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Hello and welcome back to 英語でサイエンスしナイト. I'm your host Asami and
in previous episode we were talking about 奏でる細胞の episode about observation and
we ventured a little bit into talking about the books I loved as a kid and what Yurika-san liked
as a kid and one of those books was トリトル先生 and his mode of observation is really
interesting right it's kind of sort of how science works and it's kind of a fundamental
way we learn new language so トリトル先生 for those of you who don't know
uh shame on you first of all okay i'm just kidding but um if you don't know him he can speak with
animals ranging from nezumi to parrots to sometimes even there's an episode of him talking with kite
as well so like any you know huge range of animal kingdoms and the way he learns
their languages is by essentially spending a lot of time with these animals
and yeah some of it is verbal communication like you hear
uh you know a dog bark at a certain way or the parrots or the birds make bird calls in
specific ways and he tries to mimic that but a bulk of his language vocabulary in animal language
is actually a behavioral cues so things like how do animals with tails wag their tails or
you know the way they scratch their ears or the way they blink the way they cock their head or
something like that and uh that's what he learns that's what he picks up and together with the
vocalization he you know masters the animal's language which is why you know learning a language
of shellfish like kai is very difficult of course there's not much moving elements there but
anywho i feel like that's just a fundamentally how like everyone should learn languages in general
because that's how babies learn language right like they first observe a ton of times they
make noise and they see the response that other people around them then decide
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and slowly learn what kind of response these noise elicit and they slowly learn and mimic
what to say how it should sound if they want something out of it and then lastly they learn
sort of the contextual cues right like if you make this noise at a certain time
uh it makes people happy or it makes people upset and that kind of feed the feedback just goes back
and forth back and forth and then eventually the kid will start to learn to apply specific phrases
full sentences under a circumstance like specific circumstances to learn how to use these words
right and if you think about that constantly it's fundamentally beginning of learning anything
um you know in that way right and i'm very grateful for the period of time i couldn't
express myself very well right like when i was thrown into international school at age
13 or 14 you know i knew how to speak english in that i knew how to you know tell time introduce
myself uh ask where the bathroom is like that kind of basic things but i didn't know how to
express my thoughts that's any more complicated than i'm hungry or may i go to the bathroom or
you know please don't touch my hair or something like that it was an interesting period of time
because you're you you're fully grown human at that point and you're not you have so much more
complex thoughts but in this environment that was in english i wasn't able to fully express myself
and as a result um i became more of an observer in a lot of those conversation for that period
of time right like just you know the first couple years or something you observe a lot of the times
and then learn what other people are doing and using like the kind of vocabularies that they're
using and that's how you expand your own vocabularies and you also become a very keen observer
of contextual cues right because if the verbal communication is failing you what's left for you
is body languages eye contact you know the specific situation the setting of the conversation
and i think because of that if i may say so myself one of my secret skill is well i guess not that
secret but my one of my skill is being able to pinpoint the exact word someone is looking for
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in a conversation so let's say you're you're having conversation with me and you go uh
how do you say this?
usually given the context i can tell you exactly what you're looking for you know there's synonyms
right there's few words that could be fitting to that particular context but i for whatever
reason am very good at pinpointing that specific word that they that you're looking for like
hey the word you're looking for is caution or something like that right like i i don't know why
the word caution came up but the kind that kind of things and i know have become handy um when
you're chatting with people who are learning the language that you guys are conversing in whether
you're conversing uh in english or japanese either way right and yeah come to think of though um
i think that training of you know reading the contextual cues
being a good observer really goes back to my ballet training actually because i started learning when
i was like seven or eight maybe uh maybe a bit younger than that but when you're a kid you don't
really think about what small muscle you're recruiting or momentum transfer of your weight
uh when you're moving the body you don't know the choreography necessarily either and you're just
kind of doing what the teacher seems to be doing you know you're all of your improvement in ballet
is based on how well you can mimic the motion of the teacher and the teacher would then tell you
yes that looks correct or no you're doing the wrong thing you need to straighten your knees
you need to point your toes whatever and well in my case of my super strict teacher
you know she never thought i was doing anything right but that is aside um but you see in a
adult beginners uh when you get older you become more capable of understanding the physics and
biomechanics of bones and muscles and sometimes that works to the detriment of your own
uh improvement because you think you are because you're too small you think a little too much and
then i see that a lot in adult beginner dancer especially like they think too much and they
focus so much on their internal processes to the point that they don't watch carefully
when there's ottehon in front of them and sometimes like it's a balance right it's it's
very important to think in your brain and try and execute correctly but it's also important
sometimes to watch and just move the body in order to try and see how your body responds
to the gravity or to the momentum or to the yeah whatever and that's yeah that's sometimes
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way more powerful than be able to think carefully i'm also currently learning new observation tool
uh which is listening i got really into classical music for some reason during the stressful time
of this you know final stretch of phd and while i always loved classical music it was mainly in
connection to ballet but um this time around i am super into it in a very different way and i got
very totally influenced by this violin youtuber called twoset violin they're just comedy violin
duo and now i'm listening more closely to phrasing or vibratos or color changes and you know my ears
are not trained or developed enough to tell you know intonations like i don't have zettai onkan
or sotai onkan for that matter i don't think uh but it's also really interesting mode of
observation you know because as humans well at least you know those of us who can see
we rely so much on vision and our society is built assuming that most of us can see very well right
but if you can hear that is another sort of information rich mode of observation that you can
take advantage of even if it's non-verbal like instrumental music and yeah it's i'm very curious
to sort of develop my listening skills um specifically in the musical listening and this
is both for my ballet and just for the enjoyment of classical music but yeah it's really interesting
you didn't realize that the more you listen carefully the more you can hear smallest
differences in interpretation like i used to think that if two artists place the same classical music
score they're gonna sound more or less the same within the bounds of uncertainty but no it's
completely different if you know how to listen to it and i'm only starting to understand that
very subtle difference so yeah i don't know why i'm keep blabbing on about this but
observation what a fantastic topic thank you so much for suzuki-san who brought this uh
conversation well now i guess i made four episodes out of uh observation so you know
give a listen to all the other podcasts in the kaku kikaku uh gosh
kagakukei podcast no godo kikaku there we go yeah give a listen let us know what do you think about
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it uh we love getting feedbacks so thanks for listening that's it for the show today thanks
for listening and find us at eigo de science on twitter that is e-i-g-o-d-e-s-c-i-e-n-c-e see you
see you next time
