Michelle:

Okay, so we're back. We are hydrated and we are back. Yeah. I want to start this next part to sort of discuss one part where I think many people are overlooking when it comes to the conversation on language, so let's see where this goes. But there's a post I had made on threads about the negative aspects of language learning and sort of the less rosy pieces we always hear. Oh yeah, learning languages. Oh my God, so good. So amazing, so great. And even I'm like, wow, Sean, 65 languages, go you! Let's kind of discuss that. What do you think you would tell someone who is thinking about expanding their repertoire of languages? That it's not always rosy, right? What would you have to say?

Sean:

Well, for example, you, you wanted to add another language to the language that I would tell you, Hey, that's great. What language would you like to learn? What are you learning it for? Why, et cetera. Just get an understanding of where you're going with that. I initially will not mention anything negative about it. I don't want to discourage anybody about anything, basically. But after a while, if something negative does come up, I will try to approach it in a tactful way. I won't tell people, okay, don't say it like this or speak like the people do. I try to keep as much negativity, negative vibe out of language learning or learning in general that will just disappoint and discourage the student. So I just try to find ways to uplift 'em and encourage them, make it sound better. Even if they're like, oh, man, I can't roll my Rs. It's so tough and it's hard, and I'm like, well, you know what? You're going to have an accent and that's no problem because look at how many people speak English with an accent. I mean, not everybody's going to laugh at you. I mean, if they do laugh, it's probably because they're kind of surprised or happy that, Hey, you're learning my language. There's really nothing negative to say because I started with nothing. I had to learn it. I know the struggles, so just negativity will just bring it down, and I don't believe in doing that.

Michelle:

Yeah, I am totally on the same page for the learning aspect. I think that we have to be reinforcing, not so much about positivity, but a supportive atmosphere. One that helps guide, facilitate a person's path wherever they're going, wherever they're starting from, wherever they're going. I do think that there's sort of a downside, I guess, in how I see it, because I do find it wonderful. It's wonderful to have supportive environments. It's wonderful. I had some amazing Spanish teachers who I did not appreciate until I started to see other people's experiences and retellings and stories of their own Spanish education and realizing, oh my God, I got so lucky with these people. They really helped me not feel the discomfort of learning a new language. Really, they helped open up the world to me. However, I also realized that sometimes we create a bubble with such a supportive atmosphere, and I do think that's kind of the shocking aspect because we talked about the difficulties and the shortcomings of traditional education, so let's go out of that and into now we have a supportive atmosphere.

Michelle:

Not everyone gets to work with people like Sean, people like Michelle, people like a couple others that we have online. Fantastic. I also realized, and this is a personal piece, that I also need to remind people that what they experience with their language tutor, teacher, trainer, coach, whatever, may not actually be what they experience out in the real world. They might be with people who don't have the patience, who don't have the time, who don't have the willingness to work with them. I know I experienced that myself, and so this is the part that I think is really, really important and it's hard. How do you encourage people to continue? I know people who wanted to learn French, okay, beautiful language, beautiful country, okay. Et cetera. Realize that French society is actually very hard as a new French learner, and they were completely turned off, and they just jumped to, I don't know, Portuguese, any one of the other languages. They're like, okay, whatever. We're just never going back, so I just want to get your thoughts on how do you balance that as a professional in the field? What sorts of advice do you try to give? I know you don't want to put negativity into it, but reality is still there.

Sean:

Yeah. Well, I will look to see how the student is doing. I mean, yes, some people do struggle. I mean, there could be like, well, for example, me, I was three years old in a car accident, hit my head. I was unconscious for a few hours. I have problems with memory, believe it or not, which is I have problems with memory, and sometimes it's a struggle, and so I understand the struggle when I see a student struggling, and if they're still making progress, I will encourage them, but if I see because it happens that they really cannot make progress, no matter how much they try, then I'll just let them know, well, maybe it's not the time right now

Sean:

For learning a new language. How about you just stop right now and just come back to it at another time? Because there are instances like that. There are other times when I had one guy, he thought he was god almighty because he learned linguistics. He's got a bachelor degree in linguistics and speaks all his language. He knows everything, and he was always shooting people. He shot me down many times, and so one day when he was talking about the Chinook language spoken up in the Arctic Circle, I stopped him. I said, you idiot. That's not where they speak it. The Chinook language is spoken in Oregon and Washington states in the United States. Oh, no, no. I know these things. I go, I spoke with these people.

Sean:

I will get negative and I will shoot people down who deserve it, I guess you could say. But yeah, I mean, there are times, but I'll never speak negatively about, well, you should not be learning this language. I've heard that many times. I've told people I've learned Korean, well, you shouldn't be learning Korean. That's too hard. I go: “Too late! I already did 30 years ago.”

Michelle:

That’s incredible… that people could actually say that, though. I don't know. I want to put out multiple PSAs constantly. I don't know. We're going to rent a billboard at some point, but I really am shocked when people, this idea of ownership or true… yeah. Again, true owner or authority or something around it. It's more than gatekeeping sometimes. It's not even somebody from that language or culture. It's people who just have an opinion because they believe that they somehow can be telling someone else that they should or shouldn't be doing. It's completely crazy to me. Actually.

Sean:

All I can say is do not listen to negative input, negative statements. Don't listen to it. You know what you can do. Go for it, and if you need a listening ear, here I am. And Michelle's here too!

Michelle:

Exactly. I think that it's about finding the people who will support you and know you don't have to explain yourself to, because okay, if you wanted to go jump off a cliff, probably wouldn't support that. Right? Probably would be like, oh, wait, hold on. Maybe today's not the best day. Yeah, exactly. There is a limit to this, but this is, I think when it comes to learning, when it comes to growing, it comes to expanding what you do in your life. Who is anyone to tell anyone else? Just again, logically for me, it's something I really can't understand. I've been told something. I am not exactly like your example Korean. I've been told things like, well, why did you choose French? Why didn't you choose Spanish? Because there's more Spanish speakers. You already started learning it. Why didn't you choose a more useful language? When you're living in the States, you can communicate with more people. You think that French society is difficult to integrate into? Well, then you can just move, and I just had to cut certain people out because I'm like, I don't need to explain myself to you. Why and when and where, and you are not a part of this. You just happen to hear me say something. Yeah, it's tough to do this whole process. I did not invite your input by saying that. Right?

Sean:

Yeah, and that's another thing that drives me nuts is when people think that, well, can you do this because I can do this and stuff like that. It's like I had one person kind of talking down to me as an educator because I don't have a degree.

Sean:

The only thing I have is my 45 years of experience, and that in itself is a lot of education, researching, testing, all that stuff, and one guy, he shot me down because I don't have a degree and that I should not be calling myself an educator, and I told him, well, that's kind of rude to say. He said, it's the truth. I go, okay, you want the truth? Because I have been invited. I got invitations from several universities in Europe to teach. I have taught in universities and schools in Europe, English, German, and other languages. I go… and they considered me an educator. I didn't have to show them any degrees or anything like that, so I mean, these “negativity” things, I hate them and I try to avoid them as much as possible, but sometimes I just got to let it out. I know what I'm doing.

Michelle:

Absolutely. I mean, I think you're beyond the stage of needing to even feel like you should explain yourself, number one, so there's that. The other thing is, and this surprises some people, because I'm so, I think I'm so clear on how I do have degrees. I do have certifications. I do. I have done many different types of things with my life and my various professional endeavors. This is so complicated. At this point, I cannot even, my about page is so ridiculous because it's so long, and I was like, I can't do my cv, my resume. I'm like, I'm done with this. I am so tired. However, I feel that it's important to say on the record that before I did my TEFL certification, which is the one if people don't know it's teaching English as a foreign language, it's the one you do if you want to teach in some sort of school system because they generally need to check the box and say, okay, does this person have this degree?

Michelle:

I was already… for a long time, I mean forget my whole background. Coming from an immigrant family, translating as a child didn't really have a choice. Just, okay, Michelle, go do this. I was already teaching and involved with English education and language way before I even thought about doing the certification, and had I not been actually working in that capacity, I would not have appreciated any of the things I learned through that program, and you could tell the clear difference between the people who had already worked for many years in the field and just needed it because we needed to check the box versus those who were trying to use it to qualify themselves to work in the field. All of the exercises, all of the material were based on, okay, what would you do in this setting? Can you make this exercise? Can you integrate this type of classroom… classroom style, but innovative classroom? Can you do a flipped classroom lesson plan? I was like, oh, God, but I really, really felt strongly afterwards that I was so grateful. I do think I had a little bit of imposter syndrome when I was working before I was like, oh, who am I? Yeah, I'm a native English speaker. Yeah, technically I've been involved with this. Yeah, I was a baby translator, but I never did my certification, and when I did it, I was like, okay, so we're done. We're done with this. All of this, because where you actually get the meat of your experience, the bulk of your experience, it's doing the work. Of course, I do think I did derive a lot of value from the program simply because I at that time, needed a little bit more of an introduction into classroom techniques. I was so far out of it, but no, I didn't need it to, you know what I mean? To go and actually work in the field and the people I was working with before, they were proof that I didn't actually need to do the certification to be effective for their learning, and certainly now the things I use for my work now, they come from my professional experiences in life. They did not necessarily come from the things I learned in university or what.

Michelle:

Okay. Let's topic jump into a totally unrelated domain, but still on language and whatnot. I would like to ask you where you think the industry is going. So we talked a little bit about past present issues and what we are as individual humans trying to contribute. Where do you think the field is going just naturally, but also where do you think it should go?

Sean:

I have seen the industry kind of making some changes to how learning should be done, but it's really taking a slow progression on that. They're still holding onto tradition, whereas personally, I think it should just cut that completely off and just totally revamp the whole thing. I'm not asking them to come to me because maybe I don't have all the answers, I don't know, but I got a good roadmap, and right now I am seeing a lot of people wanting to learn through software apps, online chat, GPT. The only thing about that is that there are limitations to those. I don't know if you saw that thread that I said, where you can learn from an app, learn all you want, do everything great and wonderful, but if you have to go to China and talk to a managerial conference about buying machine parts, those apps won't help you. A lot of people are dependent upon apps or using AI to translate in their little earbuds there. Yeah, they're good, but the nuances of human communication and things like that and vocabulary just will not work through a machine, and that's the one thing that I think has to be addressed and learned how to make that a little bit more accurate human wise, I guess you could say. I mean, it needs work.

Sean:

But as for materials for learning, they're still holding onto the tradition. They don't want to let that go. I have seen a fellow polyglot, I don't know if you've heard of Benny Lewis, the Irish guy. He's good. What he does, he can do what he does. He does it great, but when he partnered with Teach Yourself books for his languages, it was in their format. It wasn't in his, and I've heard people say he's a sellout. I said, well, you could say that, but he is trying to do what he can for the language business himself. He does great, but with these corporations and other things like that, if they could just break away from the tradition or find, I shouldn't say this, but I think I'm going to anyway, find people who actually know how to do what they're doing. I mean, I have a book that says, here's a chart of all these verb conjugations, memorize it, and I'm like, that's a lazy author who does not know what he's doing. But I mean, it needs a lot of work, and I think it's going to take years. If anything, I know I won't see it in my lifetime.

Michelle:

I actually have to agree on the timescale aspect of it. I don't think there's any forward momentum to try and institute any sort of reform or change, and I don't know about burning it all down truthfully, I'm not sure because I'm almost like, oh, God, and what if we reconstruct the same? But I do know that demand, generally speaking, market demand has a strong motivating effect on what happens with the supply and that if we can hopefully empower enough people, educate enough people on the choices that they're making, and really this is why they cultivate podcast stuff or the media stuff is out here, because I think it's enough with the, if just my brain hurts, to be honest, when I'm just even having this thought, the amount of podcasts and language podcasts that are out there trying to educate people on verbs, on nouns, on sentence structure, on, okay, learn English with me.

Michelle:

I want to scream because nobody is talking about how people are as any sort of language learner or client or that sort of consumer, how they're actually making decisions. What are you supposed to be looking for or what should you be looking for based on what we've experienced or what we know is out there, or there's a huge divide. I noticed that you and I can have these conversations from this side of it. We can say, okay, given our experiences working with different types of learner groups, we believe this, and when you get a group of professionals working together, you're like, yeah, yeah. Oh my God, yes. Amazing. Everyone's on the same page, and I'm almost like, why is this happening? Why is this disconnect? Right? Why is this divide the same person who is here telling me online? Yeah, amazing. Oh my God, I agree with you, and not to devalue any of all of your comments, by the way, but many of these people, I understand that they also work in classroom settings, and it's the same person online being like, yeah, we need reform going back into the classroom setting to do the exact same thing over and over and over again.

Michelle:

So my only answer to this is we got to get the word out there, right? Grassroots. We have to find some way.

Sean:

Yeah. Well, I've been noticing that too. I mean, if you look on Threads, YouTube anywhere, they say, I will teach you this language. I got the secrets. I can do the hacks. I can do all this, and when you look at what they do, it's the exact same thing as everybody else is doing. I call that the cookie cutter method, top

Michelle:

100 verbs, top 100 words that you need to know to succeed in your career.

Sean:

Where do you get this information? Nuts. What drives me nuts is when a person says, I want to learn this language. How do I start? And they say, read lots of books. Watch Netflix, listen to podcasts, do this. I'm like, really? What words should they be looking for? How should they be using this? What about this? Should they write this down in case they need it? I'm like, come on, people. Be specific.

Michelle:

Yeah. I think that there's a lack of education or material on conceptual knowledge. I actually, just to kind of add to your thoughts on this, in terms of what to look for, I feel that people are giving words without putting them in context and also explaining how to see, how to think, how to, I mean, I don't want to police how people think, but I do think it's important to explain the concepts behind, and I do think that's what you're talking about by removing the grammar. It's not like you're removing the grammar entirely. Okay. Yeah, we got the book out. Yeah, exactly.

Sean:

This has everything you need to know.

Michelle:

Yeah, yeah. Okay. Why don't you tell us, here's your time to shine. Tell me, shine more. Tell us about this book. Where can people get it? How can they use it also?

Sean:

Well, this book is available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, apple and Google Books right now online, it's not yet available in bookstores probably either December or January. That's what my publisher is telling me,

Sean:

But there are Google books… I'm not sure about Barns and Noble… but on Google Books you can see sample readings of what it's about and things like that, but it's really like 82, 84 pages long. But I've packed a lot of stuff in here. Everything that I've learned, everything I use to learn a language, and there's even a section that I have in here on how to teach a language properly. Properly. I always say properly, and I go into details about this, the power chart method I mentioned earlier, how to build them, what they're about, and I use different languages to show how flexible this method is. I mean, even languages like Welsh and Arabic can benefit from it, but yeah, this has everything you need. It basically gets to the point. There's no fluff in it, a lot of things, and I have had people say, well, people have been doing that for years. I go, but when I first started this, it was unknown or people were telling me, yeah, right, that'll never work. But it took years. But this is the… I guess you could say, my masterpiece after 45 years of languages, I will be announcing on Threads when it will be available in bookstores and which ones, but yeah, for now, it is just available online at the four retailers that I mentioned.

Michelle:

And just for historical purposes, we are recording right now. It's the end of October. October. Oh my goodness. End of NOVEMBER. I'm not ready again for winter.

Sean:

Welcome home, Michelle!

Michelle:

I know! Seriously! Okay, so Thanksgiving is next week. Again, many things I'm not ready for. So we are recording at the end of November, 2024, and so when you say December and January, it's actually really soon, so that's coming. That's really cool. I would love to have a physical copy. Truthfully, I print things out. I like the feeling of paper…

Sean:

The actual thing.

Michelle:

Yes, I know that we're not supposed to like it because we're trying to make the planet better, but I also think that this is a whole separate conversation, but my one, it's recyclable. Yeah. There we go. Yeah, if you don't like it. Thank you. Yeah. You know what? We will probably do another episode after this comes out, right Next year after more conversations, et cetera, but thank you for taking the time, number one, first guest ever. That's amazing. Okay. Thank you for joining me. I don't know how many parts this will be. Perhaps we'll make this one full episode, but I look forward to talking more in the future.

Sean:

Yeah, that'd be great. Thank you for having me.

Michelle:
You're welcome!