mistakes. We're just again, like you said, language is such a difficult representation of what we're thinking. Right, yeah. And so like there's all this in here in our brains, and it has to come through this tiny little funnel.
SPEAKER_05Right.
SPEAKER_07And it's so difficult.
SPEAKER_05Language is a very dynamic and organic thing. Um, when I was studying in Ireland, I found a lot of brilliant, talented Italian researcher, French researcher that whose first language is not English, but everybody has to uh discuss everything in English. If you just focus on the fluency of language, it'll block you out. You'll become blinded. Their proficiency will be blocked if you focus on the language too much.
SPEAKER_07You really have to pick. Do we want to keep the conversation going or do we want to point out every mistake and forget what we're talking about?
SPEAKER_05Exactly, yeah. And in a lot of TV series, they uh people, a lot of the directors, they uh intentionally hire or recruit actors or actresses who can do a certain accent, a German accent or a French accent, because they found it interesting or sexy. They want people to have those, yeah, an authentic kind of way of expression. They want the multicultural element within their prop production.
SPEAKER_07That's a really good point. So we're comfortable with other languages, but we're not comfortable with other versions of our own language. That's crazy. Why are we like this? Yeah, because we do look upon certain language people who have certain accents as being sexier or being stricter or being more mysterious, or yeah. But yeah, so it's it's kind of funny. But within the language, we want one standard, but nobody speaks that standard. We're crazy, crazy human beings.
SPEAKER_05That's read that standard to robotics. Exactly. I can easily synthesize any standardize.
SPEAKER_07Yeah. Oh, but that's it. We want that standard, but when it's coming from an actual robot, we're offended that they're speaking our language, and we're like, I don't want a robot to take care of me. Why not? If they do it better without X, Y, and Z, then who cares? Like, yeah. We're it's complicated. It's so complicated. Okay, I think I knew the answer to this, and I think the listeners probably know anyway. But I'll ask, what is your favorite part of languages? What about languages do you like the most? Yeah. How is sound? I knew it. I knew it. Didn't you know that? I know.
SPEAKER_05Did you get it right?
SPEAKER_07It's like, it's like, what, Stephanie, did you not hear the other hour of the conversation? I'm just checking, because sometimes it could be, you know, there could be two. There could be two. Okay, and the flip of that, what's your least favorite part of languages?
SPEAKER_05Personally, writing. I found we are completely opposite. I really, really love writing. Yeah. But I found writing very painful for me. Because I have to pay more attention to the grammar and things. There are different ways of writing, but I'm very strict to myself.
SPEAKER_06Yeah.
SPEAKER_05So uh when I'm when it comes to writing, I wouldn't be very fluent. I would be slower. So I think a lot more.
SPEAKER_07And by writing, do you mean writing by hand? Typing or both?
SPEAKER_05Either.
SPEAKER_07Oh wow. Okay.
SPEAKER_05I simply want um like probably because I was staying academic for too long. Yeah. I really like the flow of my mind. I used to just rent everything out. But my supervisor would always pick up things wanting to correct.
SPEAKER_07Oh sure. But that's what writing I mean that's the advantage of writing, is you get to go back, you get to get your ideas out and then go back and make them pretty.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, so when it comes to writing, I would just have to put higher standard and a stricter requirement. So for me, writing is more mentally oh well the mental load is heavier for me.
SPEAKER_07That makes sense. Even in Chinese. Yeah. Wow. Okay, because I was thinking good.
SPEAKER_05It's not only delivering an idea because it's something you will retain and then pro probably people will read it. So you really have to think about the audience and then you'll rephrase things and then just try to make their life easier. If I speak or talk, then I just wow, whatever. Yeah.
SPEAKER_07It is easier to see mistakes or to see things that don't connect when it's in written form. It's easier to find those holes in in language and it's in that form. Yeah, if it's a personal diary, it's fine.
SPEAKER_05If it's something that I mm would make public, then I spend a lot more effort.
SPEAKER_07Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I can s I can see that. I can see that. Because I I asked you if about handwriting versus typing, because as a non-native speaker of or non-native writer of Chinese, I I can type basic stuff if I know the word with using the pinion input. But handwriting-wise, I know I'm never gonna spend that time. I can do some things and I make my flash you can see some flashcards behind you. Like I make the flashcards, but generally speaking, I don't have the time left in my life to write a hundred times for each character, you know, a few times a week, that kind of thing. I just priorities, blah blah blah. I'm old.
SPEAKER_05You can use voice to text, you can just talk to your phone and then let it transcribe and oh no no, I actually like typing it.
SPEAKER_07I I like the time I I think it's the when I could actually type it out in in pinion and pick the character and see that I did that, that was a big day for me. Wow. I was like, that's amazing, because that that looks like that looks like kind of like coding to me. That that looked like I okay, I'm I'm good. It felt it feels nice to be able to do that. Again, 300, 400 words, so that's very limited, but it feels fun to do that. I like writing in that way.
SPEAKER_05When I was learning English, I really like writing tycoons in English, even though I got very limited vocabulary. Wow. Just love playing around with words and don't pay attention to the grammar because I just want it to sound beautiful.
SPEAKER_07So on the podcast, we have two giant populations of people. People that grew up with English and learned Mandarin Chinese, and people that grew up with Mandarin Chinese and learned other languages. Keeping both of those populations in mind, what other questions should I ask people? What's missing? What do you want to know from them, from future guests?
SPEAKER_05Was there a way of improving their language when it gets to the stage they couldn't improve from taking a proper class?
SPEAKER_07That is the million dollar question. It's so hard. Yes. Yeah.
SPEAKER_05I always felt like I'm uh the bottleneck of my uh language study. I don't know because I I've done all the courses I can do and still my supervisor pointed out a lot of mistakes I made, or I still uh my articulation or the expression is not the most efficient, or people still get confused of what I said. So um how should I improve? If I always ask my friend, a native speaker, oh could you correct my C V could you look through my 30-page essay, which comes out every couple of months, I feel like, well, I'm just making use of my friends, I'm not gonna do that.
SPEAKER_07The language learning answer is I haven't gotten there yet. The teacher answer, the the former teacher answer is you've kind of already answered it a little bit, is looking at similar things. If you're talking about writing a CV, looking at a lot of CVs. If you're talking about like the essays you're writing, reading a lot of those. And if somebody, like if your professor points out things that you are doing, pick one thing that you're doing a lot that's wrong, one thing that you're doing repeatedly, and go and look for that in like things and see how they're doing it. And read a ton of those, and then very slowly incorporate that into your writing. But it takes a lot of time. The third answer is to have an editor of some sort, is to have like a private tutor or a language exchange partner, which is really hard because most of those don't aren't very focused. Language exchanges are very slippery, right? Exactly. Yeah, so if you can afford it, a tutor if the school that you're at has like language exchanges, that might be more direct, more less slippery of a way.
SPEAKER_05Um right now at this stage, your requirement is really, really high. Somebody has to be able to tell where you come from, and you could you just can't stop asking them why. Why? And but some of the questions they couldn't explain why. But those people they should be able to tell you're coming from a background who's learned English grammar. Right. So I if I'm able to explain everything within the system you're familiar with, then they will adopt that system. If not, they just ask you, oh well, just remember that. But I don't like the answer, just remember it.
SPEAKER_07Because but sometimes there isn't a reason why. There are new ones that's the thing, that the language evolved because of mistakes, because uh English had a lot of immigrants coming into the language using the language, and as the children would misuse the language, those mistakes would work their way into the language, and now they're rules, and so they seem illogical because they are illogical, but that's the way they are, yeah.
SPEAKER_05So if a person who knows that history can explain everything well, then probably will be more convinced. But really, I should really tackle my own barrier of asking deeply why.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, well, I want to know the same thing about Chinese. The phu, the the one that looks like a big B.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_07I it doesn't seem to do anything. It was one of the first questions I had, and I still going back to my old videos, I don't understand why it's there. It's not adding sound-wise most of the time. It doesn't add meaning. I know it's generally a more formal or historical word, I think. But it doesn't, like, why is that there? And I still want to know why. But I don't know if anybody knows the answer. Do you know the answer to that?
SPEAKER_05Uh talk about that after.
SPEAKER_07No!
SPEAKER_05No, is it too I wanna I want to give you a responsible answer because I know it's a good one.
SPEAKER_07See? And that's and but you know when to use it, you know how to read it. It doesn't bother you that it exists. It is a thorn in my side.
SPEAKER_06I would I would say so.
SPEAKER_07I would get caught up on, and I want to know why, I want to know why. Not enough to spend years researching online or keep asking people because I stopped asking because most people said, I don't know, I just use it. And that's part of, yeah. Yeah, it's a hard answer to take though, is it just is.
SPEAKER_05Probably the first step is to accept there's difference and then there's situations that wouldn't give you a correct answer.
SPEAKER_07Exactly. Yeah, yeah, but it's really difficult. When you want to use the language in a way where people don't get distracted by how you're using it, you want them to understand your ideas.
SPEAKER_06Right.
SPEAKER_07It's hard not to want to understand everything that you're using.
SPEAKER_05If we talk to people genuinely, if another person is a genuine person as well, that language isn't a barrier at all.
SPEAKER_07For most people. Yes. There are some people where it is. Some people will be mean about language. And I want to tell them something I can't do right now. I don't want to offend Phoebe, not because I don't curse on the podcast. Those people make me very angry because it's like communication is the point. Right, right. And snobbery in language in language usage is ridiculous. Yeah.
SPEAKER_05Ridiculous. Mimicking language or uh getting proficiency in one language simply because I want to show respect. But it's not my ultimate goal. The goal is to deliver what I want. Thank you. Exactly. Contribute to a wider society. Not the native English speaker only wider society.
SPEAKER_07Exactly. Well, and native English speaker is such a weird term. It's like, okay, we grew up with it. There are a lot of native English speakers who were not skillful using the language. It's not a goal. I can I can turn on YouTube right now and show you a lot of native English speakers that you do not want to sound like. There's a lot of non-skillful people. Just because you grew up with a language doesn't mean you're good at using it. So yeah, so the long answer is constantly reading and comparing it to what how you're using it. And it takes a lot of time. Once you reach it, reach that high level that you're at, getting better is really intense and very time consuming. Yeah. Yeah. Cool, because okay, the universities I taught at in the US, there were writing centers. There was one for the undergraduates and one for the graduate students. Does your university have any centers like that?
SPEAKER_05Um no, not exactly in the university I went to. Okay. Um, but in my current research center, they provide services similar. Okay. That's something I've been actively seeking throughout the years. Yeah. I just couldn't find enough support. Right. Every need somebody who knows language well. But it's really, really hard for foreign students.
SPEAKER_07It is, it is. At the last university I went to, we had tutors specifically for second language learners in the graduate program.
SPEAKER_05We we only have a volunteer, either student or faculty members, to provide some of their like just to just as a volunteer give you some comments that they wouldn't spend time doing or details, give you help or um language help. This is really, really time consuming. When I'm correcting people's writing in Chinese, their C V and their like cover letter, the sentences just sound wrong, wrong. And I want to correct it. There are numerous ways I can correct. Not correct, but I would say rephrase it. I couldn't do that over email. I have to really sit down if I'm responsible enough. I have to sit down asking what you want to emphasize on and where you're coming from, then I would find a proper sentence or a paraphrase for that for all the sentences or expressions that sounds not natural. Or you have to sit down. If you just pinpoint the the weird ones and then just replace it, it's not very responsible, but it takes so much time and effort.
SPEAKER_07It's incredibly time consuming. Yeah. Yeah. I'm surprised they don't have hired graduate students to do that. Like for ours, we were in the English department. Yeah. And so they had varying levels of of tutoring available where they paid us to go and do these things. But maybe it's something you can suggest to them.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, possibly.
SPEAKER_07But I'm actually looking up online one of the women I worked for, Elena Cotes, she had um she had a few different computer programs, and that's not the right word, but she had a few different programs to identify. Have you heard of like moves and steps within within academic writing? Like there's there's certain transitions in academic papers that you have, like you're supposed to do the year introduction here. Then you have to state your arguments. Yeah, your arguments, and then you have to you have to build on somebody else's research. So you have to do your lit review here, and then you have to do this part here, this part here. At the end, you have to say what's wrong with your study.
SPEAKER_06Yeah.
SPEAKER_07You know, you have to just fess up to your mistakes, and and so there's those things, but there's moves, there's certain elements and language that are called moves and steps that you have to do to maneuver from one part to another. And so she she did a program that basically color codes these different ones. And part of it used to, it's been a couple of years now, but part of it used to be available online where you could put your text in there and it would sort it out and kind of tell you what's missing, what has too much of it, kind of thing. I'm gonna hunt for it and and send it. If it's still available online, I'll send it to you. But it was a really cool, very, very cool thing that she did. I loved looking at that. I like using language, but I also like seeing like the the similarities within the genre. Yeah. And and I think that's I think that's fun.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, people have different takes on l languages. A lot of my colleagues right now, because we are all engineers and scientists, they just want to use the language good enough to deliver the thoughts and the scientific findings to make the paper efficient. Yeah. And my my goal always, I always want to write something um functional or informative, at the same time pleasing to read. Right.
SPEAKER_07That that's my goal. What was really fun is the department we were in because it was like part English language teaching, or it wasn't English language teaching, it was part language teaching, part technology. Yeah, is we were reading second language acquisition-ish kind of paper, academic papers, and then we were reading computer science papers. Oh my god, those were so much fun! Like the the language ones were very high pollutant, they were very, you know, brain scratchy and very formal. And then the computer science ones, especially the machine learning ones and those kinds of things, which I did a little bit of and not really that much, they were delightful. People had a sense of humor, they were shorter, they were to the point, they were clear. I was like, can we have more of these? Am I in the wrong department? Man, they were so great. They're yeah. So the difference between the two is huge. Yes. Yeah. So which what uh of the papers that you need to write, what's the feel of those papers? What is the what are the characteristics of that?
SPEAKER_05I would personally prefer the second one.
SPEAKER_07Yeah.
SPEAKER_05But I think currently, the team I'm working at would look for the first one.
SPEAKER_07Ah, more formal. Yeah, more traditional, I could yeah. That is the majority. But oh my gosh, the other one was so. I've never seen objective from layer scientists.
SPEAKER_05Yeah. But I at the same time really appreciate the very delightful and clever paper uh written by general scientists for the lay audience. That's that's something it was awesome. That's something you that's something will make you feel happy because you really popularly uh popularize your own research to wider public.
SPEAKER_07Oh sorry, let me clarify. That wasn't for a popular audience, it was still in academia. But still it brings But it was a different department, it was more computer science. Yeah, no, it was and it was more succinct instead of it being 15-20 pages long, yeah, and really having to dig for the main information because they don't kind of overly formally write, it was very succinct. Yeah, and there were more charts and graphs and pictures and things to explain stuff, and they and then there was just thoughts, thought experiments. It was actual data. And yeah, it was very, very different. I'm trying to think of what what part of computer science that was, and I do not I can't remember. I blocked it all out. It's quite a while ago, but it was definitely something, it was language related, it was probably natural language processing-ish stuff within computer science. Yeah, yeah, because that's what we were developing. We were doing. Yeah. We were giving a test on one thing, but we were really researching their language as they were writing stuff. It's like, oh, this isn't manipulative at all. But they got, you know, research studies, people get certain I think I think I think they got something from I don't remember. Blah blah blah. It's like a lifetime ago. But anyway, okay, so your question, let me read your question back to you. See if I got it how you meant it. What's your way of improving life? When you've reached the top level of classes available. Part of. Part of? Okay, what's missing?
SPEAKER_05How long would it take?
SPEAKER_07Forever. Sorry. I'm sorry, Discord. I know. Not for me because you know, I I already know it's gonna take the rest of my life to get a second language. One of the gentlemen that came on here, he's an American man who's been studying Mandarin Chinese, been studying, he's been using it for 25 years. And he said he knew in the first couple of years that it was a marriage. He had to commit. He's like, I'm not letting I'm not stopping. He's like, I'm just gonna go. Every week he has his online tutoring session, no matter where he is in the world, and he travels a lot. He was working in Shanghai in a corporate environment in Chinese. He writes all the time in Chinese, he speaks, he uses Chung Yu's, I mean he's he's got well, but so he's got a high level of language, but he says he still feels like he has 20 more years to go, 30 more years to go. So it's like the reading modest well, and I think the more you know about anything, the more you know you don't know. And I think language is also like that.
SPEAKER_05Oh, I now just make me think of two more questions. Go for it. The second one, uh, it's related to my own experience. I want to ask some other people about on in what situation would your fluency change? Because I I really actually imagined when I'm facing you, I can speak everything fluently, wouldn't think about the mistakes I would make and the non-proper usage of word. Um it's not a concern at all. But in some other situations, I would just stop and then say sorry to the audience. Sorry, I can't pick up a word and blah blah blah. That times happened. A lot of times it happened. So I'm curious if any anybody else would have.
SPEAKER_07That's an amazing question. I'm really surprised that nobody's added that before now. Wow.
SPEAKER_05Or it could be my own.
SPEAKER_07No serious no no no, that's a really, really interesting question.
SPEAKER_05I just the fluency fluctuates.
SPEAKER_07It does. Yeah. Yeah. Does it fluctuate in your first languages too? Or just in the first, yeah. Yes, yeah.
SPEAKER_05Chinese, I my my Chinese deteriorate it a little a lot of times. Yeah. Yeah. Back very quickly, but just depends on the situation.
SPEAKER_07And if I'm not, like if I'm just by myself for a while and then I'm talking to someone, it'll take me a little while to kind of warm up language-wise, also. So even just in that situation. But okay, so I wrote down Does your level of fluency change in different situations?
unknownYes.
SPEAKER_07Okay. Listeners, if you have any questions that you want me to add to the question list, please feel free to contact me, stepfuccio at gmail.com. My information's in the show notes.
SPEAKER_05Do people think achieving fluency in spoken language is very important? Because I felt a lot of people if it a lot of people felt really happy without uh investing a lot of time around languages. They live happily in another country. As long as they understand what the others are talking about, they're happy about their language skills, care, have learned how the vocabularies, the the volume of their vocabularies that don't really care as long as people understand each other. Even if they permanently switch to another country. Right. They still live happily.
SPEAKER_07So is it about knowing other languages or is it about speaking versus writing or reading or I would say well a lot of people study English until the stage of good enough, like 3,000 words of vocabulary.
SPEAKER_05If they can live there without problem, it's fine. Then they will cease taking classes and paying attention to all the grammar or learning new vocabularies. They don't want to beautify things. Right, right, right. If they can explain everything in four sentences, they don't want to shrink it down to one sentence or use a clever word or an exact word that describes what they uh So is it fluency or is it um beautification?
SPEAKER_07Because there's it feels like there's two big parts to that question. It feels like there's a part about language curiosity in general, and then it feels like there's a part about s language skills.
SPEAKER_05I would say it's more about language curiosity. Curiosity, okay. Yeah. For daily life, language skills is like, I don't know, it's a necessity. But beyond that, would people pursue a higher level of language?
SPEAKER_07Because the people that I'm going to be interviewing are interested in languages. They wouldn't be in front of me if they weren't. So do you want to know why they're interested? Why they want to keep working on it? I think so. Okay.
SPEAKER_05Why do people pursue a higher language proficiency when they got the basics?
SPEAKER_07You are hired as my question writer. Well, oh my gosh. Seriously, PB, you've given me a lot to think about, and I'm sure a lot for the listeners to think about.
SPEAKER_03Ain't it sad that you've never seen just how beautiful life can be?
unknownIn fact, if I had to make a call, I'd say you never seen yourself at all.
SPEAKER_03Just a flaw here and a flaw there when you're standing in your underwear. Confidence has always been free. But I can see you alone in a room. Wearing nothing but some sweet perfume. That's why I'm here if you don't choose to lose. See your stuff through my eyes, you paid your dues. Say goodbye, you'll buy the blues.
unknownFrom the shackles of the bourgeoisie. And as a working man, I have to propose.
SPEAKER_03You leave the printing of your pretty clothes. That's why I'm here if you still choose to lose. See yourself through my eyes, you pay your dues. Say goodbye to your body blues. I'm just a kind of steward of a work of all. Say goodbye to your body blues. Your body blues, yeah. Your vibe, your body, your blue, your body, your body.
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