Mark Pentleton: From Teacher to Language Podcaster (Coffee Break Languages)

Welcome to the Actual Fluency Podcast with Kris Broholm. This show will inspire, motivate, and teach you how to learn foreign languages the best way. On this show, you'll hear incredible stories from amazing language learners who've learned 5 to 10, even 30 plus languages, as well as industry experts who help shape modern language learning through innovation and research. As we dive into language learning methods, techniques, and apps, you'll quickly discover what works and what doesn't. This is the Actual Fluency podcast, and this is Kris Broholm.

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I'm delighted to be here.

Um obviously founder of Radiolingua, you might know the company behind uh the Coffee Break series. Um but Mark, can you just describe just what we what it looks like right now if somebody wants to look at us.

Well, we're in a in a in a little box that's about um probably seven feet by about four feet. Um and it's covered in blue tiles. Um we've got two windows so that we can actually see out. Um but yeah, this is our our recording booth that we use for all our Coffee Break podcasts and we're delighted to have a special guest here today in the shape of Chris. Um so yeah, that's where we are.

Fantastic. And uh, you know, I might come back and do all the actual fluency episodes in here.

Okay, you'll need to schedule that back.

Okay, yeah, we'll figure it out. It's a little hot here, but uh hopefully it doesn't get too bad during the summer.

I should say we do have a thermometer in here. We're currently sitting at 24 degrees. Um a record so far is 32.4. Wow. So hopefully we won't get to 32.4.

Where's the oxygen supply monitor? Uh, is there okay.

Yeah, we we we do have a a filter and a like a an air conditioning unit, but the problem is it's noisy. So we can't we can't put it on.

It's too noisy. You can't get the quality. But anyway, Mark, thank you so much for coming on the Actual Fluency podcast and taking the time with me today. Um, so the first question, as you probably have heard as a listener, is uh, what's your background in languages? How did you first get interested in it? Do you remember anything as a child growing up hearing foreign languages?

Yeah. Um, well, first of all, my grandmother was Italian. Uh, so we did have a little bit of Italian at home. We we didn't speak Italian all the time at home, but um, you know, my grandmother would would tell me to to close the door and come here and all those kind of instructions and so on, um, in Italian. And I loved trying it out and I loved trying to to say a few words.

And when you did you have any foreign languages in school in elementary school, primary school?

Not in primary school at all back then. Um, so it was when I went to secondary school before um I I first started learning French. And at that stage, I did French for uh, five years at secondary school and later on in secondary, I picked up Italian and I did a kind of crash course in in Italian, which was helped by the fact that we had a little bit of of Italian in the family, but I guess my Italian was more sort of formally learned than uh, yeah, than than than naturally learned around me.

Right. And how did you, did you choose a degree based on that or your further studies?

Yeah, I went on to study French and Italian and then swapped to Hispanic studies. So I did French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese um at university and I absolutely loved it. It was a combination of language and literature and culture and so on. So um yeah, that's kind of where I I really sort of got more deeply into the language. I also did a a night class in Norwegian at the time. Wow. Which proved to be very useful uh later in life. Um, but uh, yeah, it was just uh, I went along on a Tuesday night or something like that to uh to learn a little bit of Norwegian.

I tried one of those for Italian. It's uh, it's an interesting experience being in a night class because it it really takes some extra motivation to to get going.

Yeah definitely. So the people who were there they're quite keen I find in compared to normal school where you know everyone's mandated to be there so it's kind of hard to get the motivation.

Yeah, definitely. But I enjoyed it. I think the I think one of my I don't know whether this is a problem or it's it's a good thing. Um, but one of the issues I had was I was wanting to go much faster than the the class was going because I would I would get the book and then work through the book. So I I would be, I don't want to say more advanced than the the other learners there, but I was definitely motivated to learn, um, but I found perhaps the people in the class were were going along to the class and they didn't maybe didn't have time to do any more than that. Um, so I guess it it the teacher at the time, I think wanted me to stop asking questions basically so that she could teach to everyone rather than answer my questions. I was probably a bad pupil.

Maybe. But well or a really good one.

Well, I guess there's two ways of looking at it.

Yeah, the balance I guess is a little bit off, but uh so you're you're a professional uh, I guess you're a professional language teacher at that point. Uh so you you get a job in teaching languages to others at that point when you're done?

Exactly, yeah. So I finished my degree at Glasgow University and then I did uh teacher training and uh became a teacher in a secondary school in in the south side of Glasgow, which I absolutely adored. I I loved teaching in in a school. I thought it was just the most wonderful uh opportunity to share my passion about about language learning with young people. Um I taught French and Spanish there for four years and uh absolutely loved it.

Did you find any resistance from the students in in language class? I mean second uh, second-tier students are notoriously kind of uh let's say resisting a lot of the education that they're receiving. So for language studies, did you find that a lot of people were a lot of the pupils were saying, what do we need this for? What's the point? You know, I'm not living in Spain or.

Yeah. I think we in the UK in in general, we suffer from the fact that English is our first language and that that is the language that ultimately the rest of the world seems to want to learn. And we suffer as a result because young people aren't perhaps surrounded by the language that they're learning in school. So I would imagine in Denmark, you would be surrounded by English and you would have lots of English music, English films, English TV programs and and so on. Absolutely yeah.

Yeah, that's been my biggest criticism of of school language learning anyway uh from the very beginning of of Actual Fluency. I was writing about how language learning in schools is really bad, but not because of not because the teachers, is not because the students often, it's mostly because the the the subject is being treated exactly like maths or physics where you're supposed to learn a lot of facts and then being able to recite those facts.

Yeah, I would have to say that there are two things, two sort of influences there that are are important to recognize. One is that when it comes to learning facts and and so on, then it's very often the exam that is determining that and therefore teachers perhaps feel the need to teach to the exam because ultimately pupils have got to get through that exam. That's what everything's based on.

Absolutely. I think often, I've had some fantastic language teachers over the years and I've heard a lot of stories of people who have had great language teachers that inspired them to do more languages after they were done with school even. Mhm. Um, but again and again, it's just the system that's not built for for the real world really. It's like, you know, here's all the conjugations of a verb even though one of the conjugations you'll only use one out of a thousand sentences. It's like, why did I spend mental capacity in the beginning of learning German to to know that form? Yeah. And even if you say the wrong form, you'll still be understood in many languages. So it's like a total waste of time.

Yeah. And it's like, it's your biggest gift, but it's also your biggest kind of weakness for for the English-speaking world because obviously speaking English gives you unprecedented opportunities across the world. Uh like for instance, you could become a an English teacher in China tomorrow probably. They need so many people. Uh and they would probably pay for your flights, your apartment and and everything. So uh that's a good good thing.

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You're listening to the Actual Fluency podcast. And now back to Kris.

All right, we're back here with Radiolingua founder Mark Pendleton. Mark, uh we've been listening a little bit to the educational side of things before and I really wanted to get into learning a little bit more about Mark the obviously the founder of Radiolingua, I want to know about, but also if we can contrast maybe some of your teaching and school learning experiences from university to how you would do it today. Yeah. That would be great. So I don't know which one you think we want to jump into right now.

Um well, here at Coffee Break, we I guess what we feel is we specialize in teaching languages to people who perhaps don't consider themselves as language learners. Um so obviously our our beginner's courses, our our our season one courses of of Coffee Break French, Spanish, German, Italian, and Mandarin, and I think by the time this goes out Swedish too. Um, they are for absolute beginners, people who perhaps have never come across the language before.

Yes, it's a great format and a lot of people are commuting, of course, so they that I in my opinion that it's like time travel in a way because you you add learning onto uh an an existing activity. So that's like adding hours in the day. Absolutely. Uh so it's a great format for that. And I I know I've heard from a lot of listeners who are, you know, in America and find themselves in very, very bad traffic like in LA. So shout out to my uh commuter friends out there, you know, it's it's not as bad as it looks when when you can have a good podcast in your ears, but uh how let's go back to the beginning of the company. When did you first think about, oh, I want to do something more with my language hobby or passion as your teaching professionally, of course.

At the time, we were um coming to the end of the project that I mentioned, so the partners in excellence project, the funding was running out from the Scottish government. So I was going to be working on uh projects in education but not language-related. So I kind of thought, oh, I I still want to be involved in in language teaching and uh at that stage, this was 2005 and uh podcasting was very much just in the the early stages. We had done some podcasting within the project. So we had a project podcast, so all the the the students that were involved in this project were listening to the podcast. But this was in very early days. This was pre-iPhone and pre-iPod and so on, you know. Yeah. Um so we we were we were experimenting with with podcasts in in my day job as it were.

Fantastic. And obviously Spanish uh really popular language in the world. I mean there's the what's it the second most learned language in the world or something like that. Yeah. So obviously getting in there's a fantastic. But I'm sure at the time it was a a hobby turning into a a kind of a full, fully-fledged uh company and and dream must have been, I mean much been amazing at the time.

Yeah, I mean way back then I was still working full-time in a day job um as as many people have done, made made that transition from day job to part-time and then uh I went full-time on on uh Coffee Break. And I think at that point we we first of all started to think, well, maybe we could produce some show notes and and the show notes might sell. Um we we could charge a dollar for the show notes or something like that. And that's what we did and and then people uh suddenly started buying and I thought, whoa, this this definitely could be be something bigger.

Exactly, yeah. I think the the process is still a slow one. We we we don't turn out these courses. They they are they're carefully thought out, they're carefully prepared. They they they are not just random lessons in a series. So it's all very much uh designed in in the the best way for the learner.

It's coming uh all the additions. But you say 40 hours of or 40 episodes for a season. Yep. So how long, just a complete estimate, would you take from conception to final uh edit of the 40 episodes just to give people an idea of the scale involved?

Yeah, well, I mean for example with with Swedish which we're doing just now and this is having learned lots and lots and lots over the past 13 years. Um so with Swedish we started the process of of creating the content and writing the content and writing the the outline and so on back in uh sort of July this year. Um we've now had maybe three or four recording sessions um and by the end of next week we'll have recorded up to the lesson 10. Um so there is a lot that goes into to the design of the course and and the editing of afterwards and so on.

Right. And also you're very much part of all the podcasts so far.

Yeah, so far.

And uh, so obviously you running a company but also being the voice of the episodes. Yeah. It's a lot of work for as well.

Yeah. I mean I think first of all I love teaching. I love uh being involved in the teaching process and I think if I wasn't involved in that teaching process then I would perhaps enjoy my my my my work less. Um and when it comes to the the teaching, again it's for me it's not necessarily about teaching in a didactic sense, it's about sharing that love for learning and learning the language and about the culture and so on.

Yeah, and I also think that for listeners, uh especially people who are interested in multiple languages, having that familiar voice brings back some kind of yeah, it makes it easier to stay on track because it's not just a new random Italian voice or a new random. So I think that might be a like an extra benefit that you didn't mention, just to have that central topic. And I I've seen a lot of the comments, you know, it's I learned French from a Scottish guy, you know, it's it's some great comments out there and they all they all love you for for being part of all the episodes of show.

Yeah, a couple of comments referring to Shrek and things like that, you know. Right. I've learned Spanish from Shrek in this one.

I'm sure lovingly uh submitted. But I think the other thing is that as a as a learner of, you know, yes, okay, I'm the I'm the teacher on on Coffee Break French, but I'm still a learner of French. Every time we do a a French podcast, I learn something new. And I think mirroring that learning process and helping listeners to um I guess in in a sense lead if I'm leading their learning, um that they are discovering it along with me. And if Pierre-Benoît teaches us some cool expression, then you know, I can get enthusiastic about that and then listeners in in turn will get enthusiastic. And possibly the fact that although yes, I am not a native speaker of of French or Spanish or Italian, that I'm I'm quite confident in in my French and Spanish and Italian. And therefore that also perhaps gives the learner listening the the idea that they will also be able to achieve that high level of of language um as a learner.

Yeah, and I think you also have a better position to understand the struggle.

Absolutely.

So I a lot of people are saying, oh, I want a native speaker uh a native speaking teacher. Yeah. And I think for some parts like pronunciation, it can be very helpful, but for general learning, I would say that the non-native but but really good uh teacher has a lot of advantages because they know what it takes to get through the struggles. Whereas a native speaker would just say, well, that's just how it is. So that really is a good concept as well.

Yeah, præcis. Præcis.

And how is the, so apart from podcast, what do you use yourself to improve your languages and and maybe add new ones? If you ever have the time, I mean you have so much to do.

I've always got one on the go. I've always got a language on the go to be honest. And it's it's really I mean I've heard lots of people describe uh this kind of process as sort of being like a magpie or something like that that you you flit from one to the other and and um yeah, there are other less less polite terms as well.

Yeah, absolutely.

Um, having said that, I also really like books. Right. I'm quite a traditionalist when it comes to, you know, picking up a colloquial Swedish or or um what I'm doing at the moment is using a a Langenscheidt uh German course to learn Swedish um because it's got some interesting texts in it and and I like doing that sort of learning one language through the other.

Yeah. It's a great one. But what better way to run a language company than with your own vision and that other people like as well. I mean that's that's win win win isn't it?

Well, theoretically, yeah. I get to do what I like to do. And and yeah, um and and you know with a team, we've got a fantastic team here and the team, the team very much buy into this idea because they've seen the comments from the learners. We we we use Slack as a communication method all the time and we've got a channel in Slack and we call it customer love. And basically anytime anyone posts a a nice review or a comment or a Facebook review or sends in as an email, we put that in there and every single member of the team sees that so they see the comments that are coming in. Um and we also put in the comments that are are constructive. So, you know, we can all benefit from that too. Um, but I think that's really important that that when we are working with our team that the team understand the the the that that that learners are finding what we do useful and therefore we want to do more of it.

Yeah. And how is has the methodology changed over the years? Like when from the first Coffee Break season to the one you're doing now, the fifth French one?

Um I'm told that my accent has changed. Your accent? My my Scottish accent, my my English accent. Um I'm told that and and actually when I listen back to some of the earlier um Coffee Break French and Spanish episodes, I was a wee bit more, a wee bit more Scottish. Um but my my son, my two sons often comment of he's got his podcast voice on. Whenever we're abroad or whatever and I'm I'm speaking in in correct English and you know trying to speak clearly, oh he's got his podcast voice on. His podcast voice, yeah. So I guess in in one sense maybe my my diction has changed.

Yeah, the pedagogy.

The pedagogy.

Yeah, it's uh strange word, isn't it? Yeah. Um pædagogik is in Danish. Danish. So it's uh,

Kan vi konvertere på dansk?

Yeah. I mean, the people think that's a loan word from Danish, but I think it comes from Greek.

I think it's Greek yeah.

But uh whatever, we'll take it I guess. So how do you make the decision of which languages to add? Is that a tricky question? Which uh, which language Mark wants to add to his repertoire next or?

No, no, no, no. It's not all about me. I think it is a combination of things. First of all, it's about it's about people. I I think what when you're when you're running a small company, everyone needs to you be part of the same team. You need to have people that that, I don't want to say fit, but that that buy into the way in which you're creating content. And so what we've found over the years is we've developed our team, we've got people who um you know who are perfect for that. And and as we add new languages, it's when we meet the right person to to work with on a particular language who gets where we're coming from, who gets where the customer, the learner is coming from, and who understands what we are trying to achieve.

It's all right. It's all right. Uh we can uh build the course how to learn Danish from Swedish afterwards. Okay. Should be a very short course, but uh I that I always thought that could be interesting to do. Yeah. Or vice versa really. Yeah. Um because they're obviously some patterns and there's some, the the core vocabulary, just for anyone listening, Norwegian, Swedish and Danish are 99% the same. Yeah. But the pronunciation is obviously quite different. Um but not different that you get very confused after being there for a while. You'll get used to it. But, well, some people say you never get used to the Danish pronunciation. Yeah. I was going to say that. No. Just just putting that out there. Um but there are some keywords here and there that are different and I think if you do a frequency list and then taking out all the duplicates, that would be a great way to start.

I mean I think as we've been we've been doing our Coffee Break Swedish, and I've done a little bit of Norwegian in the past and and it's so fascinating to see how things are are a little bit different, but those differences are quite important. Absolutely, yeah. I'll I'll keep seeing things to to Hannah our our our Swedish teacher, you know, I mean on a very basic level, uh, Jeg heter Mark, uh på norsk in in Norwegian. Jeg heter Mark på svenska. Yeah. Og på dansk? Jeg hedder. Ah, okay. Yeah. But written down obviously we're we're we're very very similar yeah.

But um some people hear L's there which I as a Danish ear I can't hear at all, but when I say hedder. Hedder. People are like, that sounds like you're saying hella. Yeah. But no, it's D. It's double D which is uh a very tricky one in uh in Danish. And you've got your your R's and your L's and your D's all they all kind of sound quite similar in some ways in certain certain dialects.

I I I read yesterday for the first time um about um waffle day in Sweden. Right. Which apparently comes from Vor Fru Dag. Right. Which then in certain dialects became uh vorfref daggen or something like that and it then developed into vaffeldagen. Um so waffle started out as Our Lady's Day. Yeah. Wow.

Loses me away. Yeah, but the Scandinavian culture is uh receiving a lot of interest now. So if anyone listening, you know, it's a great time to learn the languages now. Absolutely. Uh you've got uh in in the UK for instance, everyone's really obsessed about Hygge. Hygge, yeah. This like uh coziness in Denmark uh you know, it does exist in Sweden as well, but they usually refer to it as you know, their version is something like Fika, you know. Yeah. It's like the coffee,

It's like the Coffee Break. Coffee Break, yeah.

We may have mentioned once that once or twice in our course. Yeah, well, but but it is, I guess you could have called it Fika Swedish because that's kind of like the the the Swedish.

The branding doesn't work. No no no. No, probably not.

But in the yeah, the UK obsessed about Scandinavia and it's it's cool to see uh and it's a bit weird as a Scandinavian because you don't really put much notice at your own culture. Yeah. Uh but obviously there's a huge there a huge selection there and the food is is great as well I think. Uh for instance, bread, like this is just as an expat, you know, speaking is like, where can I get good bread in the UK? It's like they don't do it at all. It's like you can get 50 different kinds of toast but any dark bread? No. No. Not possible.

Yeah, it's tricky and and as a, you know, I've done a little bit of Danish teaching before and it's really hard to teach the pronunciation because it's almost like it's not pronunciation, it's about, it's almost like redacting. Yeah. Like you're taking away things rather than adding things. And it's really hard to teach and what I find is that people generally, if they have no experience with uh Scandinavian languages, they typically overdo it. Yeah. And that's funny because normally people under underdo, yeah exactly. Yeah perform uh pronunciation, but I generally find with Danish that people just they sound ridiculous. Tell me, how do you say your second name in proper Danish?

Well, uh Broholm.

Broholm.

That's a big problem. I mean, this is a bit of a tangent if we have if we have a few minutes. I've got a couple of minutes. Okay, great. Um because I live in the UK. Yeah. And every time somebody asks me for my name, I have no idea how to say it in a way so they understand the letters. Right. I don't care if it's authentic, I don't care if it sounds like the Danish. I just want people to understand it starts with a B Yeah. and there might be an M at the end. Yeah, okay. But no matter what I say, nobody ever gets it. So that is a bit of an issue, uh first world problems there. But

If it's any consolation, people can't write Pendleton either correctly. So don't don't worry too much.

No, I don't.

So Broholm Yeah I guess Broholm but Broholm. Broholm. Broholm.

Broholm, yeah.

Broholm. Yeah so you're unusually.

It's an unusual name actually. Most Danish names end in uh en Yeah. like sen, SEN, uh for son, son of which uh is not the real son of, for just for people who might not know, you know, in for instance in Russian, you have the patronym where you get your father's name. But in in Danish it's not, it's an ancestral name. Yeah. So even though your son might be your name might be son of Jens, your dad might be Peter. Yeah, yeah. You know it's completely it's it's not used. I think Iceland is more traditional like that as well. But um most names in in in Danish has that ending SEN. So not having that is quite unusual. Uh so that also stands out a bit. But uh I do have a castle somewhere in Denmark.

Oh well there you go. Yeah.

We know who's the next polyglot gathering. Oh yeah yeah. No but that could be fun to go over there and shoot some Danish videos in there. Broholm uh castle. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Um but yeah so I guess my my kind of conclusion is definitely learn the Scandinavian languages, they're fun. You get um three for the price of one. And very very different cultures as well. So Denmark is completely flat, like we don't have any hills or anything. You go to the top of Norway, you've got proper mountains. Yeah. And that changes a lot of things. Not not at least the weather and I know there's basically no sunlight in the northern Norway for like half the year. Yeah. Um so that changes things and food and culture and tradition.

And dialect.

Dialect, oh yeah yeah. I mean that's the funny thing about Norway, people think that Danish is strange. You should try and hear some of these really uh northern dialects, you just think, is this even Norwegian?

And the frustrating thing is no one actually speaks the Norwegian that you learn in books because that's a kind of well there are two versions of it, Bokmål and Nynorsk, and and they are amalgamations of different dialects. Well certainly Nynorsk is, but um yeah it's all it's fascinating.

It's like modern standard Arabic or BBC English, you know. Nobody really speaks like that, you know.

But I think one thing that's really important about Scandinavian languages is that because you all speak amazing English, the minute someone speaks to you in the Danish or the Swedish or the Norwegian that they've learned, it completely changes the relationship. You if if I'm making an effort to speak in in Norwegian or Swedish, I wouldn't really make the effort to speak in Danish because you would just laugh. Um but it it does change the relationship because you don't need to. Yeah. You speak amazing English and and maybe it's tricky because it's difficult to get someone to speak to you in Swedish or Danish or on Norwegian. It is, yeah. But at the same time it does change that relationship. I found that in Norway particularly.

Yeah. I think Scandinavian countries are very uh notoriously bad for responding in English when somebody tries to speak to them in the country or in the language. But I think if you know a little bit about the culture is that people are very uh reserved, they're very kind of inward-looking. And a one way to kind of pass through that outer shell is definitely to if you're if you're good at the language, you don't need to be an expert or anything, but if you can do that, you definitely communicate at a different level whereas English is more like just a formality, you know. You just you you get the information across but you don't build a relationship. So but um yeah, anyway, we're looking forward to uh Coffee Break Swedish coming soon. And who knows what comes next. Coffee Break Norwegian, Coffee Break Danish, you never know. Um but uh thank you so much for being on the Actual Fluency Podcast Mark.

It's been a pleasure.

And more importantly, thank you for letting us uh record here in the uh Radio Lingua headquarters, the Coffee Break headquarters in Glasgow, Scotland. Beautiful rainy day.

On a rainy day, yeah. We we we we couldn't sort the weather for you today, I'm afraid.

That's a shame. But but thank you so much, Mark. And if uh people want to know more about Radio Lingua and the Coffee Break series, can you tell them just where to go?

Absolutely. If you just head to coffeebreaklanguages.com, uh you'll find everything that you need to there.

Perfect. Thank you so much.

Tak skal du have.

Tak skal du have.

This episode was brought to you by OptiLingo. Learn over 18 languages through guided immersion by going to www.optilingo.com. That's O P T I L I N G O.com.