We're delighted to welcome back Craig Johnson - of Fifteen Minutes of Fascism - to chat about the politics and value of native English speakers learning other languages, especially Spanish. Episode Notes: Spanish language papers: Pagina12: left Peronist, Argentina: www.pagina12.com.ar Proceso, Mexico: www.proceso.com.mx elDiario.es and Público, Spain: www.eldiario.es, www.publico.es Again, not an endorsement of these as the best and most perfect news sources in the world, they have their own biases (esp regarding their own domestic left), but good for different perspectives. Craig: How to Talk to Your Son About Fascism, book. 15 Minutes of Fascism at Soundcloud IDSG on 15MoF Craig's bluesky Craig's Patreon Show Notes: Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay ad-free and independent. Patrons get exclusive access to at least one full extra episode a month plus all backer-only back-episodes. Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper/posts Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618&fan_landing=true IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod Daniel's Twitter: @danieleharper Jack's (Locked) Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_ Jack's Bluesky: @timescarcass.bsky.social Daniel's Bluesky: @danielharper.bsky.social IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1
I never even thought of the idea of reading news in Spanish.
I can't believe I never, like, I just really hope it never popped into my head.
It never came to me.
It's like, you know, like, oh, that's something you could try.
You know, I guess I always thought like newspapers would be too difficult for me at my level.
The thing is that, like, newspapers are generally written in declarative sentences.
Like, they're generally a declarative statement.
Yeah, yeah.
And like, this happened here.
This person said this about that.
Yeah.
You know, I mean, the New York Times, you know.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
The New York Times is famously written, you know, like between a 10th and 12th grade reading level.
Yeah.
Many newspapers around the world are written at somewhat higher reading levels, but you know, like, like still, like a lot of it is going to be pretty legible.
Yeah.
So like, yeah, if you want, I can send you some lists of newspapers.
No, no, no.
News sources and other copies.
If you've got some stuff that you, you know, would let you, I mean, I wouldn't ask you to do work for me.
If you got a list of stuff that you'd let you, you keep track of, then I would love to check that out.
So, yeah.
And, you know, if this goes well, then maybe we'll invite you back and we'll do, we can do a little bit more.
We can talk about some of the details.
You know, you could recommend some of those things.
I'd be glad to.
Periodicals.
Yes, yeah, yeah, exactly.
Sorry, I'm just trying to use a little bit of it as I have it.
I am.
That's a word I struggled with a little bit.
Like, I obviously know the word, but it was like I couldn't type it right.
That's one of those that Duolingo just marked me wrong because I missed the I or I missed the O or I missed something.
And it's just like, oh my God, it's just like, you're drilling this into my fucking brain at this point.
I got so annoyed.
I got so annoyed.
I get so annoyed.
It's like, you know, I know it's wrong, but it's not that wrong.
Just give me, give me partial credit.
Let me move on.
No, I know.
And it's funny, like some typos that'll let you take like some, like if you just miss a letter, but if it's a loss versus loss thing, even though that could be a typo, they mark it incorrect because that's like part of what they are like testing what they're doing.
So I get it.
I get it.
It's just annoying.
It's just annoying.
Especially when the sentence is long enough that I can't like keep it in my head all at one time.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So sorry, I'm just bitching about my, about the absence.
No, no, no, no.
You know, like it.
I'm sure you have some experience with this in other contexts.
I'm very familiar with this, you know, trying to trying to explain my way out of something.
Yeah.
I do this a lot.
Yes.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay, and welcome to a new podcast, Noabla Español.
It's called Not Really, Not Really, don't worry.
But you will understand the joke presently, my friends.
You can hear Daniel, my friend Daniel, the co-host of this podcast.
You probably know who I mean, chuckling in the background.
Daniel, what on earth are you laughing about?
You did misconjugate the verblar.
It is ablo.
It is Yoablo Español.
And technically, it would be no Yo Ablo Espanol would be the appropriate translation.
There's a reason why I made these mistakes.
Yes, of course.
No, Yo Ablo Espanol.
So even I can correct them.
Yeah, no.
I think Craig and I had the immediate response of like, okay.
It was pretty funny.
Yeah.
It was pretty funny.
So anyway.
But yeah, no, I'm here.
Yo, Estoy Ki.
I'm here.
Good, good.
But this is in fact, I fooled you, listeners.
It is in fact the podcast.
I don't speak German.
And we, in a recent episode, in fact, I think it's our last mainline episode, we did a little bit of talking about learning languages.
And it occurred to Daniel and me also that we'd have our friend Craig Johnson back onto the show to talk to us a little bit about things like that.
Craig, how are you doing?
Hey, folks.
I'm doing all right.
I actually recently returned from a trip in Latin America for academic work.
So definitely ready to talk about this.
Whereabouts?
Where did you come from?
I was in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Buenos Aires.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Awesome.
No, I, I, Argentina, Argentina is one of the like shortlist of countries I'd like to visit.
You know, it's really lovely if you eat beef.
And, you know, coming from the United States, it isn't as if the politics is so categorically, catastrophically worse at this point.
Yeah, sure.
Yeah.
No, I hear you.
I've just, every time I've seen photos of Argentina, I'm just like, I just want to, I just want to visit Argentina.
It's just, it always seems lovely.
Stunningly beautiful.
Southern Argentina has incredible natural beauty.
Buenos Aires is one of my favorite cities in the world.
Sure.
Lovely.
Highly recommend.
Yeah.
No, I hear you.
All right.
So, Daniel, why don't you introduce the subject of today's discussion?
Sure.
So we are, you know, I put out a post on Blue Sky.
I didn't pull it up.
I don't have the exact text, but something to the plant of, you know, I've been learning Spanish for, I started in January just like trying to pick up Spanish in a couple other languages as well.
I've been kind of dabbling a bit.
Just for me, it was partly just it was a memory aid.
I've found I've gotten older.
And as I've gotten older, I've just kind of like, I don't kind of come to things as fast as I used to.
And playing memory games was doing stuff, but I thought, why not do this in a way that's actually useful to me and actually try to learn a language?
And I took a couple of years of Spanish in high school.
That was 30 years ago now when I took Spanish.
So I was like, okay, I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to come back to it.
And then I also kind of realized as I was coming back to it, I was like, well, obviously there's a political legal to this too.
And I think that was part of, that was the point of the Blue Sky Post was, you know, look, I wouldn't blame anybody for not doing it.
I didn't do it for years and years and years.
But I mean, I think there is a real positive political case to make, like a leftist case to make for learning the language, the minor languages of your, of your regional, the languages of the people who are oppressed in your, in your area.
So that, you know, for, you know, just mutual understanding and mutual like respect.
I mean, I think, I think there is something to that.
And so here in the U.S., that is clearly Spanish.
That would be vary a lot depending on where you are in the world.
But that's kind of what I wanted to talk about with Craig and Jack today.
So I don't know, Craig, I mean, you're kind of nodding along and you retweeted or retweeted, you reposted that blue sky post.
So with some positive commentary.
So I was just so so, and that's why I reached out to you.
It's like, hey, let's do this as an episode sometime.
So, so Craig, what do you have to say?
Yeah, I mean, I'm really glad to be talking about this and to be talking with you two again.
I absolutely agree.
Like it, it seems fairly transparent to me that, especially if you're in the United States, that learning Spanish is a pretty clear political.
I mean, if not imperative, it's at least something that will help you be a better organizer, be a better political actor, be a better consumer of news.
I mean, there's all sorts of really real benefits in addition to the fact that it's just like a good and enriching experience to learn a new language for a person.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
If you are monolingual, it's one of the better things you can do for yourself to become conversant in a second or third language.
No, absolutely.
And, you know, I mean, I don't know, for me, like looking at the footage in LA and looking at the right-wing response to the footage from out of LA where, you know, they're flying Mexican flags and as if that's obviously this like horrendous thing to do.
I mean, believe me, one of the first things I plan to do when I get into my new place is to buy a big Mexican flag, hang it prominently in my bedroom or whatever.
It's going to be a, it's going to be a thing.
I am, it's, it's like a political statement at this point, you know.
Yeah, yeah.
Being, being criticized for flying Mexican flags by people who fly the flags of the worst treason in the history of the United States.
Yes, to fly Confederate flags.
Slavery, yeah.
Exactly.
Yeah.
So I don't know.
Like, I guess, I guess how, I mean, I presumably, given your research interest, you are, you are fluent in Spanish.
Have you been assessed?
Do you have like an idea about how fluent and how well you speak it?
I have been assessed.
So before the podcast, we were chatting about our Spanish abilities and you mentioned, you know, the sort of like A1, A2, B1, B2 levels.
The CEFR levels.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
So just for listeners who aren't familiar with this, this comes out of European language learning classification.
It's a common European framework.
I think it is originally French.
So, and I don't speak any French.
Yeah.
So the concept here is that there are basically six tiers to language knowledge, and they range from A1, which is like maybe I could do some touristy type stuff in this place.
Like I can say please and thank you and I can point at things and say this, not that, or where's the bathroom and stuff like that.
A2 is more like, I can tell you where I'm from and what my name is and, you know, have like small little conversations.
I kind of think A2 is often like grammar constructions more so than that, you know, where you're using more, you're using more passive voice, you're using more past tense.
You're using, so, you know, a lot of the really early stuff is, you know, like, my name is Daniel, you know?
Yeah.
And then, you know, whereas I come from, I come from Alabama is a little bit more A2ish or, you know, I used to live in Alabama, like that sort of thing.
Exactly.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Like having different tenses and stuff.
B level is like you could perform.
And again, this is my understanding of it.
I'm not a language particularly, but the way it's been taught, the way it's been told to me when I was learning languages was that B1 and B2 are essentially like, could you have something like a professional life in this language?
Like, you know, if you got a job in a country, could you work in this language?
So some of it's pretty specialized or, you know, it's like, can you be in a meeting?
Can you read a newspaper?
Like that kind of stuff.
And then C is the point at which you could be pretty fluidly incorporating it into your everyday life.
You can read fiction.
You could watch a stand-up special and get the jokes.
You could go on a date, you know.
A lot of this is like culturally dependent as well.
Like, you know, because that's a lot of what you learn like past like kind of the A2 level.
Once you get, you know, a lot of people will say like B2-ish is kind of like you are fluent.
You are like, you are, you know, a lot of people would consider you fluent at B2.
Like you are speaking the language perfectly well.
C1 is like kind of university, like native speaking level.
And then C2 is like university level.
And to be clear, a lot of people who have university degrees, like I have a, I have a bachelor's degree in, I am a native level speaker of English.
I speak American.
I have a university degree.
I don't think I could pass a C2 exam.
A C2 exam is deliberately difficult.
Yes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
C2 exam is like, yeah, that stuff is hard.
Yeah.
You've got to be able to have like in-depth, fluid conversations around a multitude of highly complex like political and scientific topics to like pass that exam.
Because the reason you take that, just sorry, just to highlight, is because you're going to want to be an interpreter, like a high-level interpreter of the United Nations or like that level of work or something.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly.
Yeah.
Whereas like the thing that if you're learning a language and you're trying to incorporate it into your everyday life, what you're aiming for is maybe something like B2, something like that.
When I've been evaluated, when I've been at my best with Spanish, I've been on the, I've been around C1.
That's, that's, that's what my value is.
That's kind of what I would expect.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Because again, for other listeners, I have a PhD in Latin American history.
And so I do a lot of research and work in Latin America.
I read Spanish all the time.
And maybe this is jumping the gun a little bit, but when it comes to learning languages, one of the things that I really suggest to people, like as a great first step, and I mean, I guess it depends on what you want to do.
Like for me, I wanted to be a reader, a consumer of language and ideas, of books.
And so for me, it was reading.
Reading was the most important thing.
You know, as a PhD student in history, that was the most important thing, right?
Absolutely.
And so getting my academic Spanish up there was the most important thing.
And I can also, I'm also somewhere in the B range in Portuguese.
And that similarly, you know, it's the same sort of process of like, you just got to sit down with a book that is a relatively appropriate reading level for you.
So maybe that's the newspaper, you know, like whatever a nation's equivalent of a New York Times type thing, you know, La Nacion, maybe in Argentina's case, or El País, if we're talking about Spain.
Sit down with it.
And like, if you're on your computer, try to read it without translating it.
If you don't know a word, check up that word, look it up.
But I'm an old fogey.
I'm an oldie time guy.
So my real recommendation is get a physical book and get a physical dictionary.
And like, you know, this is what you're doing, like once you've already learned the language somewhat and you're like trying to improve.
Get a physical book, maybe a young adult fiction book, you know, something that's, that's, that's at the reading level.
Something you hear a lot is read Harry Potter in your target language.
Obviously, we don't support Harry Potter for a lot of other reasons.
Just don't pay for it, right?
Yeah.
You know, like like some something at that level.
Exactly.
You know, like something that's written for something that was appropriate for you to read when you were 10 or 12 is like a great place to be once you're trying to like launch yourself between and something and and i think something you also know well is kind of like kind of part of that you know because you know it's like for me something like ender's game or like some of the like izzy gasimov short stories would be kind of like yeah in that vein you know where something i just know really well and could just like plow through and i know the plot so i'm just going through it um lately i've been sorry this is again a little bit jumping the gun i've
watching spanish like part of the simpsons like oh dubbed in spanish um it's it's definitely above my level but again i know those first few seasons well enough that i can just follow along and just and i just i find myself just mumbling along with it you know like they use a word now you go or you know whatever i mean i just find myself like you know as you start plugging into your brain i just find myself just mumbling in spanish like just during my day i mean you know just just talking to myself not even i've been necessarily forming thoughts but just like you know you know
lo siento is bien is muy bien you know and just just sort of like getting the getting the sounds out so you know it's just one of those things i just find myself doing like without even thinking about it you know um and that's a sign i think that's a sign of like you know you're just at that point you know you're putting enough in your brain you're not just like putting in your 15 minutes a day and like going about your day it's it's got to be it and sorry you know it better than i do i'm just like what i've learned just from just from like following like language learning like like communities online for a while um because i always kind of had the the
inclination to do this i just never you know sat down and did it until january this year i wish i'd started like two years ago honestly but you know the the one thing that i say is like you really have to do it daily like it has to be like part of your routine and even if it's five minutes if you could do five minutes a day five minutes a day is enough but it is better than not doing five minutes a day doing five minutes a day is better than doing 15 minutes every three days it's kind of where i would land on that you know oh i agree uh doing some of it every day is good so like for me when i am i live in
the united states and this means that there aren't necessarily opportunities for me to speak or hear spanish spoken all the time um but what i do is i i read the news in spanish every day um i i'm gonna pick that up that's really good advice i should start picking it up for sure yeah i mean this is and again you know i talked about jumping the gun but you know we're just having a conversation there isn't there isn't a particular direction we're going here uh when
it comes to what you get out of learning a second or third language and especially as you said daniel about like learning a a language of people who are particularly politically disadvantaged or or oppressed or racially oppressed in the place that you live is you know if you've ever found yourself complaining about like the new york times or cnn being like this like terrible centrist force then it's like okay well then
you can like other countries have actual leftist newspapers yes indeed um
and particularly in spanish you will find those very quickly yes yeah you can just read them um and they will they will have leftist news in them and they'll be very honest and direct and clear about stuff in a way that in a way that u.s is not and i mean you know like these newspapers often have political affiliations which are themselves maybe problematic or something that you need to keep your your wits about you on like for example in argentina i read a series of peronist newspapers and peronism is a very complicated political
movement.
It has its ups and downs.
It has its problems.
It has its ins and outs, but it's just like a different perspective.
You know, they-Yeah, absolutely.
And it's a very helpful corrective to what you get in the United States, this sort of like, you know, extruded meat paste type news that we get mostly as Americans.
Yes, no, absolutely.
Especially from like the big outlets.
It's either the meat paste or it's, you know, the absolutely unhinged propaganda coming from the site formerly known as Twitter these days.
Exactly.
It's like that sort of thing, you know?
Yeah.
Or God forbid, Facebook, you know?
Oh my God.
No, no, no, no, no.
So yeah, I mean, I guess, again, we kind of jumped into, and I do want to talk about other languages a little bit.
I mean, so you say you have Spanish, you have Portuguese.
Did you ever study anything else or, you know, it was kind of, you know-I can read some French, but again, that's basically for academic purposes.
And my reading French is more or less me translating as I'm going.
Like, I'm not reading it fluidly at all.
Sure.
No, no.
Same with Italian.
So I've cheated.
All of mine are romance languages.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, if you're C1 in Spanish, then you kind of get, you have a big heads up.
I mean, you know, Portuguese is also, you know, it's like a, you know, if you're high level Spanish, you're basically, sorry, I'm insulting.
I'm not trying to be insulting to Portuguese speakers.
Portuguese is Spanish with an accent.
It's on some level, you know?
In many ways it is like the grammar is incredibly similar.
Yeah.
Coming from English.
And this is something that you'll find in a bunch of romance languages, right?
The things that are different between Spanish and English are generally also different between English and other romance languages.
And usually they're sort of like different in a similar way.
And, you know, if you have, I have the privilege of having, you know, university education and a postgraduate degree in the United States and in English, I mean.
And so that means that I'm very familiar with, I was taught a lot of sort of, you know, like complicated GRE type words, right?
Yes.
And a lot of those come, a lot of those come from Greek and Latin.
And a lot of those words are the same in Spanish and Portuguese.
So, you know, like in, in the same word that like, like in the same way that there might be a complicated word in English that you wouldn't teach like a second grader.
Right.
Like, like, you know, for example, ecumenicism or something like that.
Right.
Right.
That's just the same word.
Right.
It's not a different word in, in, in, in Spanish or Portuguese.
Right.
You just have to learn the different ways that they construct like a gerund or an infinitive or something like that.
But like, usually the root of it is the same.
And so if you're learning a, a second or third language, and especially if you're going between English and a Romance language.
So particularly if you're learning Spanish as an English speaker, what you'll probably find is that like, it'll be the everyday words.
That'll be the hardest for you to figure out.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
because like governmental is the same word right i i have trouble with the just just speaking for myself, again, at my level, low level, I have trouble sometimes with like articles and like constructions and like, you know, why is it, why is it like, you know, Ami and Canton, you know, Ami and Canto, et cetera.
And why is it, you know, why does it have to be constructed that way?
And that's like, and so then I do, I just Google it because I'm just like, what, why is it doing this?
And it's like, you know, so I, so literally like today, I started working through like a Spanish grammar textbook because I'm like, I think this is going to be pound for pounds and it's going to help me personally like right now is so that I can sort of at least get the sense of like how some of these grammatical constructions work.
So that's been, you know, I've been, again, I've been trying, I've been like kind of dabbling with different methods.
So it's, it's just one of those things where I just, you just run into these things where it's just like, I don't know why it's this way.
And we can talk about the apps.
I would certainly, I don't know if you've ever tried any of the apps, but you know, I've been, I've been, you know, trying a lot of that stuff.
And so I have definite opinions about that.
Jack, did you have anything to throw in here?
Yeah, I thought the beginnings of the political conversation that you started to have was really interesting.
The idea of openness to other viewpoints, particularly viewpoints that are politically excluded in the Anglophone world in America.
I think that's really interesting.
I'm just interested in the idea of, particularly in the American context.
And I think Spanish is a language that's, you know, be worth anybody in the world learning because it's one of the world's biggest languages.
It's the world's most spoken languages, absolutely.
Yeah, it has like 600 or something million speakers.
It's not something that I knew, but in our little conversations about this, you've said that and I looked it up and it's like the fourth or the fifth most common language in the world after English, Mandarin, Chinese, Hindi.
So that's, I mean, just anybody in the world, you know, just in terms of the number of people that speak Spanish, but also particularly in the American context, because of the proximity of the United States to Central and South America and the number of people of that extraction and nationality and so on living in the United States.
I'm interested in the idea of learning other languages as an act of solidarity in itself.
No, absolutely.
Yeah, sorry, that's something we did.
I think that was the reason we came here and then I got distracted.
So sorry about that.
Oh, no, no.
Just an anecdote about that.
I remember reading a book by the historian Piers Brendan many years ago.
It's a book about the period between the two wars.
And he wrote about his father, I think, or it might have been his grandfather.
It's a long time ago I read the book.
And he said that his, I think it was his father, at the time of the Spanish Civil War, he wanted to go out and join the international brigades in Spain.
But for one reason or another, he felt that he couldn't do it.
But as an act of solidarity, he decided to learn Spanish.
That's always stuck in my head.
So yeah, that's something I find really interesting, that idea.
Well, and you see that like language learning is an act of solidarity of like, you know, like the degree to which the Russian government has suppressed Ukrainian, you know, over the long history.
And the fact that speaking Ukrainian is actually a, you know, it is an act of political defiance on, you know, even before the I think about Pinterest play mountain language as well.
Yeah, I mean, language as political act is definitely, like, that's definitely a very real truth, you know, like even before Trump, you know, all of these like cries about people, you know, white people screaming at people to speak American, right?
Oh, yeah.
Like being able to engage with somebody.
The fact that press two for Spanish drives people up in a rage.
I always want to tell them, wait till it's press two for English, asshole.
Yeah, oh, yeah, yeah.
Incidentally, if you speak Spanish, it is sometimes easier to get somebody on the line.
Yeah, I can believe it.
I can believe it.
Yeah.
Although, if you do also speak English, you should not do that and take away the spotlight slap from somebody who needs to.
I was going to say that that looks like you should show it our unethical life hacks.
Yes.
When it comes to learning a language as an act of solidarity, as a political act, yeah, like being able to engage with people in the language that they were raised in is one of the ultimate ways to show that you support their personhood on a very simple level.
In the United States, there's some complications about it, simply because you don't want to assume what languages a person speaks or what languages a person would be the most comfortable with.
But this is a situation where you might always ask, would you prefer to be talking with me in this language or that or another language that I've just heard you speak?
You don't want to make people be your practice.
So ask people, engage with them what they want.
But when it comes to solidarity with or just like knowing what is happening in other countries, being able to read about it in the language in which it is occurring is just, it's so fantastically different.
It's so fantastically helpful.
Like the number of times that I read a U.S. news source talking about the principal countries that I study, so Argentina, Chile, and Brazil, those are the ones that I study in my academic life.
And so I pay particular close attention to the news news, like the contemporary news out of those countries.
The number of times that I encounter a U.S. news story that is about those countries, and you think to yourself, like, oh man, like, who wrote this?
Like, where did they get this information?
Where did they get this news?
Who is it for?
And like, probably the person writing it speaks Spanish or Portuguese or something.
But like, it's written from a perspective that it just sort of like ends up presenting it as if it's from the outside.
Right.
And if you instead, essentially what it allows you to do is to, as best as you can, as a person who is not a native speaker of the language, as best you can, you can sort of approach it sort of from the inside, like trying to understand how people think about themselves, how they present their own world.
You know, what's bringing me to, what's coming to mind about this is in the wake of the United States' bombing in Iran, people were sharing around the Anthony Bourdain episode where he went to Iran.
Oh, yeah.
Talking about like humanizing people, just like simply being present and just like seeing the world as other people do.
And like, obviously, you can't fully do that.
That's impossible.
But the humanizing aspect of it is huge, especially if you are in a relatively isolated or culturally monolithic part of the United States.
It can be really hard for people to understand that the world is big and different.
I mean, I am from the Midwest.
And so when I told my relatives that I was going to be studying Argentina professionally, and I'd be like, oh, I'm going there this July.
They'd always be like, oh, is it like hot?
Is it safe?
They would say, oh, is it hot?
Is it safe?
And I would be like, well, it's on the other side of the planet.
So it's winter.
It's actually quite cold there.
They would always be like, wait, really?
And then you realize like, well, most people in the United States believe that the entirety of Latin America is a desert until the Amazon.
And then there's sort of like a question mark.
Yeah, I know, elsewhere, right?
That's something you also get corrected if you play Jew guesser.
That's another thing I, you know, like, because, I mean, you know, not to, not to, you know, but you, you know, you see a lot of the world and you suddenly like, oh, this looks very different than I anticipated it looking, you know.
But yeah, yes.
No, I kind of think, I kind of think most Americans think like, you know, south of like, south of El Paso is effectively one, a, a yellow filter goes over everything.
Yes.
You know, and it really is just like deserts and then occasional jungles.
And like the idea that Argentina like spans so many lines of latitude, it's just like, you know, it's bonkers.
Argentina is a giant country.
I mean, but Ushiguaya is Argentina.
Is Ushuaya in Argentina or Chile?
Ushuaya is in Argentina.
Okay, yeah, that's southernmost.
Sorry, I thought it was Argentina.
I didn't want to be wrong.
So, you know, there was, I mean, they almost went to war about that one.
So, yeah, you know.
Okay, so there's a political reason that I might have been slightly confused.
Yes.
I was like 95% sure it was in Argentina, but I didn't want to confidently state so.
But no, you know, it's literally the most southern, the southernmost city above like a certain population thing in the entire world.
It's, you know, it's practically in the Arctic Circle.
Like I saw videos of people who went there.
Yes.
And it's like, yeah, Membrana Station is like 200 miles that way.
Oh, yeah.
If you want to go to Antarctica, first you go to Ushua.
Yes, exactly.
Exactly.
Almost universally.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So that is a place I would very much like to visit.
I think it looks fascinating to me.
I have no reason to go there except just to just to say I've done it, but like it is, it is something that, you know, yeah.
Same here.
Same here.
Yeah.
Anyway, sorry, I interrupted you, but yeah, no, it does just, it does describe like the, the, you know, these places are large and diverse, you know, and like learning Spanish is a way of interacting with that, at least even in, even in the smallest ways, you know, and, you know, again, you know, five minutes is better, five minutes is better than zero minutes, you know, so, you know, you're obviously not going to be reading political pamphlets if you spend five minutes a day on Spanish.
You know, it'll take you 10 years to get to, you know, you know, to even begin to be able to do that.
But I mean, you know, you could at least, at least to be able to say hello and goodbye and at least to be able to like, you know, like, express some kind of solidarity.
I mean, I've, you know, I work with the public and occasionally, and I do run into people who speak Spanish as a first language on it on a pretty regular basis.
They are almost universally also fluent in English.
So there's no, you know, no question there.
But I found even being able to, even just to hola, even just, you know, like, oh, oh, you know, how would you like, you know, or, you know, yeah, what can I do for you today?
Like that sort of thing.
Just like, hey, is Spanish okay?
Is this piñol pien?
You know, that sort of thing.
And people like relax.
It really is like a thing of like, you know, it is, you know, I don't know, like, sorry, not to be, I'm not trying to be the white guy like saying like you can do this, but, you know, I've done it and I see people like visibly relax and be like, oh, you're not one of the assholes, you know, sort of thing, you know, who's going to, who's going to like be mad at me if I trip up my, if I trip up my, my infinitives in English, because English is a really hard language.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, the other thing here is that like, speaking of political solidarity, you know, the United States is entering a period in which the government is literally disappearing people off the street.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
And in major part, the people that they are targeting for this are people either who are themselves from originally Spanish-speaking countries or predominantly Spanish-speaking countries or whom the disappearers,
you know, ICE, these unmarked guys, who they assume, you know, because of their skin or because of their affect or for some other reason, they assume that they are from a Spanish-speaking country or that they assume that they're from ethnic groups that are from Spanish-speaking countries, right?
You know, they're racially profiling people.
And so being able to, like, if you were present and trying to witness one of these events, you know, trying to record it, if you were trying to record what happened in order to take place in some sort of like legal action or, you know, someday some sort of like truth and reconciliation committee, because like we're going to need something like that.
If, if, if, yeah, yeah, you know, yes, yes.
Lots of ifs involved in that one, but you know, yes.
God willing, we end up with one of those, right?
Or if you're trying to stop it when it's happening, like being able to communicate with people in multiple languages is just simply better.
Yes.
It's just simply better for you and for the people who are being targeted by this.
There's, there's, it, there are just so many benefits to it.
And organizing with people who another big thing that I, that I want to make sure that, that I talk about here is that like when you learn, coming from the United States, learning Spanish, and certainly the two languages here would be different in different places.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
But are an English speaker in the United States and you are learning Spanish for some political solidarity purposes.
Like not only will you be able to engage with actual physically present human organizers and people who are in need of political assistance or who you're helping defend against government action or whatever.
Not only are there real living physical human beings that you can engage with, not only is there news for you to consume, but there's also entire, extremely robust, very powerful political currents and traditions that you can engage with.
I mean, if you are in the United States today, you will know that like the May Day protests as like organizing labor events emerged first in the United States, yes.
But in the United States today, they're primarily run as immigrant rights marches because people came from Latin American countries where May Day is a holiday and they understand that immigrant rights are workers' rights.
It's a very clear, transparent connection here.
And so it just connects you to like, to whole universes of extremely successful, extremely powerful leftist and progressive organizing that otherwise you wouldn't be able to really access.
You wouldn't really be able to get close to.
It's one of the better things that I've done for my life in that capacity.
No, absolutely.
I have not reached that point, unfortunately.
But it's definitely, you know, I work, again, I work with the public.
I guess I can reveal this.
I work in a print copy center.
So I make copies on paper for a living.
That's what I do.
And for a while, we used to get UFW workers coming in to make 600 color flyers for their, you know, for stuff.
And it would be, you know, 300 in black or 300 in English and 300 in Spanish or, you know, that sort of thing.
And, you know, it does, you know, again, you know, it's like, it's like you're just suddenly connected to that just so much more.
If you can, you know, if you can feel like, you know, I have a little bit of an ability to communicate in that person's native language.
It just feels so much better.
Oh, also, I just wanted to say we just got a New York Times news alert because I'm embarrassed as I subscribe to the New York Times because it's important to get your news somewhere.
Supreme Court allows Trump to deport migrants to third countries.
So as we were recording this, I just got that.
I just got that news alert.
So, you know, all of this is very, very salient to what's going on in the news right now, you know?
So, yeah.
Oh, it's there's some really terrifying stuff happening, not just in the United States, but around the world.
And yeah, you can learning a second or third language is just, it's just a really, really incredible, powerful act.
Whenever I'm finding myself, whenever I'm finding myself sort of like thinking about how much work learning a language is, because it's a lot of work.
Oh, yeah, but I think that's something I do want to come to some of that at the end here, but yeah, no, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Whenever I find myself thinking about how much work it is, I think about Karl Marx.
I think about Marx sitting down with a Russian dictionary being like, well, I guess I got to learn Russian now.
Like, this is the late 19th century and like people are getting into me in Russian.
I got to, I'll be able to correspond with them, I guess.
And like, you know.
Well, I haven't got anything else to do.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
You know, it's not like I have four more volumes of capital that I promised people or something like that.
But, you know, it's something to remind yourself that like it's hard.
It's hard to do.
But the thing is, if it's hard for you, it's hard for the other people that you are implicitly asking to learn.
Exactly.
It's that English is so much harder.
If English is not your first language, English is so much harder than Spanish.
It's a second language.
It is.
It's one of the harder languages on earth to learn.
The fact that A, it's such a lingua franca of the world.
I love that I say lingua franca.
It's such a lingua franca of the world.
There's not an English phrase that means that, except we just adopt that term for it.
That's so funny.
The fact that like literally every educated person in the world learns some English.
And so like, you just get to expect to walk into places.
And of course you speak English, but English is, English is freaking hard.
I've been following, you know, again, just on Reddit for a while, I've been following like English language learning communities.
And like the questions these people have is like, well, why do you say it like this and not like that?
Like they speak perfectly fine English, but they're like, they're asking like that, so that, you know, they're, they're probably B2, you know, ish.
And they're still finding like these little like grammar rules.
It's like, why do, why do we, why do you say it this way?
Or like post a screenshot of a meme and like, why is this meme funny?
And that sort of thing.
And it's like, and then you have, and then you take, it takes like a linguistics degree to really like sit down and like explain, okay, this is why it's funny, you know?
It's fascinating stuff.
It's really fascinating stuff.
So yeah, I've I've definitely encountered, you know, I've tutored English language learners a few times, you know, in various contexts.
And yes, English is quite hard.
And so, yeah, just that's the, that's another thing that gets me through it is, is to think to myself, like, well, if, if I am saying that learning this other language is hard, it's too hard.
You know, if I think, oh, that's too hard and I don't want to do it.
That is me offloading work to somebody else.
Exactly.
Like, well, now you have to learn English in order for me to be able to communicate with you.
Exactly.
And if instead.
And I think it would be unreasonable to learn that.
I had someone come to my counter once who spoke Kenya Rwanda.
Kenya Rwanda is the national language of Rwanda.
I think it's not unreasonable to say, yeah, I don't speak Kenya Rwanda.
Like, I'm not going to learn for that one person I meet in the course of my life.
But Spanish is like, there are like tens of millions of people living in the United States who speak Spanish as a first language.
Like it is a significant minority language.
You should, you know, like, you know, and again, I'm not like, I didn't get on this until I was 45 years old.
So I'm not like blaming anybody for not doing it.
But I really, like, the more I've like studied Spanish, the more I've thought about it, the more I really do think like it, you know, if you're a leftist, you should speak a little Spanish.
Like you really, you, you really should.
I think it's in the United States.
Obviously that, that goes for, you know, we have, we have listeners from all over the world.
So, you know, I'm not, I'm not pretending that that's the case everywhere, but I think certainly in North America, you should speak some Spanish.
You know, you should, you should have some context for it.
Like, I don't know.
Like, it's just, I don't know.
Like, it seems having not thought about it for a long time and then having started to do it and then realizing like how important it is, like in the process of doing it.
And I think that was why I put that post up was just because, you know, like almost to hold myself accountable for this.
It's like, you know, I learned, I learned, I spent two years in high school learning Spanish and I spent about two years, a little more than two years learning Latin.
And I liked Latin more, you know, partly because you don't have to learn to speak or listen to Latin.
It's reading, but also it's very like grammar heavy.
So you're learning like case endings.
So it's a declined language.
So you're spending a lot of time, you know, like, you know, it felt more like a puzzle to me.
And so it was like, it was more fun and more interesting.
And, you know, when you learn Spanish, you're speaking, you know, I'd like to order paella at the restaurant.
And when, when you learn, when you learn Latin, it's like, and then the, and then the Romans conquered Gaul.
You know, it's just a very different kind of thing you're reading.
Very different feeling.
Yeah.
So, so, and I will say that learning, learning a little bit of Latin and knowing that, like what you're saying about like cognates from like more complicated words and having that like, um, you know, the grammatical structure and knowing how inflected languages work, even from an ancient, even from a dead language, really helped me a lot and,
in, and kind of, in, in all my kind of future like learning it's really like you know kind of having that structure down um and so yeah so um i mean you say like what get a text get a physical textbook and get a physical dictionary and you know sit down and read kids books is kind of like your kind of kind of first you know that that would be the way you'd say to start yeah i mean it i think it depends on what you want to do sure um if you want to be able to read then yeah you know the thing to do is yeah yes exactly yeah the thing to do is to sit down with either you know maybe a young
adult book or maybe a physical textbook, you know, pick up a learning Spanish textbook, pick up a learning Arabic textbook, something like that.
Something that's been really helpful for me that isn't in vogue anymore in language teaching.
And so pedagogically, somebody might get mad at me if you're listening to this and you are a language instructor, but it's something that's been very helpful for me.
It's something they used to make.
They're called graded readers or graduated readers.
And so it'll be a single book and the first thing in the book is like a one story page that's sort of like, you know, C-spot run, C-jane run type stuff.
And then by the end, you're, you know, reading, it's like a maybe sixth, seventh, eighth grade level, you know, young adult fiction, something like that.
Right, yeah, sure.
And that to me has felt like a very natural way.
That was something that I used with Portuguese.
I was like, okay, I sat down with an English Portuguese dictionary.
I sat down with a graded reader and I moved my way through having Spanish and English.
I had a big leg up, but you know, starting from Spanish, that would also work.
If your goal is to talk to people, then again, no surprise.
You got to talk to people.
You want to have a foundation there.
So, you know, some of the apps can help.
I've, you know, used them sometimes.
There's also just like, there's resources online.
You know, maybe you could be like, I'm going to make little flashcards of the hundred most common verbs and the thousand most common nouns.
Right.
And that'll be really helpful.
That's something that I did again for Portuguese to sort of like get myself centered on, you know, differences between Portuguese and Spanish, because there are quite, quite, quite a few, especially when it comes to sort of like everyday nouns.
And obviously I do not actually believe you can support to use a Spanish accent.
I was, I was joking.
You know?
Well, whenever I met Argentines in Argentina, that is a joke that they made too.
So, you know.
Solidarity with the Argentinian crowd, apparently.
Well, usually, usually the joke is that, is that Brazilians understand Argentines, but Argentines don't understand Brazilians.
That's usually the joke that people make.
Fair enough.
Fair enough.
Putting the advantage on the side of the Brazilians who are like, well, yeah, you know, like we, we, we, we can understand Spanish and they don't understand Portuguese.
For them, for them, Spanish is the, is the language of their oppressors because Spanish is so much more spoken in South America.
Yeah.
I never really thought about it that way.
That's interesting.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, I mean, Brazil's the most populous and in many ways, the most, the most wealthy.
Yes.
But that, the wealthy, the wealthiness of Brazil is something that's relatively recent, I guess, you know, maybe only in less, like in this last century.
History, history recent, you know.
Yeah, sure, sure, sure, sure.
Yeah.
But when it comes to, so like, if, if, if you want to speak a language, like you want to be able to have conversations with the people, there is no substitute for having conversations with people.
So one option there is go out and take a class at a community college.
If you live in a major urban area in the United States, there will probably be one or several, you know, private institutions that will offer you classes.
And, you know, they might be, some of them will be like, hey, this is a class for like, maybe you want to go do medical work in this country and you want to learn a bunch of medical terms or a legal class.
Or maybe it's just a conversation class and it's just going to be you, an instructor, and maybe two or three other people.
And you're just like chatting.
Yeah.
Again, if you live in a major urban area in the United States, there will probably be events in your city that are like, these are events for people who are practicing languages.
And so like you come and you're trying to practice your Spanish.
Other people are maybe trying to practice their English or practice another language.
And you can, you know, cooperate and collaborate in that way.
I know that there are, there is a couple of those in the United States.
If you have the privilege of being able to go to a country in Latin America, even for like a couple of weeks or a month or something and take an immersive class, that is a big benefit.
That's something that I did back in college.
And it was really helpful for me in terms of really cementing my Spanish.
Yeah.
I do think that that helps more when you, after you've got a little bit of your belt, like, you know, it's not like a beginner move.
Now I, so the other language I'm really like trying to put some time into every day is Czech.
And that's because I lived in Prague for a month back in 2010 and I, I kind of fell in love with it.
And I, so I heard it around me every day and I learned a lot.
I just learned a lot from like reading street signs and reading like, like, you know, just going places and, you know, like the Rodney means this and, you know, like, you know, like, you know, and so, um, and I found like it, so like picking that up, actually when I started doing Russian, it's like, it's very similar, you know, a lot of the words transferred over, um, you know, so it was like, it was very much a, uh, in fact, I learned I can't do both because they interfere in my head.
Um, maybe if I get pretty good at one, I can learn the other, but it was like, it was just impossible, um, to do both.
People always told me to, people always told me not to practice Spanish and Portuguese at the same time.
And it is definitely true.
When I was in Argentina, I would occasionally encounter people who were Brazilian and like speak Portuguese with them.
And that, that was, that was pretty tough.
Yeah, no, I can, I can hear you.
You know, cause I would just end up speaking Spanish and apologize and they'd be like, no, I get it.
Yeah.
Um, yeah, no, I, I think that, I think the key to that is like, you need to get like pretty good at one before you start learning the others.
Kind of the advice that I see.
Um, um, I will say for myself, Spanish is also like, you know, if you speak English, Spanish is the easiest language to get into in the fucking world.
Um, it is, there are so many, um, free, I would not disagree with anything that Craig said, although I haven't done a whole lot of that, but you know, having even like my high school classes have given me a lot of like, there's a little like grammar in my back, in the back of my head.
There's a lot of stuff that I just can't bring, bring up because I haven't used it in 30 years, but like going through the lessons and going through stuff, I find myself like really kind of like, you know, finding stuff and going, Oh, that's how that works.
And now, now I finally got the explanation for why it was that way.
All those many years ago, et cetera.
But I do find, you know, there, there are YouTube channels, you know, there's this, you know, and, and some of these things get a little bit like, you know, I won't talk about the details cause I don't, I'm not good enough at Spanish to really be able to say like, this is something that I would recommend, you know, except like do it every day.
I'm doing, I'm doing Duolingo.
I'm doing Spanish on Duolingo.
I paid for it and I paid for it January.
I'm going to keep it until my, my subscription runs out.
And I still feel like it's given me usage and then I'll keep it up.
Um, I will say of the courses on Duolingo, the ones I've tried, Spanish is by far the best.
It is, it is head and shoulders, but even German, I've never tried French.
I heard French is also very good.
French just annoys me for other reasons.
So all those, all those freaking vowels.
I just can't, I just can't do French, you know, I will do the consonant clusters of a, of a, of a, of a check before I even began to, you know, do the, do the like super precise vowels of French.
It's just every time I even look at French, it just like, it annoys me to know it.
Another thing I would definitely recommend.
Um, and, and there are a couple of sites for this.
I've used one in the past called Verbling.
Okay.
This is, it's a, it's a site that connects you to a private language tutor.
Yeah.
I think it's hockey is kind of the big one right now.
Um, and that's, that's, I, I'm planning to do that as soon as I have a little bit more stable employment.
That's kind of my goal.
Yes.
Um, yeah, exactly.
Um, it's, it, it does cost money, but because of exchange rates, you know, it is possible to get, you know, an hour long lesson for.
You know, the price of a sandwich perhaps in a major urban area in the United States.
And if you can swing that it is helpful and it also is literally paying people from the live in the country.
Like some of the top end that I've seen is like $30 an hour, which is really not much.
It's really, really not much.
And, um, that's what, you know, some of these people have, like, you know, they have certificate, like C2 certifications of like six languages or something.
And of course that's the person whose expertise I would absolutely be worth paying that for, you know, um, but a lot of times you can find it for, you know, 10 bucks for, for 30 minutes and that sort of thing.
And, um, you know, one of the things I've, one of the, one of the reasons I want to do it is it will give you like instant speaking practice with somebody who is literally paid to listen to you and to help you, you know, um, which really feels better than like trying to accost people on the street and force them to teach you Spanish.
Um, certainly.
Yes.
Yes.
And, and you can, you know, you can tailor your, what you want, you know, you can say like, Hey, I'm just getting over the hump of like actually speaking and like, I'm nervous about it.
And so like, please don't correct me until I'm done talking.
Or you can say like, Hey, actually, please just like, just like, tell me, Hey, hold up.
And you conjugated that verb wrong or whatever, which, which is what I asked my tutor to do.
Um, because, because I'm, I'm a, I don't know, a masochist, I guess.
What I, what I find is really annoying to me lately is I've been doing my Duolingo lessons and I've been trying to not translate to just do it in Spanish and to not like translate it.
And so I turned off the word bank.
And so I like type it out.
Hey, I do Duolingo on my computer, not on my phone.
I find that much more useful and it forces me to actually like type in the language.
Um, I'm not speaking it, but I am like typing in it.
And so I'm getting like that kind of practice.
What I find is like, I will often make like minor typos and then it marks me wrong where I got the, the other thing, the other part that I was focused.
I'm focusing on like making sure that these two endings match or making sure the, the grammar works.
And then like, Oh, I actually typed low, this is a loss.
And that was completely cause that part of the sentence.
I was just, I was just doing by rote and didn't, and I didn't go back and reread it because I'm also trying to, you know, engage it with speed so that it's like, so that it's not, um, you know, so, so, and then, then I make the same mistake four times because, all right, do the same sentence four times and make a different minor mistake each time.
And I just want to be like, just let me pass this fucking sentence, please.
You know?
So, um, you know, your mileage may vary on that, but, um, you know, it often is something where I knew the right answer, but I just typed it wrong.
You know, I just hit the wrong, you know, and, and that's, that's, that's annoying, but, um, you know, yeah, sorry.
That's, that's a, that's a me problem.
You know, but, uh, one last thing I want to say about, about practicing and, and avenues for practice.
And, uh, you know, this is another one where your mileage may vary.
If this isn't your thing, maybe it wouldn't work.
But, um, you know, we've been talking a lot about like practice that, that looks like homework, right?
You know, a tutor, a book, a dictionary, like, oh no, but like, there's obviously there's so many other things, you know, watch television in Spanish.
Particularly like kids television, I was thinking about like Disney plus translates a bunch of their stuff into Spanish.
If you have a Disney plus subscription, which you may or may not feel politically about that.
I, you know, I live in a house where we just have a Disney plus subscription.
It has a lot of like cool stuff.
I said earlier, I was watching the Simpsons in Spanish.
Um, yes.
Simpsons is a great option.
You know, it's a, I find that it's, it's, I wouldn't, it's a little bit complicated.
Like some of the grammar constructions are a little bit complicated.
And it's also like the subtitles don't match the speaking because the subtitles are meant for one group of people.
And the dub is meant for another.
Um, but I find turning them both on and just sort of like comparing them to each other, just casually.
I find that that's been useful for me.
I've only done a few episodes, but that's been, you know, it gives me a sense of it, you know, but like Disney movies, you know, watch your favorite Disney movies.
You can watch, I was watching a little bit of Lilo and Stitch, which is like my favorite Disney movie.
I watched the first 20 minutes of that.
I just did it in Spanish.
I know that movie pretty well.
And it could be, you know, like, like, you know, and obviously it's like, it's tough to tell like a 30 year old, like, yeah, go read, go read C spot run in Spanish.
And that's because that's part of it is that stuff feels embarrassed.
Well, and it gets boring.
I mean, it just gets to the point where like this, I'm not interested in this content.
And so basically I can think really what you have to do, you have to find something that works for you.
And I think that's what I was meaning by there is so many resources for Spanish, you know?
You know, I'm wanting to check, I said, I'm wanting to check and check is like so much harder because there's just not a lot of stuff out there.
The beauty of check is if you are learning it, you can reach out to like, because it's a minority language, because it's a small language.
There are people who will kind of teach you for free or for very cheaply.
There are like resources for doing that.
But the idea of just being able to like turn my favorite TV show and put it into check is just not a thing, you know?
You have to really go and seek out content.
Yeah.
Something that's really worked for me for Spanish and Portuguese is I watch anime.
Anime is already translated.
Right.
into English if I'm going to be reading subtitles or listening to a dub already then like just do that in the target language in the language that you're trying to learn you know so if you are already say watching a german tv show or like you know one of those like scandinavian cop dramas then Like, that's probably dubbed or subbed into Spanish in the European market anyway.
You know, like, check that out.
Yeah.
Netflix has a huge variety of shows that are in the show.
Netflix does a weird thing because they actually like CDI the mouths of a lot of stuff.
So they do.
I was watching that.
I watched a documentary about this at one point, about like how they, how they do this.
So, but I, I was trying, I tried Oceans 11 because I was watching another George Clooney movie and I was like, oh, I really, I miss, I miss, I really like that.
I really like that, that first Ocean's 11 movie.
And I was like, yeah, put it on in Spanish, you know, because I know that movie really well.
And it is so bizarre watching like the mouth moves try to match the Spanish as opposed to the English.
That's terrible.
That's terrible.
I watched the first like three minutes and I'm like, hey, this is too hard for me.
Like it's just, it's just, I, I, I know kind of where, like, I could do the Simpsons because it's fairly simple constructions.
And oh my God, like episode two, there's like a Scrabble game being played.
And so it's so much fun watching the originally English language thing done in Spanish, but then they're spelling all the words in English.
So it's like the Simpsons in this universe are playing Scrabble.
They speak Spanish fluently, but they're playing Scrabble in English, which suddenly makes some of those jokes make a little bit more sense of like, oh, I don't know that word in English.
Like, it's like, okay, you know, no, sorry.
Just a fun, just a fun thing.
It was like, I forgot that was there until it was there.
And then I'm like, oh my God, you know, like this.
Speaking of, and it's interesting that you brought up one of the elephants in the room in terms of language learning, which is AI, right?
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
You might get somebody telling you like, well, why would you need to learn another language?
There's going to be like insta-translation, whatever, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
First of all, no, that's just like probably, as far as I understand it, not going to happen in like a perfectly robust way.
And certainly not.
Google Translate is better than you would have any reason to think it is.
If what you want to do is Google Translate is pretty incredible.
If you want to do this read street signs and get like a basic gist of stuff.
Yes.
Google Translate is very incredible as a tourist.
It'll probably get you pretty far.
When I had that young woman speaking Kenya Rwanda to me, Google Translate had Kenya Rwanda.
I could type to her and she could read it, but I could tell that the translation was not great because she couldn't understand what I was, you know, she puzzled it out and like typed back at me.
But it was like, so, you know, I mean, I'm sure for Spanish, it's much better, but, you know, still, it's.
The translations can be very good.
Yeah.
But what I mean is that like, if you are learning a language for a political purpose and, you know, maybe, for example, you're doing stuff, you're communicating on signal because you want your communication to be as, you know, secure and as private as possible.
And then just show it to Google.
Yes.
Then obviously you cannot put it into a translation out.
Yes, absolutely.
Absolutely.
You need to be doing that in your own brain.
Yes.
Additionally, right, you know, just like as a general principle of trying to rely as little as possible on systems that are owned by people who are opposed to you and your interests.
Yes.
It is a, it's a, it's just a general principle to try to try to be able to not rely on that.
You know, obviously, this isn't me telling you not to use Google Translate.
I do that all the time when I encounter a word and I don't know what it is.
Like, of course.
Yeah, I Google, I Google words all the time and I try not to like keep it open next to me.
I'll always like open the tab and Google it and just go like, I can't, like, I know I know that word.
I just can't remember it.
You know, what is it again?
Yeah.
Just so I can like move on, you know, but um.
But all of which is to say just like, you know, while that might be something that can be helpful, sometimes it shouldn't be something that you should rely on.
And again, even if AI translation becomes like note perfect, like full-on colloquial speech ideal, you still couldn't use it for organizing purposes.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
You still can't.
And it is kind of a mark of disrespect to the people you're trying to organize.
Like, you know, I can, I'm going to speak to you from on high using this like techno, you know, this, this techno option instead of like actually speaking to you as you would speak to each other.
I mean, you know, so there is, there is that element as well.
I mean, obviously, if you're organizing, it's better than any organizing is better than no organizing.
But like, if you are trying to, you know, if we are political actors and we are trying to act politically in the world, that means interacting with human beings and not machines, you know, on a fundamental level, you know.
I will say, you know, when it comes to communication, I have heard from some organizing friends in the past about actions organized at extremely diverse workplaces that were organized exclusively in emoji.
Yeah.
No, I would, I would, I would believe it.
Yeah, no.
Yeah.
Pretty incredible stuff.
But all of which is to say that like communication is good.
Do it as best you can.
Learn another language.
And you will, this is something that I see.
This is something that I found.
You will find pretty quickly if the method you're learning isn't working for you.
And again, just speaking for Spanish, there are so many other options out there.
There are so many YouTube channels.
There's so many different, there's so much advice you can get from people.
If something isn't working for you, it isn't working for you.
And if it is working for you, then keep pursuing that because nobody has the key.
There's not like a, also, something I did want to highlight.
I think you mentioned it earlier, but I did want to just highlight it.
This is a slow process.
This is not something anybody who sells you you're going to learn in 90 days, you're going to be fluent in 90 days.
You're not even going to be conversational in 90 days.
You're not even, you're going to be reading C-Spot Run in 90 days, realistically.
Depending on how hard your language is, but Spanish, you know, as an English speaker, Spanish is pretty easy.
You will be even lower in like Mandarin Chinese if you try to do that.
So anybody, anybody trying to pretend that that's happening is selling you, you know, it's not worth the paper it's written on.
And so, you know, look for things that are, you know, that realistically tell you like, you're going to spend thousands of hours on this.
Like to get good at it, you're going to spend thousands of hours on it.
And I think that's something that, you know, I think something that people should just have realistically in their heads when they start the project.
Sounds good.
Okay.
Well, thanks, guys, for that very interesting discussion.
And yeah, that was fascinating to listen to.
Thank you ever so much.
And Craig, thanks for coming on the show.
You are always and continuingly welcome to come back on anytime you want to talk.
Yeah.
Lovely to speak with both of you.
Again, fortunately, this time it was actually about something nice to talk about.
Yeah, yeah.
Give me a couple of years.
We'll do it in Spanish.
How about that?
That sounds great.
That sounds wonderful.
Okay.
Yeah.
It'll be a while.
It'll be a while, but I'll try that.
I'm sending that as a goal.
We'll do an episode in Spanish like, you know, 2027 or so.
In the meantime, everybody, you're going to have to continue to tolerate listening to us in English.
Or you could just stop listening, I suppose.
Nobody's forcing you listening.
As long as you keep donating to the Patreon, that's the important part.
Yeah, that's really all we care about.
We don't really mind if you stop listening so long as you keep supporting.
We do this for the money.
It's a good job we don't do this for the money, isn't it, really?
Although I'm very grateful for whatever comes in, it does help very much so.
Okay, well, everybody, thanks ever so much for listening, and we will be back with you quite soon with some more language of various types.
Until then.
Probably English, but yes.
Probably.
Jack here, dropping in at the very end to tell you where you can find Craig, because professional that I am, I forgot at the end of this recording session to give him an opportunity to promote his work.
Craig has a podcast called 15 Minutes of Fascism.
You can find that in all the usual places.
His Patreon is under the same name.
He can be found on Blue Sky at cajohnson-craig.bsky.social.
