EP 55 Blow In

[Music] Hello and welcome to the Australian Teaching English podcast, the podcast by language learners, with language learners, four language learners. My name is Glenn and I'm the owner and director of the Australian Teaching English Institute and with me today is my co-host, Ariana. Hello, Ariana. Hello. And joining, we're very well, I'm very well and we have a special guest joining us once again, our friend, Dr Howard Mann. Hello Howard. Hello, one. Hi, Gloria. How are you today? I'm good. How are you? I'm good. I'm good. It's good to see that you blew in again to the studio. and say we have the word doctor sounds my mom's a doctor as well. In the lecture in Engwad, what does she do? In science education. Well, I won't say anything just because I respect your mom a lot of her, but I don't like science education like this. Is this going to be another target of your anger or your mom? Yes, well, actually, I don't know. Hey, you can go cyclist your mom. No, not your mom. I had a education side as I think it's, I don't know, just chanda. Yeah, well, actually, I think her thesis was actually on why young women and girls do not like science education in schools. I don't know. Thanks for the young thing I got it. Yeah, so she was actually researching why you people like yourself didn't like science at school. And speaking of research, well, Dr. Howard Manz is here. And I was talking to him via email, trying to organize, trying to organize a time to get him to come on the show. And I realized that he was just another blow in from the United States. But as it tends out, we know that you're not actually really a blow in anymore. You've been living in Australia for quite a long time. So I'm not really sure we could call you a, we could call you a blow in now. But you've certainly been around the world. You've certainly been a blow into many different places around the world. And that's what we're going to, that's what we're going to do in this show today is we're going to talk about your, your learning journey. So in, in our previous episode with you, we talked about your life as a CIA agent. Well, not good, not good, not quite. But you obviously have, obviously, have an extensive history of learning languages and things like this. So how was it that you came to be learning languages? When did you start getting interested in languages? Probably when I was a kid, when I was very, very young, I grew up in a very monolingual environment. I grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which is a very monolingual, white, working class place. And when I was a kid, I gravitated to the language part of the library. And I used to love getting books out to different languages. And, you know, I remember when I barely learned to read, I got to go on Russian out because I wanted to learn this really alphabet. Not because you wanted to be a CIA agent, not because you wanted to be a spy. No, no, but you spend a lot of time when he was a Cold War and you were worried about the Russians at the time. But then it just so happened that I went to, I went to join the Navy when I was 18, the US Navy. And I took a test and I wanted to learn to cook. And they said, you did, you, the tests suggest that you're not a good cook. But you might be a good linguist. So they sent me to a language school. And I learned Persian for a year at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California. There you go. You got, had you actually formally learned any languages before then? I took high school French. I took French in secondary school, but I didn't really learn much. I think that sometimes this story of many people who went up kind of engaging with the language at the secondary level, at least in a place where that language isn't widely spoken. So I knew a handful of French words, but I hadn't actually learned a language at that point. Yeah, it certainly is a common story for me and Australia as well. I think in year eight, an Australia was mandatory to learn French. But basically it was an excuse to goof off and muck around, screw around in class basically. And when you look back on it now and you think, well, geez, that was a waste of time. We're busy learning languages now. When we could have actually made the most of that of that time. Exactly. But especially as a teenage boy, you don't really think of these things at the time. Your foresight isn't so good. So then after you studied Persian, then where did life take you after this? So I moved to Bahrain. I lived off and on in Bahrain for about three years. And in that time, I would do interpreting and translating. And then I went back to the US and I went to university and at university. I studied French and Vietnamese and linguistics. I have the same question. Probably everybody has the same question. So yeah, I think Arianna, I think you start with your questions first. Yeah, because you said you moved to Bahrain, Bahrain. I don't know how do you pronounce it in English. But it isn't like a democracy. Either like a monarchy is like a sultanate. Do you say like a dalle? Sultanate. Yeah. And how does things work there? I'm so interested in that. Yeah, it's a constitutional monarchy, officially. And what it means is that, yes, the king is in charge of everything, but they have a parliament. And that's-- so the parliament gets to vote on things. But ultimately, the king has the final say. So if the king doesn't like what they're voting on in theory, he can just dissolve parliament or suggest gently or not so gently that they change their minds. Yeah. Oh, it wasn't as interesting as I thought. I'm disappointed. What are you hoping for? I don't know, because my mind is sultanate. I don't know. It's weird. It's a weird word. I've heard things about a constitutional monarchy, but not about sultanate. Well, Australia is a constitutional monarchy. Yeah, but what are your gringos? [LAUGHTER] What do you say? Yeah, no. Yeah, no. No, no. [LAUGHTER] So do they speak Persian in Bahrain? Or do they speak Arabic? No, they speak Arabic in Bahrain. So it was just a base for me to live in at the time when I was doing work. And so while I was there, I had to learn a little bit of golferic to get around. As you would know, that there are different varieties of Arabic. Yeah. And the kind of Arabic that they speak in Saudi Arabia in Bahrain, in particular, is called golferic. So I picked up a little bit of that just to get around, but nothing, nothing really more. And so then you returned to the United States and you felt like you hadn't learned enough languages so you started learning Vietnamese. Is that correct? What was the "meas"? I did. Yeah. Because growing up in the US, Vietnam played a big role in my parents' generation. So Vietnam was starting to open up in the early Nazis to Americans. And just the world more generally. And I was really-- I had two goals. I mean, one of them was to understand Vietnam. This Vietnam had loomed large in my childhood, or in my parents' generation. But the other part of it was, I thought it would be a good opportunity to live as a multilingual. Because I was looking for a job to teach English. I ended up going to Southeast Asia to get a T-Soul certificate. And I thought it would be a good opportunity if I could speak French, if I could speak Vietnamese, and I could speak English on a daily basis. For somebody who loves languages, I couldn't imagine really a better situation. So that's why I ended up going to Vietnam and studying Vietnamese to begin with. Fantastic. So you taught English in Vietnam? No, it didn't end up happening. (laughing) - You took a ship back to the Persian Gulf. - No, no, I ended up in China actually. And I thought I would be fine. - I liked it. - I liked it. - And how, do you speak Chinese? - No, not very well. - But you learned a little bit. - Yeah, I learned a little bit on the ground. Because I ended up in a regional place. And no one really spoke English that well. So I was just trying to learn as much Mandarin as I could. I ended up in a, it wasn't rural, but it was a medium-sized Chinese town called Tufu, which is the home of Confucius in Shandong Province. - So when you're in the south, the southeast. - South, it's mountain range and is that where it is? - Yeah, it's probably more central east. - Yeah, central east. It's, it's, if you, about halfway between Beijing and Shanghai, to the east of that. - Oh, really? So that is quite central east then. - Yeah. So yeah, the teachers at the school took me under their wing and kind of, there was this, there was this gorgeous, but grumpy old Mandarin teachers used to pick me up who are blackboard and hit my hands if I use the wrong stroke on the Chinese. (laughing) - Yeah, I'm not sure what it is about the Chinese teachers in China, but my students in China always complain about the Chinese teachers as well. They seem to be, it doesn't matter which school they're in. The Chinese teachers always seem to be very, very disciplinary and very brutal, that seems like. So they were brutal even to you. - Hey, they were, they were brutal, but I'm in on the one hand, I did, I did learn some of the characters and I learned to do the calligraphy correctly. On the other hand, I still feel a tinge of pain whenever I, I start writing Chinese characters. Alrighty. So then, so then after China, what happened? - I ended up, yeah. - No, stop talking because I want to cry. I want to travel and tell me, "So's pencil now, I used to so travel so fast." - So after China, where did you go? - Indonesia, I ended up in Indonesia for a year teaching English and it was grand. So it's part of a longer story. I was hoping to be an American diplomat and I wanted to live in one place for a long period of time and learn it and I went to Indonesia, spent a year there, learned so much about it. Indonesia and Japanese, which are more or less context. And yeah, after that, that's when I ended up in Latin America for about a year and a half. (laughing) - I mean, going back to Indonesia is quite an interesting story with the Indonesian language because yes, there are different languages on the different islands. I mean, Indonesia is a country made up of hundreds of thousands of different islands and they all have slightly different interrelated languages there and dialects or whatever. And as a process of the forming of Indonesia, as a country, they tried to unite a lot of the languages into a sort of a conglomerate, but I'm not sure how successful that has been. I think that still causes a lot of issues. So I think a lot of people prefer to just learn English because it makes it easier. - That was actually my PhD dissertation. - Ah, well there you go. So what's my hypothesis correct? Do they just find learning English easier than learning all the different versions of different Indonesian? What was your-- - So it ends up, yeah. - Yeah, what's happening is they, a lot of them end up learning aspects of Jakarta Indonesian. So the kind of Indonesian that's spoken in Jakarta is for you to be the Indonesian that is spoken by the most beautiful, richest people and because of it, people end up learning a lot of that kind of Indonesian. And if anything, I mean, yeah, in Jakarta, you'll find a lot of English speakers and Jakarta, you'll even find people who were learning English as a nativeish language. But when you get out to places like Sura Baya, which is the second largest city or some of the smaller cities, people are actually learning Indonesian and the young people are using Indonesian, but it's like cool Jakarta slang and it's cool to use them. - Okay. - Interesting. - Interesting. And then you went to Latin America. - I did, yeah. I went to, where did I fly to, Jesus? San Jose in Costa Rica. And I went to-- - Oh, not. - Oh, it was gorgeous. I love it so much. - That's so fun. (laughing) - I know. - Yeah, and I traveled up to Mexico City to meet a friend. Then we traveled back to, we were so aimless and pointless, we traveled down to Panama City. We had this crazy idea to walk across the Darian gap, which I definitely don't recommend. (laughing) And we didn't do it based on the recommendations of everyone. And we ended up, yeah, just traveling back up through Latin America, central America, visiting a lot of the places that we hadn't seen the first time. So it was aimless, wandering for that better. - Did you make it to South America? - I did, but on an earlier trip, I kind of skipped that. I spent about six months in South America, just after I graduated university. I flew to Rio and from Rio, I traveled down to Buenos Aires, where you're at, which is an amazing city, as if I have to tell you. And then I traveled over to Santiago and then spent most of my time actually in Bolivia and Peru. - Fantastic. - So you speak, so I assume you speak Portuguese and Spanish as well. - I just Spanish, just Spanish, you know. - Okay. - I just Spanish. (laughing) - Chile and Spanish. (laughing) Yeah, they're not important over there. (laughing) But my Spanish teacher was actually from Buenos Aires. I took a single class when I lived in Pittsburgh in Spanish and it was a teacher from Buenos Aires and I just loved learning the Argentinian, or the Buenos Aires pronunciation, which he told not to use because people would get angry with us. (laughing) - Yeah, it's quite funny. Like when I speak to my students in Spain, they tell me, "Glan, please don't speak like that." And then the end. (laughing) - Well. - Yeah, well some of them do. So well some of them just laugh and say, it's very very strange that someone from Australia speaks with this Spanish, with this Argentinian accent. Is mixture of them. - Yeah, it sounds weird. Yeah. (laughing) - I'm funny. I'm not into it. - Yeah. It's good. I'm proud. I'm proud of my Spanish accent actually. It's good. - Yeah, it's good. I like it. - Yeah. - People say, "Yeah, it's obviously, you're obviously from overseas, but you're not American." Where are you from? (laughing) - Yeah, they were sort of trying guests. No, you're not from the United States. Are you from Ireland? - Yeah, you're from where? - From where? (laughing) Yeah. They sort of know that my accent is a little bit different to most of the gringos. And so then after that, you went to Australia and did you sent an email to Monash University and. - I went back to Indonesia for a year first. Another year. - Okay. - But then I sent that email, yes. - Okay. And so you said, "I'm not teaching English anymore. I want to study languages instead." Is that what you did? - I think I was just really, really intrigued by that question you raised earlier about what was happening with the national language in Indonesia because you're right, Indonesia has more than 650 languages and groups associated with those languages. They were just fresh out of an authoritarian government. And part of that government was pushing this kind of Indonesian that was just, it just wasn't, it was so over-engineered as a language that people weren't speaking it. And young people hated it in particular, they were sitting with school. But what I had noticed was, you know, a lot of the television broadcasts, they were using this young hip Indonesian and my students in the English school really seemed to like this. So I thought, well, maybe there's, maybe there's a question here to be answered. So I sent an email to Monash University, a couple of universities, but at Monash University, it got picked up by a couple of people who studied language and society and also were experts in the Indonesian language. And they said, "Come down." We think this is a great question and we'd love to supervise this project. And that's what I did. - How nice of you. - Yeah, I loved it. - Oh, so wonderful project. - Yeah, amazing. And you've stayed in Australia ever since. Why? - That's a great place. You're like America. You use another Australianism, use guys. So use guys are like, like a mirror, but with better health care and not as crazy. Not as crazy. Better health care and not as crazy and no guns. Yeah, that terrifies me about the United States. I just terrified of guns. I'm not sure I could ever I could ever live there for that for that reason. Yeah. And that's that's one of the reasons why I'm drawn to here. I mean, other than the sunshine and just it's a really pleasant place to be. The sunshine in Melbourne really. You get you get sunny days in Melbourne. I can I can even show you my internet world. Yeah, I can see a bit of the sun out there. But but there isn't there is an expression for Melbourne as for four seasons in one day. So even though it's sunny now, it might be it might be raining and freezing cold and in an hour's time. It's actually we actually have a joke amongst the Australians here in Buenos Aires that the Buenos Aires weather is just like Melbourne weather and that it changes very quickly except the weather except that it's warmer in Buenos Aires. You get four seasons in one day and Buenos Aires, but at least it's warmer. So we joke about that. We joke about that here. So how many languages do you actually speak? Have you actually counted them all up? It's always a complicated question and I wouldn't claim to speak any of them well is. What about English? I don't even know if I'm worried about my poor kids, you know, because they're getting a mix of Irish and American and Australian English as an example of that. I've got, you know, I've got a six year old and my six year old. So, you know, in the US, we would say sidewalk and in Australia, you would say footpath. And my kid actually says path walk because he just worked together. Well, pavement. But I mean, in total probably I've studied about eight languages, but I wouldn't claim to speak any of them in, you know, with with any fluency at any one time. You know how it is you would learn a language and you get better or worse at one if you're using it and these languages hot, dusty, dusty shelves in my brain at this point. Yeah. Yeah. So, so how are you raising your children and like like we were raised in very monolingual societies. So, so are you encouraging your children to learn other language or at least explore other languages? Always, yeah. I mean, the kids, the kids are, the kids are surrounded. I've got two boys and they're surrounded by me interacting with Indonesian friends and speaking with Indonesians. So, I mean, they're surrounded by that. But what we're actually teaching them is Spanish and we try to get them to learn some Spanish. And part of the reason for that is that it's the language that my wife and I share because my wife worked for wireless as a journalist in Bolivia. And because she did like it's it's the language that we both speak. I think I think we have to have her on the show next. I want you to go to Beliade summer. So. Well, we definitely have to definitely are are you are. Do you have any questions for Howard? I still have a lot of questions. Well, that was your time. That was your time, Ariana. That was your time. Well, well, I have I don't know because my question is it is not just for you, but how do you do for traveling all around the world and keep on the same line of your career and your job and that? How do you do that? That's my my question, my primary questions. I think I think for me and I'm sure there are different answers to this, but for me, I didn't really think much about career in the beginning like I didn't I didn't occur to me that career career of any sort mattered. And for probably from my teenage years through to my early 30s. It was kind of lingering in the background. I had this thing. I had this niggling thought in my head that maybe I should think about a career, but at the same time. I was more interested in in traveling and learning languages and learning different cultures at the time. So, you know, I left the military. I had money from the military and I used that money to travel for a while. Then when I went to university, I worked for I worked a lot while I was at university and I just kept putting the money in the bank, putting the money in the bank. So I could keep traveling and you know, that's that's how I kept it going and teaching teaching is teaching is a wonderful way to keep that going too. I suppose or at least it, you know, it was for a while. Yeah, I think that it that is a good question, but it also adds is one of my other questions. Well, if you're not so worried about your career and things like that, that's usually how you end up working at a university. So, I just kind of just stumble into it. There's my default. There was a bit of that. I suppose even kind of getting into into the university thing at the time. For me, when I was working on that project, I thought, well, I don't really, I didn't really care how it was going to turn out. I think it was very gratuitous and lucky that I got to do that because I like teaching. I love teaching. And I love discovering things and so it suited me really well, but even doing the project, I didn't think that much about what I was going to do with it. Yeah, afterwards. Well, I mean, that's that's really what makes good research. I've been lucky enough to be involved in research. I think that's the main point. Just things are going to come up. And I think this is also a good lesson to learn about language learning as well is not worrying so much about the outcome. Not not worrying so much about, well, can I speak this language well or not? It's not really, it's not really the point. Are you learning a little bit now? Yes, I think it's a very good tip to come down the outside anxiety. Your anxiety, absolutely. And so what would be some of your learning tips, how and for learning other languages? I think that you you've still in my best one, which is just that, like to not become so obsessed with some kind of end game as much as you can get away with not being obsessed with some kind of end game, but just enjoy language for what it is, which is a gorgeous opportunity to connect with more knowledge and to connect with more people. I think that's really important because we spend a lot of time worrying about in anything, I mean, not just language learning about the final process or where we're going to end up. And if we spend too much time worrying about the, you know, what we're going to, we don't enjoy the journey. Exactly. That's the important thing. Yeah. Ariana, do you have any final questions? I want to say no because I'm tired. I have one question. How what is the most difficult, what is the most difficult word that you've found? Yes, we've got this competition going at the moment to find the most difficult word in the world to pronounce. That's relative, isn't it? Because no, no, no, Ben. See enemy. That's the most difficult word in English. That's a galogue word. That's a lot. That's terrible. I almost got it. The most difficult words are always the English cognates and other languages. And my brain just melts down as soon as I hear an English cognate in another language. And I'm trying to conjure up one in Indonesian. And yeah. What was the, I'll just give you one, but it probably won't strike you as that difficult. And I think that's something like in Indonesian nepotism is just nepotism. And maybe I don't know you come across similar cognates, I think in English and in Spanish. But my brain actually does an absolute meltdown when I come across cognates. And so typically I have to really spend some time thinking. And now that you think of it, this is actually a common occurrence with Spanish speakers when I teach them something like if you say, if you get them to say second. or feminism, or communism, or anything like this with an ism on the end. It becomes really difficult for them to actually pronounce it. And I have no idea why, because all you're doing is just taking the O off the end of the world. Word. Yeah, one of my students when I gave, gave closet, when I, it's okay when I gave closet. When you guys, when I was keeping closet. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, whatever. He is troubled with the word rhythm. Oh, rhythm. That is a nightmare of the word. If you look at that, genetically. Yeah, he said, read to read. The he couldn't. Yeah, he said, yeah, it's really difficult. Sometimes it blows up and it just something like it doesn't just say rhythm. I don't know. So I mean, that is the other thing that we've discovered. Actually, on the show, it's often, it's often simple words that we, that we think of. For me, another one in Spanish that is really difficult is, is to do. Or to do. Yeah, because it has the to and the to sound, even though it looks like a very simple word. Having, having those two slightly different sounds so close together makes it really, really, really difficult for. Yeah, for a lot of green goes to say. Say. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Nah. Sorry. So it was great. Sorry. Would you consider yourself a blow into Australia now? How it. I wouldn't. I would say that. This is as close as I have to a home and I love being here. Good. Yeah. So I don't, I don't think you're a blow in at all. So a blow in is someone that is recently arrived. Maybe has taken a position from someone else using eyes just some blow in. Yeah. Yeah. Sucked up to the boss and he's just some blow in with in this, in this job. I'm recently arrived. And so it's usually a disparaging, disparaging word. But I don't think you were a blow in at all. So it was fantastic to have you on the, on the show again, how it. I hope you enjoyed your, your time here again. So, so from us at the Australians Teaching, Grace podcast, the podcast by language learners with language learners for language learners. It's us saying goodbye. Bye bye. Bye. Bye. For more information about the Australians Teach English Institute, go to Australians Teach English.com. Or follow us on Instagram, Facebook and YouTube at Australians Teaching English.