Daily Dose of English 28
Notebooks
Daily Dose of English 28
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 can make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about notebooks. Those are the books that you write stuff down in. There's other names for them, but I primarily know them as notebooks. And I want to talk about them because I think that they're interesting, even though they're used a lot less often nowadays. Most people have used a notebook at some point in time for something, whether it was for school or just for taking notes, God forgive, or in university. That's also school. or for like things around the house, right? If you have to make grocery lists or write down messages or whatever it might be, there's a lot of different reasons you might use a notebook. They also come in all sorts of different sizes. There's the sort of more regular sized, we call them letter size because they're the size of like a sheet of paper. You might also find sort of half size. Another name actually is composition books in English. And those are the ones that typically have sort of black and white covers. They look very generic. And those are sort of middle sized and they have like lines on the inside for writing in. But notebooks can also be really small. Here on my desk, I have a very small notebook. It's probably, let's see, like three by two inches, maybe three and a half by two. And it's got a spiral ring bind on it. And it opens top to bottom, sort of like you might think of a detective in an old movie taking notes in their notebook. And I don't really use it for much, but it's nice to have if I ever need like a sheet of paper or something. And there's also, yeah, there's also other kinds of notebooks. Some people use them for journals, for basically whatever. I think they're interesting because they offer a lot of possibilities because they're blank. You can do really anything with a notebook. And we don't do that as much anymore. There's cell phones and computers and there's so much to do nowadays that most people don't write as much. Especially me, I'm not saying that I'm not like that, but that's something that I have been trying to do better with because I don't really try to put my thoughts down or create something that's not necessarily for the benefit of anybody else other than myself, pretty much ever. And so having a little notebook to take notes in or make thoughts is just a cool thing. I've also been thinking about notebooks because I've seen a couple of cool ones recently. One of them was for kids. It's not really a journal or a diary, but on every page it has like a different prompt or different thing that you should do. And the idea is to get kids a little more engaged with writing and doing stuff. It's sort of a project to do. So for like, I think you're supposed to use it by writing something on the page and then doing something with that page. So for example, one of the pages says like, write on this page with mud. with dirt that has water in it. Or another one that says, light this page on fire or bury this page underground. Like there's all sorts of different little quests for kids to do. And I think that's just a really neat idea of a way to get somebody engaged with paper in some way, because like that piece of paper or that, I guess, that bunch of piece of paper. No, that doesn't make sense. That book of paper. Okay, fine, I'll say book, whatever. That book of paper, someone made and thought of a way that it will interact with somebody else. And then they sent it out in the world and then it interacts with other people in that way. And I just think that's interesting. The other one that I saw recently was my mother gave her mother, so my grandma, a book called Mom, I Want to Hear Your Story. And it's a notebook or a journal or whatever you want to call it that has again sort of like prompts in it throughout the pages that my grandma is filling out. So she's writing down essentially stuff from her life, her story in a lot of ways. And the idea is that you do it over time and slowly. to build up your story. And in this case, it's to share, for a mother to share her story with her children, because very typically, we don't know our parents' story. Right? Think about your parents and how much you know about where they're from, what they did when they were young, where they went to school. A lot of the facts you might know. I know that I know sort of fast facts about my parents, but there's very little that I know that's very specific about their lives in the 1990s or whatever. I know maybe their job or where they lived, but not much else. And so I think it would be definitely interesting to hear more about that. And I hope that at some point my, I guess, musings, my talking here on this podcast in some way serves as a bit of a record of that in my future. But I definitely would like to have something that I create intentionally for that purpose. Notebooks are also just useful for, like I said, taking notes. It's pretty common. It's actually a trope. Again, I think I've used that word before, but a trope is something that you see in a lot of similar genres or things just because it's really common. It's sort of like a stereotype, but a trope is generally agreed to be not necessarily bad, right? Stereotypes are typically sort of negative things, but tropes can just be like, that's how this works. And so the trope that I'm using as an example is that by the phone in a house, there's a notepad that you can take notes on. Although I'm now realizing that that doesn't really happen anymore. People don't have house phones, at least in the US. And so maybe it's not a trope anymore. But house phones used to be a big thing. Everybody had a house phone that was a landline is the other word for it. And often you'd have to take down messages to give to your parents or your friends or whoever was not at home right now. And so there's almost always a notepad or a notebook next to the phone. I specifically have a notebook that I've been using for the past three months now, almost four, that I'm going to be using for the next four years, or four and a half really, more, because it's a one line a day notebook. And the idea is that every single day I write a little thing, very short. It's just, it's like, it's really, it's actually five, six lines a day, but they're very short lines. So it's like, you're writing one, basically one, two sentences. and it's kind of about whatever I'm thinking of at that point and it goes on for five years and so next year on January 1st I'm gonna have to go back to the very beginning of the book open it again and look at what I wrote on the January 1st from one year before and so that's the notebook that I've been using and also engaging with every single day and I think it's a really cool um, little, I don't know, thing to do because it's for me, right? There's nobody else that's going to read this, but I get to do this thing for me. Oh, sorry. I just bumped my microphone. Um, I actually got the idea from my boss and I think it's really cool. So I'm going to keep doing that and I'll let you know in, um, five years how it goes. There's a lot of other ways that notebooks are thought of. I think the biggest connection that people make with notebooks is within school. So usually in elementary school or middle school is when kids typically have their notebooks for something and they have to take notes. However, in adulthood, I think they're just not nearly as common, especially nowadays, as I've sort of said before, with the age of smartphones and stuff. However, there are a lot of really nice notebooks out there that you can use for whatever reason. There's actually a way to use notebooks for language learning. It's often called the gold list method, and it's a way to learn new vocabulary by writing it down and then reviewing it every week or every two weeks. I've talked about that before in other places, and it's really simple, honestly, and you can just Google it, how to do the gold list method, G-O-L-D-L-I-S-T. And it's a fun way to learn vocabulary if you don't like doing things on computers. The other way that I see notebooks, at least online, which also isn't that common, but is for philosophy and for trying to distill ideas or people that are trying to really learn something well. And I would love to be able to do that at some point. I'm slowly trying to train myself to be able to write and take notes like that. It's hard. It's not a skill that comes easily for me. But I think it's really cool that people distill their own ideas. Let's talk about distilling for a second. And distilling is when you take something and you make it more pure. So the most common way that it's used probably is with alcohol, is when you take a liquid that you've sort of created from whatever plant or something, and you distill it down to the pure alcohol or much purer alcohol. And so you might start with something that is only 15% alcohol, but then as you distill it, it might get to 20%, 25% alcohol. You can even get up to like 100% alcohol with pure ethanol, right? And so that process is called distillation. We also use it for ideas or you might find distilled water in supermarkets or stores. Distilled water is just pure H2O or as pure as it can be. Um, in terms of like what the chemical process does to it. And so it's very pure, but distilling ideas is something that is very difficult, right? Making your ideas short and clean and crisp is a skill that I hope to improve and learn over the next, um, or my whole lifetime, I guess. Although this podcast is not a very good version of that because I'm just talking into the microphone for 11 minutes and 11 seconds at this point. So I'm actually going to end there. I went off topic a bit from notebooks, but you know, that's how we roll. I appreciate you for being here and listening and subscribing. And I'll see you again for tomorrow, tomorrow for another episode of a daily dose of English. Bye.
Jeez.
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