Daily Dose of English 102
Pros and Cons
Daily Dose of English 102
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about pros and cons. Pros and cons. What are some weird words, right? So pros and cons, well, really the word pro and the word con, don't really exist outside of this phrase. There are a couple of words that have very specific use cases and collocations and they almost always come together or are assumed to come together. Often we will talk about specific prose but it's referring to this phrase. And I have no idea where it comes from, because pro isn't a word in and of itself. We just know what it is because of pro and con. When I think of where it might come from, all that comes to mind is in some sort of democratic process in voting. Some people are pro, and like, no, not really. That's yay or nay is how they vote. But, so yeah, I actually have no idea where these words come from and they mean the reason something is good and the reason something is bad. So the pros are the things that are good for something and the cons are a reason that something might be bad. everything might have pros or cons or and maybe possibly they could have pros and cons they very likely do and whenever you're thinking about doing something especially making a big decision you typically want to go over the pros and cons and it's a useful tool to think about when you're making a decision like that. And then also we do a version of that sort of naturally in our minds in order to make decisions as creatures. We think, okay, what's good about this? What's bad about this? We need to make our decision from that. So having explained the word and not knowing where it comes from, let's talk a little bit about it. So when you weigh the pros and cons, which is what we say, when you weigh the pros and cons of something, you typically go through a list, a mental list, or you write down a real list and you think about reasons why something is good. So for example, um, let's, let's say that you want to go out to pizza tonight and there's a pizza restaurant that you really like, but you're not really sure if you should go and you want to make a decision. And so you go to make a list of pros. Some pros are that it's really good. Um, you support the local pizza business that you want to, um, support because it's really good. Uh, what other pros it's, um, I already said it's delicious, so I can't say that one again. Other pros for going out to dinner might be going on a walk, getting outside of your apartment, things like that. Those are the pros, good things that you are trying to do. And then the cons might be, oh, it's kind of expensive. It's not very healthy. It takes more time than doing something else. This is not a great example for tons of pros and cons, but I think you get the general idea where you're thinking about the things that are good about doing something and the things that are maybe a little bit negative. The past couple of days we've actually been talking about things that made me think of this episode. So the first one is making a podcast like this or a channel like I have with Ben's Language Lab is there's many pros but there are also many cons because there's great things about doing this and there's also definitely some cons. Some pros for making a comprehensible input channel are definitely that it's rewarding. It's nice to do something like this because you achieve something. So you feel rewarded when you do this thing. So whenever I see comments from you or people watch the videos, I feel good that I'm helping English learners. So that's definitely a pro. Another pro is that you learn some very important skills about maybe just production of content, but then also working with computers and things like that is definitely a pro. You can learn more about yourself. There's a lot of introspection that happens. That's a great word. Introspection is when you look inside yourself in a figurative way, when you sort of ask yourself questions and you learn things about you, who you are. You learn, oh, I like this, I don't like this, this is how I think, this is how I speak. So you learn things about yourself. And that can be quite a pretty good pro for doing something like this. It's also, you are helping other learners, right? I'm sure that you've enjoyed having these podcasts available to listen to. I'm sure that you find them, or I really hope that you find them helpful. And that's a pro. And there's plenty of other pros I'm sure I could think of eventually, but cons are that it's difficult, it takes time, right? So I'm sitting here at 4.30 on a Sunday, and I'm recording an episode. And I'm enjoying it, I'm having a good time, but it's also a thing that's taking my time. And some people maybe don't have a ton of extra time, or they don't want to put their time into this, and so to them, it's a con. For me, it's not really a con. I don't really mind. It's something that I enjoy doing and I like the consistency and what I've learned from doing it and I hope to do it with other things in the future. I don't know if I've said it before, but actually, for me, this is a con, something that's, or sorry, a pro. For me, this is a pro that I'm learning about this process and I'm developing it as I go because my goal is to do this kind of thing, this sort of channel with Nahuatl, which is a native language to Mexico that I'm really interested in learning, but there's not much content on the internet in the language. It's mostly spoken among families or people in the country and so I'd really like to find a way to produce content like this with native speakers so that I can learn it and then also make it available for other people to learn. And so for me, learning about this process is a huge pro. It's something that I've learned a ton about and I feel like when I start that project, I will be able to do it well because I've already learned so much about the process and it's more about implementation rather than trying to figure out how to do it, right? So when you're trying to figure out how to do something, that's a very big and important step of the process, but then once you know what to do and you just have to execute, you just have to do the thing, it's actually quite simple to do many tasks. that might seem difficult, that is. And so, in this case, I will know exactly what to make, what kind of content, what materials to use, what software, what workflows, and I can just find people to do that in the language, and then I can focus on other things. I'm getting off topic now, but yeah, to me, this is all a pro. Going back to yesterday's episode on YouTube, there's definitely pros and cons, and that's kind of what I went over, I think, which is what made me think of this episode. But some pros are that you learned things, there's limitless content available, there's so many resources. It's entertaining, pro, pro, pro, pro, but then cons are that it can be addictive, that you can get sucked in, that you can get false information, that you can be led down the wrong path, that you can, really those are the main ones, but those are pretty big cons. And so if you're trying to make a large decision and you've gone through as many different pros and cons as you can, it's also important to think about the relative importance of each of those. Relative is a great other word and that's when you're talking about two objects or two things in relation to each other. Relativity is when things are relative, they're connected to or measured against each other rather than like in general. So for example, I'm pretty tall. I'm 6'3", which is tall for a person. And so if I stand next to somebody who's 5'4", or something, they might look up at me and go, wow, you're really tall. They're not talking about tall in general, because a building is 100 times my size, like way, way taller than I am. A tree is way taller than I am. There's so many things that are taller than me. But when they're saying, wow, you're tall, that's a relative term. So when I say that when we look at the pros and cons with relative importance, so for example, on YouTube, a pro of having limitless content available is not that big of a pro. There's so much content everywhere nowadays that it's not really a big pro. It is a pro, it's still a good thing, but it's more like a kinda, it's kind of important, right? Like, I don't know, a one out of 10 maybe? But then the fact that it can be addicting is a very big con. So maybe an eight or a nine out of 10. And so whenever you think about pros and cons, you also have to take into account their relative size. So yeah, anyways, I think that's enough for today. I hope that this has made sense and you've enjoyed listening to my random talkings and have maybe learned a couple of new words today. But that's all that I have. And I thank you very much for watching. And I'll see you again tomorrow for another episode. Bye. See you then.
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