Robin MacPherson: How To Maintain Languages

But anyway, I have a little, uh, request for you. If you are anyone with, uh, a little bit of a musical talent or maybe you have a good voice, uh, send me an email, kris@actualfluency.com if you want to help me create some cool intros and outros and maybe some, you know, music in between, some, uh, background music that I can use to, uh, make the new series even better, then, uh, please send me a message. Um, I don't have a massive budget, just so you don't waste your time, uh, but if you, if you are a, uh, sort of a hobby enthusiast, I, I definitely do will compensate in, in the best way that I can. So, kris@actualfluency.com. Send me your, uh, send me your email and, uh, you know, let's make it great. Let's make the podcast great again, right?

Uh, but anyway, here is the, uh, actual real introduction. This episode is brought to you by Glossika. Glossika provides a unique way to acquire fluency in a foreign language by focusing on listening and speaking skills introduced in via sentence patterns, so that you can learn on how to control the sentences that you want to say step-by-step. You can get started now by going to actualfluency.com/glossika. Hello, everyone, and welcome to a new episode of The Actual Fluency Podcast, which is super exciting because it's been quite a while since I, I put out a new episode, and, uh, many of you have been wondering what has Kris been up to, you know, why are there no new episodes? What's been going on? And I want to just quickly tell you what's been going on. Uh, but first I want to obviously recommend, first of all, you go to actualfluency.com and join the email list, where I often send out an email, usually about once a week, updating on what I'm up to, what's been going on, everything in that order. And the second suggestion I'll have is the new podcast I'm doing. So, I didn't only bring back this podcast, The Actual Fluency Podcast, I'm actually bringing out a new one called Language Learner Weekly, where each week I sit down and talk in, in sort of a segmented way, so it's a few short segments about what's been going on that week, what's on my mind, what's in the news and take questions and comments from the listeners as well. And I did decide to do this new podcast because I felt the actual fluency podcast was more of a timeless thing. So, I wanted to talk to someone like Richard Simcott and have his language learning tips and tricks that you can listen to on the day of the release of the episode, but also five years from now. And actually, we're getting close to five years now, I guess, so that becomes quite relevant. But what I always felt awkward doing was like I'm doing now, I guess I'm guilty of, is in the beginning of the episode, if you're tuning in later, you know, what sense does it make to, uh, you know, be told that the polyglot gathering is coming up next week or, you know, all these things that are, that are just not relevant at all. And I, I looked through the previous episodes and there are some episodes that are completely pointless now, which is a shame, but of course, when they came out, they were quite interesting. So, I always had this dilemma of balancing timelessness and, uh, timeliness, which is also important because obviously we're in the thick of it, we're learning the languages now and this is where we need the support. So, I'm running an experiment with the new show called Language Learner Weekly, which is on a new app called Anchor, uh, you know, like the ship's anchor. And what it allows me to do is, first of all, it's quite easy to use for me. So, it's not, it's not adding a lot of work for me to produce. Of course, I still need to actually, uh, record it and, and organize content and everything. But the app itself is very intuitive, and it allows the listener, that is you, for instance, to send me questions directly in the app, to listen to the segments that you want to listen to. So, for instance, with The Actual Fluency Podcast, you won't, weren't really able to listen to different parts of the episode. All you could do was the all of it or nothing. So, with the new podcast, I hope to make it a little bit more snappy, you know, 5, 10-minute segments, maybe three segments per episode, including mailbag and, and news and everything. And so, I hope to make it more of a half-hour show really. So, you can listen to it pretty much on the bus or train or commute. Um, whereas this podcast will probably always be sort of the hour mark, just because it's more in-depth, it's more discussion, uh, it's drilling down into very specific topics. Um, so I hope you give a Language Learner a try, you know, the, the easiest way to get started with listening to that is anchor.fm/languagelearner. And in there you can choose different feeds. You know, there's iTunes, there's Overcast, there's all these different ways of listening to it. But of course, the best experience is through the Anchor app itself, because you can then pick the segments, you can send me messages directly. But if you don't want to install yet another app, I totally understand you. And, um, if you just want to listen to the whole episode as one, you can use iTunes. It's totally fine that way. So, let's get into it. Today's episode. I thought about how to restart the series, and I was thinking for a moment to make like a a a long solo episode. But I feel like I've been making a lot of solo episodes lately. Probably to excuse for my poor logistics, you know, with not having a place to live and, um, well, I guess I should give you the quick story. So, I was living in Budapest in 2015, 2016. I had my own flat there for most of the time, and I was producing episodes quite regularly. That was pretty much my only job. I was working on actual fluency, language learning, teaching Danish as a full-time job. Um, but when I took a month off to go to Canada for the North American Polyglot Symposium, which is today Montreal Langfest, I came back to a Budapest which was completely messed up. I was very unlucky. But basically, I quit my apartment when I left because I thought there's no point in paying rent two places. And my lease was ending by then anyway, because I'd been in Budapest for a year. So, I thought, okay, I'll just find a new flat when I come back. But by then, the the work I was doing had sort of, uh, reduced a bit, and I was lower income than before. So, the idea of renting an apartment for say 600 euros plus bills per month was suddenly becoming a bit unrealistic. Uh, I managed to find a place with, uh, where that price included the bills, uh, but it was terrible. It was like an old hotel, and it didn't have internet for one, which was awful. It didn't have much privacy. There was, uh, very thin walls. So, I couldn't really record much. And that's why I took a really long break. Then I moved back to Denmark because everything was just collapsing. I was living outside of Budapest suddenly in this abandoned hotel with the worst hotel owner ever, with the, you know, no internet, bad rooms. It was all bad, and I was getting depressed almost, you know. Um, so I moved back to Denmark, intending to rejoin university, try and finish my degree. I figured if I had a degree, I could get into some kind of job or, um, career or something. But, um, I couldn't start until September, and even then, the university questioned my previous merits. Uh, basically, there was some issues over one exam that I had misunderstood or something, and I didn't show up for one, and I thought, okay, if I don't show up, I can always show up for the next one. And but apparently, that counts against you somehow, and and therefore, um, they considered, they didn't consider my leaving the university quite, uh, I don't know, honorable. Uh, I didn't know at the time, but whatever, it doesn't bother me anymore. But, um, I realized that I had to kind of make a new start and, and, and get going. So, I decided to move to the UK. I always liked the UK. And, um, I knew that I didn't want to live in Denmark, which is a bit tough, because that's where my family is. That's where I'm from. But I always felt like something was missing. And so, I decided to go to the UK. And, um, I put on, I, I searched for Danish jobs in the UK, and I found, I think, about 10 or so job posts from, you know, Dublin to London to, uh, Edinburgh to Manchester, and it was exactly Manchester that I was lucky enough to get a callback from a rental car company running a call center in Manchester, and they offered me sort of a an entry-level job with, uh, basic salary. And that allowed me to move over, find a room, start to get a routine. And I figured as long as I had a job, you know, I could always try and look for something else, um, to kind of start some, some kind of a career instead of just being in a entry-level job. But anyway, eight months passed, and I was sort of half looking for jobs, not seriously, but every once in a while, I would just check what was out there, do a few half-assed, uh, attempts at applications. And then, finally, things happened. I, uh, got a recruiter calling me about a job in, about an hour away from Manchester, in a city called Stoke-on-Trent, which is actually a collection of cities that's kind of merged into one. And, uh, this job would offer me much better pay. But more importantly, it would be a step up in that it had much more responsibility. It was a corporate job, uh, you know, not that the other wasn't, but it was more of a sweatshop, really, more of a call center, where it seemed like with the new job, it was more of a, you're part of a something bigger. And you're selling your own products now, whereas before we were sort of affiliating for rental car companies. So, with that in