00:01
あ、あ、あ、OKです。 OKですか? じゃあ、3, 2… So, welcome to 英語でサイエンスしナイト. I am Asami.
I'm Asako.
I'll put some fun music behind this to, you know, make it sound festive or something.
But this is our first episode, and I am… Well, I have to do a few things in the first episode, right?
Like, you know, what is this about? Why are you starting a podcast when everyone and their dog has their own podcast?
Yeah, here we go.
So, this was in the middle of pandemic. I did not get to go home in Japan for about 3 years.
And right now, I live in the States, and I am doing my PhD in physical chemistry.
And so I didn't get to go home to Japan because they were locked down for a long time.
And what I missed the most during that time is, I guess, was conversation with English-Japanese bilingual people.
Because there are lots of bilingual friends here. Not necessarily Japanese friends, but, you know, there are lots of people that I can talk to here.
But there's a specific kind of Japanese-English mishmash conversation that, yeah, I get to have with my friends in Japan or my sister and stuff.
And I realized that's what I missed the most because, you know, we live in an age where we can watch Japanese TV shows or eat Japanese food, even if you're many, many thousands of miles away from Japan.
I also, having lived abroad for a long time in my life, gotten used to not eating the best sushi for a few months.
I am okay. I don't die if I don't eat rice. I am, yeah, like, it's fine. I am, I got used to that.
What I missed the most was this kind of Japanese-English mishmash conversation.
And I also, to fill that up, I started listening to Japanese podcasts, which was a new thing for me because I have, I'm a podcast fan and I listen to a lot of English podcasts.
It's kind of a saturated market over there where, like, everyone has their podcast and I, you know, it's hard to find a good one.
But when you do find a good one, it's very, like, high production quality, lots of research, you know, 18 people on a team editing and sound producing and, you know, making some music composition to go with.
03:11
And I just never thought that that's something that I could do until I listened to some of the Japanese podcasts, which felt more like tezukuri-kan, you know, because I feel like it's still, podcast is becoming popular in Japan, I think, as a medium, but it's nowhere as popular as English-speaking world.
And there are lots of good, like, shirouto podcast everywhere, I think.
And it's, the market is not quite saturated, like, there are, you know, owarai genin ga yatteru podcast, or, like, super knowledgeable, nanka no ekspert ga yatteru news no hanashi toka.
But not, like, there's very few fun, interesting shirouto podcast, but there are, and it's kind of fun to look for those.
And I also found that there's bazillion Eigo Marabouke podcast, which are either too beginner, like for, like, you would think that most people in Japan who have done middle school and high school have some familiarity with English.
And, like, the level of English that they're teaching is, like, not helpful for anybody, or it's not helpful to go beyond high school, middle school level.
Or it's entirely business-oriented, like, business English with so-and-so.
And, you know, yeah, that probably has a lot of demand.
I think so. But I felt like there's a room for somewhere in between, you know, something that is a little bit less formal than the business English style podcast.
But something that is actually a little bit more interesting and more challenging than those super beginners, like, let's have a conversation, pretending that we're in cafe kind of thing.
And that was my impression. And then I realized, like, when do Japanese scientists learn English?
Because they obviously do a lot of writing, conference presentation in English, but there's no dedicated time for them to learn English because usually they're busy doing sciences, naturally.
06:04
And I felt like it's such a shame if English was being sort of a hindrance for lots of people who want to go to Ryugaku or people who want to do collaboration with international team.
So I thought if I could come up with a humble little podcast that everyone can listen to for free and just two scientists talking about science, sometimes not science.
And because I think that's really important to sort of find something that you can identify with, you know, because the vocabulary you want to develop is what you want to talk about.
And of course, I cannot cover all of the semmon yogo of like a very specific scientific lingo, but we can probably cover a decent amount of how scientists speak in general.
And because I didn't want to do a solo speaking podcast, like hitori shaberike, like, you know, like, who would want to listen to that?
So I had to ask my friend, and I enlisted Masako, just be like, hey, want to do this thing? I cannot pay, but do you think it's gonna be fun?
And she thankfully agreed to come along. So maybe, yeah, Masako, what do you do? Where are you? How? Yeah, what are you? Who are you?
Well, I'm a researcher, and I spent several years in the United States. And then I just came back.
That's where we met.
Yeah, that's where we met. So Asami, you participated in my experiment, right? That was the first time we met. And also, you kind of mixed up two different experiments.
Yes, at the time, your department was looking for participants for bilingual studies, and studies, like brain, both brain related, but completely different parts. And I somehow mixed up when I saw that you were looking for a participant.
Those two, and I thought, and you had like a list of, you know, 30 different items for what they need to be criteria. Yeah, for the eligibility, eligibility criteria, you had a lot of these, and like, oh, you cannot travel outside of different time zone, you cannot be like having medications, you could not have metals in your body, like all these things.
09:00
I was like, okay, on top of this, you have to be Japanese, English, bilingual, like, that's not possible. Like, you're gonna get like two people, if you're lucky. And I thought, I need to help somebody graduate. That's why I signed myself up. And also, you know, getting 200 bucks and a cool scan of my brain was also pretty cool.
That's, that's why. And then I got to the got to your experiment. And you told me it's like, oh, you didn't have to be bilingual. My bad. But yeah, that's, that's how we met. Yeah. And then so so you you were you were a research scientist in a lab here, and you are now back in Japan.
For your own PI. Yeah. And that's very exciting.
Yeah, it's exciting. Yeah. But I also missed, you know, like a mixture of English and Japanese conversations. It's kind of, it became natural for me to, sometimes it's easier to explain something in Japanese, but sometimes it's, you know, if when you can't find the how to express in Japanese, but you could find,
that thing in English. And yeah, so, yeah.
So what would you say like, you're like, ima no genjou de, like, what's your language ratio right now?
Oh, it's almost, um, I only have one international member in my lab. Oh, no, two, actually. But yeah, most of the lab members can speak Japanese. So it's heavily biased to Japanese. But we kind of mixed, which is good. But yeah, but it's, yeah, it's biased to Japanese.
So that's, that's two of us. So Masako and me. Hopefully, yeah, we can, you know, we have some ideas of what to talk about, you know, whether it's something more serious, like how American grad school application works, how, you know, grants writing is like, what it's like being a master's student versus PhD students, etc, etc.
Well, I don't know, I think we can also talk about, like, random things like, nani, jikkenkei labo aru aru mitai na, you know. And so we have lots of topics in mind. And I hope that we can sort of serve as a free English learning material for busy scientists who, you know, we can plug in while they're doing experiments in their commute, whatever.
And just have some like a little micro exposure to English while you're in Japan. And yeah, this helps me connecting, reconnecting with you once in a while. And this is kind of fun. So we'll see how it goes.
12:10
Yep. All right. See me.
