00:11
and the second time is for me personally it came around college level writing
where not only did i need to write a lot but i needed to write
most of the time sort of like a persuasive piece like whether it's essays or analytical
piece i needed to write to make my point across you know to to the reader and
you can say one thing using a whole sentence or you can say that with one word if you know
how to if you know these vocabularies and you just sound that much smarter and
that's sort of like when i realized that like because at that point in college level i had
been in english environment for four five years and i was like i'm pretty all right at this like
i don't struggle with english most of the time on a daily basis but i do struggle at school like
it's hard for me to get an a in like a writing assignments sure yeah i think i need to make
multiple trips to the writing center if i were to do that and uh or get it read by other people
and i don't always have time for that shit like i just you know sometimes i'm writing stuff up
like the night before and i in that case i get a solid b yeah
yeah no yeah i hear you i'll just push the shade of i'm writing centers to the side i know for a
fact that i'm a pretty decent writer in japanese i get i can whip it out in that kind of short
period of time and still scrape away at ace because i have like my word bank is pretty there
um so so sounding intelligent or something sounding more convincing is a relatively easy
trick for me to play as long as my main argument is solid uh whereas there were i would say like
90 of my college essays uh came back with some sort of frustration especially if it wasn't
scientific writing where i think my argument was there but i was not writing in convincing or
03:11
concise or clear way whatever clear meant to most professors like yeah i i like i mean that's the
hard difficulty of the writing assignment because it's kind of up to the reader so so you know give
yourself a little forgiveness because it's not just because you get a b or c or d in your essays
like doesn't mean that you're like writing ultimately like permanently sucks like it could
just mean that you just didn't vibe with your reader and and that's that's a possibility there's
a real possibility especially if you're writing about like philosophy art history that sort of
things of nature um and and and that's when i was like i really need to get better at writing if i
wanted to get the grade that i think i deserve right because it's i in in all in most of these
writing assignments it's i think my argument was not too off but except for maybe the hegel
uh the the philosophy piece that i had to write about hegel and i just don't think i understood
hegel but um like from what i've been told by some faculty here that are philosophers in like
the department i'm in i'm not sure anybody understands hegel but maybe okay that makes
me feel better i feel like there's there's one of those ends or there's the ones that are like no
it's definitely this way but i think they also differ so i just feel like i don't get that but
that's okay sure but yeah and and that's when i did something where i hadn't done for years which
was to actively read and note new words that i come across or new phrases new sentence construction
sentence patterns that i come across and i like didn't note it in like any formal way it was more
like a mental memo of like huh i've never seen people use insofar as like that was a weird
academic lingo i just didn't know that people use i've never come across it and i've seen it in
our reading materials and i was like oh that's a thing i didn't know right that's just like a
mental note that i make did i use that phrase probably not but i i know that it's a thing
yeah and things like that right like i will make a mental note while i'm reading and whenever i
06:02
come across new words and if the bandwidth and time allows i would also quickly search up google
for like the etymology etymology that's the word right like etymology is the the origin of words
yeah yeah and and it's kind of particularly fun to do in english because there is a pattern
recognition uh that you can play because a lot of these are based on latin language and you know
these like prefix and suffix are very repeatable uh situation and when they don't follow that rule
that's also like a funny anomaly to keep in your mental bank yeah um so yeah like it's it's uh i
think those like were the two times where like i consciously had to expand my vocabularies in order
to get to the next level of my writing game uh and i also you know that that consequently helps
me with my speaking game as well right like i just have more precise access to words uh
is how i think about it like i i have like an idea or like a feeling or situation i want to describe
and uh if i can find in my mental maze what that word is it's that a new synapse forming moment
and you the repetition of that gets into your brain and you know voila you like
get better at writing or speaking so i think you did mark though nicely that a school like
environment is good for a space that you didn't have to maybe consciously go i need to repeat
this word a couple of times and try it out because you had an assignment or a class or a space that
was gonna ask you to produce something anyway yeah so you were gonna just try to use the things
you had come across because you were in the space for it so obviously it's hard for everyone you
know now that's not a common thing that you have the opportunity to do so if people are not anymore
yeah if people are looking to pick up more words sounds like make notes but maybe the mental notes
might have to sort of be um supplemented with something if you're not in that type of space
right so which is funny because i do this almost automatically with cantonese
because you have plenty of frameworks i imagine right it's like the fact no i don't have frameworks
09:00
i i'm just at like the level 000 of like cantonese game hold on let me use let me use my hold on from
the previous episode here um you you're about to say something or you don't have frameworks what
you do have is two other languages so like the fact that you have not only two languages but
you have the ability to output in those two languages and engage in those two languages
is a framework that you can whether consciously or not adhere language to like this is this is
the way that i would understand it i could probably push that i've spent enough time in the
idea of frameworks for this to mean something but like if you had stepped into another language
having no experience stepping into another language before you would have no framework you would have
your original language framework that you never thought about consciously right so like that's
not great it's not the best thing to like latch on to unless you were super conscious about
learning your first language which is not how most of us learn our first language it just sort
of happens but when you get a second well now you've started to process even just slightly
more consciously what that looks like and now yeah it would be an interesting question to be like
i would ask you more right how does how does the learning of cantonese feel and i imagine
what you're saying would probably make me think ah like i see how you're sort of taking this in
in a way that you know makes sense to you right this sort of matching or mapping onto of something
it's not perfect if the languages are really different right but it helps so you know yeah i
think you might be right like i i'm just it's been a while since i've been able to speak both languages
to the point that i was like not sure super aware of uh the fact that i have this framework yeah
that you're speaking of yeah um but like what i do in cantonese that i think is really good uh
in terms of like language learning and like of course if i were serious about it i can like
ramp this up with actually taking classes or uh you know do any number of those things but
right now i'm just like learning organically from my colleagues and the way i do it is like
i encounter a situation i want to say something or this is how what i would say in english like
how do you say this in cantonese and they gave me few options usually because there's no one
direct way to say it usually yeah um and i will like repeat them because cantonese is a very
12:02
foreign sounding language to me so i don't know if and it's a tonal language so the the exact pitch
and tone of your pronunciation matters a lot so i repeat them on the spot immediately what i heard
yep and and they say yes that's right or no it's more like this and and i like
get better and because i'm asking them phrases to say in a specific situation that i know that
i encounter fairly frequently um i i can just use that like the the opportunity to use this phrase
comes fairly frequently also and every time i say it they say you know that was good or
no actually it's a little different situation than you think it is like in this specific instance you
would say this right and and and because i think in this back and forth like i i'm asking actively
for their feedback uh having done this several times they now know to not hold back on their
feedback right they they know that i am open to repeating myself maybe embarrassing myself
a little bit along the way or accidentally using it in a wrong context or i will mispronounce
in a way that's funny to them and not to me and and i'm okay with all of this and and and
like because i have no real pressure to learn cantonese i'm just like doing it for fun right
because everybody here can speak english and i can get by fine with english yeah um but i
yeah it's it's what makes it fun for me to pick up few phrases here and there
and um that's why like i i because i learn it in a phrase based way rather than word space
i like accidentally can sound fluent for like two seconds in like a different situation
it's um sometimes sometimes when you jump ahead in your learning right you might be mistaken for
knowing more like i don't know how to count to 10 in cantonese got it okay wait it's yeah
i don't know how to say 10 i always forget i was gonna say i think you're just about there
well you only need one through nine you can just you know well yeah actually when you're waiting
15:00
for like your food order and stuff you can just say oh my number is like one one six like yeah
yeah like and then that's that's all i like need um and yeah but i don't know how to say
10 in cantonese but i do know how to say like hurry up for instance
okay yeah yeah that sounds that sounds uh important
right like it's just like a weird weird level of specificity in phrasing
and cantonese i think especially is like about 50 of how well you can communicate in cantonese
is having the right attitude um to say your phrase
so okay like if you if you say it with a certain level of confidence and attitude
it's okay if you mess up your pronunciation a little it will sound like what it is
uh attitude matters i think um that wasn't that's not the uh the moral of the story i think we just
the story but it is in the case of cantonese it is it is in fact important and specifically
to cantonese uh or at least especially maybe not specifically but yeah yeah yeah nice oh man
uh yeah no i i don't know where this conversation would end but
that's it for the show today thanks for listening and find us on x at egode science that is e-i-g-o-d-e
s-c-i-e-n-c see you next time
