Daily Dose of English 21
Crosstalk
Daily Dose of English 21
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 crosstalk. Crosstalk, you may not have ever heard of it before. This might be a brand new word for you. In fact, it's a brand new word for a lot of native English speakers as well because it's not really a very common word. In fact, it's a word that comes from language learning and especially sort of newer methods to learn languages. I think the word has only been around for a couple of decades in very small language learning communities and in larger communities only recently. And so that means maybe a couple hundred thousand people in the world know the word, right? It's not a very common word. But I want to talk about it today because it's such a powerful language learning tool and my experience with it. So first, what is crosstalk? Great question. Essentially, crosstalk is where two people are having a conversation, but they are speaking in their native language. So for example, let's say I was having a conversation with a native Spanish speaker. They would be speaking in Spanish and I would be speaking in English. We would be understanding the other person's language, but we would be speaking our own. That's the definition of it. It happens a lot in countries where a lot of languages are spoken. I once read a comment from somebody who said that they did that with their mother. Their mother would speak Afrikaans and the person who wrote the comment would speak in English because in the evening they would both be a little bit tired and wouldn't really want to speak the other person's language, but it was easier for them to use their native language, obviously. And so they sort of just cross-talked naturally without really knowing what it was called. That happens all over the world in a ton of different countries where it is common for two languages to sort of coexist in one household. For example, in the United States specifically, there are a lot of first generation Americans. So that's somebody that is born in the U.S. but their parents weren't. That's a pretty common thing for, there's a ton of Spanish speakers and mostly, not mostly, but a very large amount of Mexicans move to the U.S. and they have kids there. And their kids speak English as their first language and Spanish as a more second, not super confident language. But what happens very often is that the parents feel more comfortable in Spanish because it's their native language and they're not maybe just still learning English. Maybe they should use this podcast, but they speak to their kids in Spanish and their kids respond in English. And they go like that for a long time. In fact, in a lot of foreign countries, I think I've said in fact, a lot of different, a lot of times. Interesting bit, I guess, I don't want to say it again. Interesting thing is that a lot of kids will naturally do this when their parents speak a language that is different from the language they speak with their friends and with their other closer family there in that place. And so this sort of naturally arises out of people because it's easier to do. And that's actually a good thing. Crosstalk is really beneficial for language learning because it allows you to connect with another person very early on in your language learning. Because speaking is one of the hardest things you can do, especially if you want to have an interesting conversation. I've had a lot of English learners as students, and many of them have not had the ability to say things that are very interesting. That's not to be mean or anything, or I guess I should clarify, in English. Obviously, they're very interesting people in their native language. They've got lots of things to say, lots of things to share. But when it comes time to speak English, they can't really say much more than a couple of basic phrases. And so that makes the conversation horrendously boring. And Crosstalk basically solves that for a long time. You can actually have conversations with native speakers of your target language while also enjoying it, which is sort of, I guess, the main part here. Plus, it's really good for improving your comprehension of the spoken language. A lot of English learners specifically will spend a lot of time with very, very basic content. That's part of the reason that I want to make this podcast is because it's a little bit more real. Sure. I'm still thinking about my words and speaking a little bit more slowly and speaking into a nice microphone, but it's a step up from the dialogues you might hear in a book from a textbook or yeah, in a textbook. But crosstalk is even a little bit more natural because you're speaking to somebody who's likely not trained, they don't really think about it, and they're just chatting with you normally. And then you can get really comfortable with that side of conversation and improve at the listening side so that later when you are actually trying to speak and engage in, let's say, English, it's a lot easier, you don't have to think about the other side. So I've been doing this a little bit in Czech, and it's been really, really helpful because I haven't even tried to speak in Czech. I've said some individual words, but I haven't actually tried to form a sentence about a thought I had. And so this allows me to focus on what the person is saying and actually have an interesting conversation. And I've done it with several different people and we can actually chat about lots of different things because I'm able to understand Czech pretty well and they're able to understand English pretty well and so we can just talk, right? We don't have to limit ourselves to talking about daily routines and fruit and animal names or whatever a conversation might be about. But instead, we can talk about what's interesting, right? I've had conversations about climbing gyms, about public transit, about people's favorite food to make. There's all sorts of different things that you can talk about because you don't have to worry about being able to express your ideas fully because it's so, so hard. Side note, one of the most famous examples of crosstalk is Han Solo and Chewbacca in Star Wars. because they physically can't produce the language of the other person. Is Chewbacca a person? I guess he is, right? He's a big creature. But their vocal cords physically can't produce the language of the other person, and so they don't even try. But they're really good at understanding each other, so they can have a great conversation. They can be friends, right? They've been friends for a long time. But they never actually speak each other's language in terms of speaking. And that's exactly what you want to do with crosstalk. Some people use it as a primary way to learn a language, which is fantastic. They do mostly crosstalk and then do other things outside of their crosstalk time. And it's really good for people that are a little bit more extroverted, so they like to pee with people, they like to talk to people, because it's a way to learn without putting a ton of stress on yourself or making the conversation really boring, like I said. However, the hardest part about crosstalk is finding people to do it with. And that's the difficulty. I've been trying to improve my method, but I don't really want to spend a ton of time on it every day because it's not very interesting, right? Trying to get somebody to have a conversation with you of crosstalk isn't that much fun. But I have a method that's been working fairly well. At the beginning, I got pretty lucky and it was working really, really well, but now it's a little bit more methodical, I guess. So to start off, I have a way to schedule sessions, right? I just use a spreadsheet and they can see what time of day it is and we can pretty easily schedule that way. So that's the first step. You need to have a way that people can schedule something with you because you're not going to be to do it live almost ever. You can't be just be like, hey, are you free right now? That's almost never going to work. So you need something to schedule with. And then you need a way to get in contact with people. I've been using HelloTalk, which has been pretty good because there's just tons of users on there. And I wrote a couple of default, um, messages that I send in English. Um, and I say, Hey, I want to do crosstalk with you. That means that you're going to speak in Czech and I'm going to speak in English. Does that sound okay? And then if they respond, we have a little bit of a conversation and we get over the five message limit, because once you have five messages with somebody in HelloTalks, you can send them links. And so then at that point I go, you know what, I actually don't really like chatting very much, like messaging. I would much rather have voice conversations. Are you interested in that? And if they say yes, then I send them like information on how to schedule things on, and I send them a video of an example and we go from there. One of the big things I've learned is that most people are just not going to respond. That's a reality of the situation. I've probably sent messages to like 50 or 60 people and maybe 15 or 20 of them have responded. So don't expect everybody to respond. It's just not gonna happen. Don't worry about it. Some people are also not going to understand crosstalk. This has happened to me several times now where I have to tell the person repeatedly, you speak in Czech, I speak in English. And if they don't get it, that's fine, just move on. Because that's what, for example, I say, that's all I'm here for. I'm only trying to crosstalk. If you wanna do something else, you can find somebody else. I'm not trying to be rude or mean or anything, I'm just being realistic. Same goes if somebody just isn't interesting or they're not really engaging with you. Like they just say, hey, and you go, oh, hi, how are you? How was your day? They go, good. That sort of person, don't even worry about it. They're not actually trying to really learn the language. They're doing something else. And any other tips? Oh yeah, remind people. A lot of people just forget, right? So be like, hey, you said that you wanted to have a voice conversation. Why don't you schedule something? They go, oh yeah, I said that, right? I do want to, I just forgot. So yeah, that's about crosstalk. I think that's enough for today's episode. Um, let me know down in the comments, have you ever done crosstalk on purpose, on accident? Are you going to try it for English learning? English is, has a lot of people learning lots of different languages. So I'm sure that you can find somebody interested in your language. So I definitely recommend you give it a try and let me know how it goes, but that's everything for today. I appreciate you taking the time out of your day to listen to this podcast and I'll see you again tomorrow for another episode. Have a good one. Bye.
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