Daily Dose of English 143
title: Daily Dose of English 143 link: daily-english-143 published_date: 2024-08-21 19:00 meta_description: In this video, I talk about languages I'd like to learn lang: en tags: intermediate, dailydose
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 languages I'd like to learn. So, as you can probably guess, I am interested in languages. I think that they're really interesting and I like learning them. That is something that I've been doing for quite a while and would like to continue doing. To be clear, my goal is not to be some kind of polyglot or person that knows a lot of languages sort of just to know them. I'm a lot more interested in the process and what I get out of it in terms of personal growth and people that I meet and that sort of thing. And so I don't really want to end up being somebody who's known for speaking a lot of languages. That's just a hobby that I have. I sort of see it as like somebody who plays a lot of video games. They might be considered a gamer, but the video games that they play might be very different. They might play one game a lot over for six months to a year, and then they play a different game, and they play a different game. They move between games, but they're not known as a specific gamer, a specific kind of gamer maybe. That's how I see it. I don't plan to stop learning languages. I like it. It's one of my favorite things that I do every day. And so that means that I'm going to end up going between languages. I'm not going to always be learning Czech, for example. I'm not doing it for a reason other than to do it, if that makes sense. You're learning English right now, so you might be learning it for a reason. Maybe you want to get a better job, or you want to move to a different country, whatever, and so you have like a specific goal in mind. Many people want to learn English and that's it. They just want to have their English ability quite high and then continue living their life speaking English and whatever their native language is. And that's totally fine. But my goals are a little bit different, right? I don't need to learn any other language. I already speak Spanish and English, which are two of the most spoken languages in the world. And I don't even need to really speak Spanish. It's helpful, but I can live my life just fine in English if I wanted to. And there's no real incentive for me to learn more. And so I'm mostly doing it because I want to. Um, which is, which is nice. I mean, that means that I have a lot of choice and I can do things that I want to do instead of like having to go on what makes the most sense, right? A common thing that people say is that they're learning X, Y, Z language because it's, um, it's for, it's economic benefits, right? Somebody says, Oh, I'm learning Mandarin because it's the most spoken language in the world. And it, it's, there's more economic stuff or whatever. I don't know. And the reality is that you don't really need to do that. You can do just fine speaking one language. Many of the world's richest people, most successful people speak one language. Many people that live in... their home country their whole lives, have a totally happy and fine life. So learning a language for the economic implications doesn't really make sense unless you have a specific interest that is connected to that language, but that also makes more sense. Sorry, like for example, somebody that's really into manufacturing and really wants to improve their company that's a manufacturing company or something like I don't know they might benefit from speaking Chinese because that there's a lot of manufacturing there there's a lot of factories and a lot of very knowledgeable people so that might make sense but for most people 90% of people it is it doesn't really, it's not really required. Well, actually, that's not true. For a lot of people, English is very, very helpful. So anybody that's not learning English, I guess I would say, 99% of non-English learners don't really have real benefits unless they get married to somebody who's from another country and they wanna live and work there, then they have a great, great reason to learn that one language, right? So actually, probably not 99% of people. That's a bad number. That doesn't make sense, actually, now that I think about it. I think you get my point though. Most people that are learning languages have a sort of very niche reason. I think I used that word last time. A niche reason where it's like, it's a sort of specific case, right? They moved to Germany because their wife is German and now they want to speak German so that they can have German friends. Right? That's, I mean, it's relatively common. I think, I hope you know what I mean. Anyways. I am not like that, though, is what I'm trying to say. I don't really have a reason to learn any languages, and I'm doing it for fun. And so I get to choose languages that aren't necessarily as useful. For example, Czech. There are only 10 million speakers of Czech, 11 million, something like that, plus 5 or 6 million speakers of Slovak, which is a very, very, very related language, very close. That's not that many people. If I wanted to learn a bigger language, there's German, there's French, there's so many other languages that are close by, and bigger. Polish is a very similar language as well. The country is just to the north, and it is also spoken by way more people. But that's not my goal, and so I chose a language that I was interested in and wanted to learn, and I did that. Other languages that I have interest in are the Nahuatl languages, which are some native languages here spoken in Mexico. I would like to spend time learning at least one language or language dialects, I'm not exactly sure, and figure out what that process is like. That's a language that I have specific interest in. It's really a family of languages, not just one language. That is one that I certainly want to get into. And hopefully I want to start this year and go sort of slowly. It's going to take a long time, but I think it's going to be really interesting. I'd also like to, I mentioned this last time, learn Toki Pona, which isn't a real native language or natural language, but it is a language and I think it'd be interesting to learn. I'm planning on doing a bit of a project with it where I learn it live on stream over the course of a month to show off the refold method and the ways that we recommend you learn a language because you can do it in one month. You can't learn any real language in a month, but you can a small fake language. So I think it'd be sort of a fun daily thing to do and show off the refold method. I would also like to learn at least one Asian language is an interest that I have. I'm thinking of going, I haven't really decided yet, but I think it'd be interesting to do either Cantonese or Mandarin just because those are more widely spoken. I think it'd be interesting to learn Taiwanese Mandarin as well, because I definitely have more interest in Taiwan than China. And so Taiwanese Mandarin might be interesting to do, especially because there's a whole different rating system that I would like to dive into at some point. I've always had sort of an interest in Hindi just because it's so widely spoken and has an interesting script, has some really cool sounds, and I would love to be able to watch some of the film from India because it's so, so different than we have in the US. There are many different languages spoken in Indian film, but Hindi is one of them. I don't really have specific interest in all of the Indian languages, so that would be too much, because India has something like a billion languages. That's not really true, but there's a lot. Also, Russian is interesting, just because of its... how spread out it is, is interesting, and I already speak, or am learning, rather, Czech, so I would already have a head up, a head start there, a leg up, and a head start are the two different things that I combined. I have a leg up there, and also another writing system, Cyrillic would be interesting to learn. I also think Italian would be cool because, again, I speak a very related language and Italy seems just like such a nice place to go as on vacation, on holiday, so that's definitely something that is interesting to me. And that's sort of as far as I've gone. I don't really have interest in a language like Arabic or any of the related dialects. It would be interesting maybe to get some very basic conversational stuff to connect with somebody. But I don't think I'm going to dive into it. Maybe though, we'll see. Oh, I just had it in my mind. What was the other one? Oh, I've always had, um, a love of click sounds in languages because there are, um, some languages that are almost completely, um, isolated in Africa, not isolated, but almost completely grouped in parts of Africa. And so learning a language like, uh, Zulu would be interesting just because there's some really cool sounds in it. Um, I don't have a ton of practice, but they sort of sound like in a word. So, um, or NASA and like those sorts of sounds in words. which would be really interesting because they just sound very cool, but I have no other connection to the languages, so we'll see. And the last one that I want to mention is, again, not really a language, but there are many languages of the world that can be whistled. And there are a couple of, some of them, so a whistling by the way, That's whistling, and there are many languages in different parts of the world that use whistling to communicate their languages. Some of them are tonal, which means that you can, tonal languages use tone to change the meaning of words, right? So imagine that word and word were different meanings. That's a tonal language. And so some tonal languages can whistle their language and people understand because it's tonal enough to have enough meaning. Or there's some sort of system to convert the spoken language to a whistled language, which is the case in El Silbo, which is a language spoken like the Canary, not really a language. It's a version of Spanish that's whistled in the Canary Islands to communicate across larger distances. It does lose some of the specificity of Spanish, because it's just more limited, but you can still do a lot of things with it, which I think is just so interesting. There's whistled languages in various parts of the world, so I'm not necessarily sure which one I would learn, but learning one that's based on Spanish seems pretty cool. Yeah, I think I have a generally a more interest interest. No, I have a more niche interest in languages beyond just like people and number of speakers. I think the languages themselves are quite interesting, but, um, yeah, but maybe a sign language at some point too, because they're cool. But yeah. Okay. Okay. This episode has gone really long. Thank you so much for listening. I hope that you enjoy it. I hope that you learned something. Let me know down in the comments, if you want to learn any other languages, what are the languages that you want to learn? And I'll see you in the next episode. Okay. Bye.
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