▷S1E9 Language is a Door: Lindsay Szper of Culture Without Borders (Part 2)

Are children really better at learning language than adults? Is an unknown language a "barrier," or a door to another culture? What is an idiom, anyway? Lindsay Szper and Rose Thomas refer to Hannah Arendt on the mother tongue, James Baldwin on good bread, and the power of friendship to learn a language and to repair the world.

Lindsay studies language pedagogy at The New School and is working on a masters in Oral History at Columbia. Listen to Part 1 of this interview, "What I Need is a Friend," to learn more about Culture Without Borders Language Collective (CWB), the community school for world languages that Lindsay co-founded. CWB believes the best way to learn language is through friendship.

You can get in touch with Lindsay at cwblanguagecollective@gmail.com.

Lindsay gave Rose Thomas this great working definition for "idiom":
An idiom is a collocation of words that tend to go together and represent a common cultural notion or understanding.

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Lindsay and Rose Thomas refer to many brilliant texts and people in this episode, listed below for further inspiration.

Gabriel Wyner, author of Fluent Forever, says these 625 vocabulary words will let you communicate in any language.
Rose Thomas mentions the mom and dad from the Campania winemaking family of the Terre Stregate estate.
Penny Ur, a language pedagogy specialist, considers some of the advantages adult language learners have (compared to children) when learning a language.

More information on University’s Oral History Master of Arts (OHMA) Program and the Certificate in Teaching English program at The New School.
More information about the "affective filter".
Lindsay also referred to the language scholar Dianne Larson Freeman in Part 1 of the interview.
Lindsay's favorite three minutes on the internet begin at 36:51 during this interview with Hanna Arendt, broadcast in 1964.
Lindsay presented on the Walter Benjamin essay "The Translator's Task" with her friend Ana María Belique, a leader and founding member of the the Reconoci.do movement,  an independent national civic network that promotes human rights and the full integration of Dominicans of Haitian descent in Dominican society.

Lindsay mentioned this 15-minute video on Youtube by Robin Waldun that summarizes the Benjamin essay. Reflections on the French word maman come from Waldun’s video.
Lindsay learned the saying "Cada cabeza es un mundo" from her friend Florencia Ruiz Mendoza, a researcher, lecturer, activist, and longtime advocate against forced disappearance in Mexico.
This is the James Baldwin quote about bread from The Fire Next Time.
Should Modo di Bere make a spinoff podcast all about different cultural conceptions of the word "bread"?
Send your opinion in an Instagram DM or an email!

• Expand for auto-generated transcript. (Please excuse errors.)

  You don't need to be perfect. You don't like the idea that you have to speak with perfect precision in the same way that a surgeon or a doctor has to do their craft with perfection and precision is not true of language education. He was like, language education needs to be a collaboration. If somebody doesn't know something, the rest of the group needs to help them. And so I think at least speaking from his experience kids were kids made it easier because they just like you're saying they took away they took away a lot shame yeah exactly exactly and shame is such a such a ugly thing in general so if we can take shame out of out of one place and it's a language classroom good welcome to the duty bearer Welcome to Modo de Bere, the podcast for local drinks and local sayings. I'm your host, Rose Thomas Bannister. Today is the second part of my interview with Lindsay Spear. Lindsay is an oral historian and language student, language teacher who co -founded Culture Without Borders, an alternative language school that believes that the best way to learn language is through friendship. You can check out the last episode, What I Need as a Friend, to hear the first part of my interview with Lindsay. We're about to jump back in to Lindsay giving us some very practical advice about how to study and learn languages. But before we do that, I want to ask if you haven't given us a follow yet on social media, Modo di Bere is on TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook. And there is a lot of additional content there, videos of people teaching me and you, the kind of local sayings that are discussed in this interview, these idiomatic sayings that make you smile, that help you make friends that you can practice languages with. Go ahead and jump over there, give us a follow on Instagram, give us a follow on TikTok and see more from some of these guests and from some of the other people that I meet on my travels in the world of local drinks and local sayings. All right, let's get into it. Part two of my interview with Lindsay Spear. Remembering that there's no one right way to do this. There's many ways to learn the languages. There are people and then some. Finding things that are fun and genuinely interesting to you as a person. Giving it time every day, I struggle with discipline as a human being on this earth. But I think if you can Language is a skill, like any other skill, it requires time, consistency, practice. It's also an embodied practice. Language is an embodied practice. It's muscle memory as much as it is cognitive memory, so it's unrealistic to assume that you're gonna internalize knowledge and movements if you don't practice those movements on a regular basis. I also think, I have a long answer to this, I also think Vocabulary is generally, grammar can be kind of impenetrable, especially if you don't have a background in grammatical terms in your own language, it can be really tough to try to learn grammar in a language, especially if you're a beginner, my goodness. You don't know the word for ball, cup, spoon, school, and they're trying to teach you... Transitive. Exactly. Exactly. So I think Learning vocabulary is a really effective place to start. And learning vocabulary, that's common and useful. There's a linguist called Gabriel Weiner, who wrote a book I haven't finished called Fluent Forever, but in that book is this wonderful list of 625 vocabulary words that according to him, if you know these 625 words, you can communicate basically anything you want. Maybe it's not going to be clean and, you know, grammatically standardized, but you can get your point across. So learning high -frequency words, I think, is so helpful. And more than anything, just not being afraid to speak. I think so many people are immobilized by the fear of speaking, the fear, and it's normal. My goodness, like, It's normal, we're not often in our primary language, we're not often in a situation where we can't fully communicate our needs, thoughts, feelings, whatever to another person, and where our pronunciation is non -standard and our grammar is non -standard. And there are so many, unfortunately, so many assumptions that often come with having non -standard grammar and non -standard pronunciation. And so people sometimes feel, I think, so much weight and nervousness and paralysis around doing the thing and talking to people. But that's if that's-- - That's the only way. - Yeah, yeah. - That's the only way is by talking to people. - And as a teacher, like as an idealist teacher, I want, it's been kind of my policy so far that like the desire to do the thing has to come from the student. Like I can't tell the person who's learning that they need to speak this language at this time. That's not for me to decide, that's for them. However, ideally, people will independently overcome their discomfort around language, like producing the new language. But I'm finding that when I ask people what helped them learn, kind of across the board, what people have said is that they learn when they're in a situation where they have no alternative. And so I'm wondering kind of as a teacher, as I get this response over and over again from people and all, you know, people that I encounter, what role, what role we have as a school, what role I have as a teacher to give people a little bit of a nudge and put them in a position where, okay, the stakes maybe aren't so high, you know this person's gonna be kind and good to you, but go do it, you know? - Maybe there's a relationship between fear and confidence. I remember one of my first moments where I felt, oh wow, I really do speak some Italian. I was working as a wine rep and this wonderful Italian family from the Teres Tregate winery in Campania. We're here and did not speak one word of English and I said, "Yes, I will take them around. I can do this." And it was one of the first chances, one of the first moments where there really was nobody around to step in. And I was going to be the only conduit for their story to the people that they hoped would buy or continue to buy their wine. And there was a moment, there were some funny moments, you know, with the translation process of mishearings as there always are. But there was a moment where I was translating and I had never done that in Italian before. And I think we were talking about the Alianico grape and I found myself explaining in English that the person I was translating had just said that Alianico is like a wild horse with blood that cannot be domesticated. And I just was you know so suddenly astonished that I was able to do that, that I was able to understand and convey this information. And it was only the opportunity where there was, there were no other Italian speakers to come in and say, "Oh, that's too, let me help you. I got this." I wouldn't have been able to find out that I could do that without there being no other alternative. I actually had a question that I would have been really curious about with language for a long time that I think ties really well into this, which is the concept of children versus adult learners, that it's this biological thing probably having to do with neuroplasticity that makes it so much easier for children and so incredibly hard for adults. And, you know, I'm assuming that this is the science. However, I wonder, And I have my own personal theory, having studied languages, but not, not linguistics or development, we'll say, instead of acquisition. But my thought is, maybe children do so much better, at least in part, because they have no shame. And my feeling with my own experience is that I learned by making mistakes in language, more so than almost anything else I've tried to learn. So I wonder if I'm onto something with this theory or if you have any thoughts about shame, you know, sort of those stages of human development from a child that's just hungry to learn these things and it's not embarrassed to get something wrong, just wants to learn and doesn't care and hasn't learned, you know, what they're not supposed to be like yet by society. Oh, heck yeah. I have so many thoughts on that. I'm like writing them down so that I remember to say all the things that I want to say. I totally, I very much agree with you. One thing about, I wish I remember which grammarian or linguist this idea came from, but someone who wrote one of the textbooks for my English teaching certificate talked about how there's this kind of common understanding or there's this There's this idea that makes its way around that kids are better at language learning than adults. Whoever this person is, I think it was Penny or but I'm not entirely sure. You've given us so many great resources and books. I'll just say now that we'll definitely be putting some links to the resources that you've mentioned and then we can add it in the notes in the podcast for everyone who wants to explore this further. Oh, very cool. Never - I never fear. - That's a great solution. Thank you. Whoever this person was, I think it was Penny Orr said that that's actually not, not necessarily true, because as adults, we have so many more cognitive-- - Oh my goodness, there's still hope for me. As adults, we have so many more cognitive resources than kids. Kids are learning, like babies are learning everything all at the same time from how to eat to what the heck all these objects are for around us. Whereas adults, we already have a existing framework of cognitive skills and understanding of the world that we can put to the service of language learning. But something happens to adults that inhibits them from learning. And I think personally, it's exactly what you're saying. And there's this term in the language teaching field called the affective filter. The idea of the affective filter is that people can't learn language when their affective filter is, they can only learn when the affective filter is low, I think that's what they say, but basically what they mean by that is that people don't learn when they're anxious, that your resources, the resources of your brain are preoccupied with other things, with anxiety, with whatever is provoking your anxiety, and that inhibits you from taking in and retaining new information. And so this is a thing language people talk about, but I think that's true about language across the board. If you're anxious, uncomfortable, and preoccupied, How are you going to retain information? This idea that we teach people first how to do a job interview now seems incredibly counterproductive in the understanding that you're just describing. I have to impress someone for incredibly high stakes, and that's going to be how I learn how to speak a second language. Great. So one of my friends who I interviewed, his name is Jim. He's from Hungary originally and he was talking about his experience of migration to various places in the world. He was talking about how for a time, shortly after his family left Hungary, they were in Paris and he was talking about his experiences as an eight, nine -year -old boy. I think that was his age as a school -aged kid, learning French. And his discussion of the way that the French kids treated him was beautiful But honestly, like what we're going for, what I think we're going for in our school, he talked about how the kids in his class didn't see his lack of French knowledge as a deficit. It wasn't something that was wrong with him. It was simply a fact of his condition. And so he talked about how they just invited him into their games, how if he didn't know something he would express that he didn't know it and they would work to explain to him what was was going on. He talked a lot about how, and I completely agree with him, how language education can't be a competitive thing. Jim is an emergency room doctor, and so I was asking him about medical school. I was like, what, you know, medical school is competitive and it works. How does medical school work? How can we apply that to language school? And he was like, no, language learning isn't medical school. You don't need to be perfect. You don't, Like the idea that you have to speak with perfect precision in the same way that a surgeon or a doctor has to do their craft with perfection and precision is not true of language education. He was like, "Language education needs to be a collaboration. If somebody doesn't know something, the rest of the group needs to help them." And so I think at least speaking from his experience, kids made it easier because they, just like you're saying, they took away, they took away a lot. The shame. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And shame is such a, such a ugly thing in general. So if we can take shame out of, out of one place and it's a language classroom, good. Learning a second language or coming to learn something about wine for different or maybe similar reasons, who knows, can just be so intimidating to people such that the subject can be approached with an apology usually. "Oh, I don't know anything about wine," or "Oh, you know, I don't speak a word of," "Wish I did," "Goodness," "Don't remember my high school language studies," "Guess that was all the waste," you know, just this very apologetic entry into the conversation and that's something that I'm trying to help change for people and to give people a little encouragement to just go ahead and jump in and there's no perfection here. It's pretty impossible to really learn. I mean, I still learn new words in English all the time. Absolutely. I like to try to turn around the concept of vastness to try to diffuse the feeling of intimidation because if it's impossible to actually learn it all anyway, you might as well just do the best you can in something like the country of Italy, which has so, so, so many different grape varieties to learn about. I think some people will maybe even avoid it because they think the goal is to know all of them and like you can't, you know, that would be a wonderful life -womb journey to try to learn them all. You know, you just have to start somewhere. So, and it seems that you found that starting with a friendship or a relationship, I think that's a very beautiful insight that I hadn't really ever heard articulated. It sounds to me that this is gonna be a great language school. - Oh, I hope so. And one point related to, I couldn't agree with you more that like, it's just like my girl Diane Larson Freeman says, "It's an impossible task to learn a language because not only is the language so vast, it's also constantly changing. - True. - I watched-- - Like with the Vintage's, right? With the wine. I will say that to people sometimes when they're obviously feeling quite intimidated. I'm like, listen, even if a master or sommelier could learn every wine in the world, which they can't, it would change the next year because it's a new vintage. Yeah, so it's a moving target. Absolutely. Yeah, if it is even a target in the traditional sense. And I got, I have a certification, like a national certification in medical interpreting. When I graduated college and then when I left college, I thought that's what I wanted to do forever was be an interpreter and a translator and translation and interpreting is fascinating worthy And one thing that, like I put a lot of pressure on myself, I think, because I wanted to do that profession, and I think many of the people who do that profession grow up bilingual. And I think I, not for anything that anybody else did or said, but I put a lot of pressure on myself to speak like a native to there's, and I think a lot of people do that. They want to speak like, I want to speak like a native speaker. I want to speak like a native speaker. native speaker. And I started when I was very young. I had a lot of support. It was normal to me to practice accents since my family had one. So I accomplished a pretty high level of Spanish where people, if I'm not talking for too long, people will ask me where's my family from and if I speak the language natively. If I speak for more than two minutes, it becomes obvious that this is my second language. But why am I telling you all this? I'm telling you all this because I think there's often a lot of pressure to attain a native level of language learning. I watched recently, YouTube's my favorite thing. I love YouTube. And my favorite three minutes on YouTube are this interview of Hannah Arendt, she's talking about a hundred things in this one hour interview, it's a beautiful, expansive interview. But my three favorite minutes are her talking about mother tongue. And She talks about how the interviewer asks her what she misses or what if she longs for Europe before Hitler and he asks what Europe is different now, the interview is taken in the 60s and the interviewer asks Europe's different now, what remained? Through all of this, what of Germany, what of Europe remains? And her answer is the language remains, the language didn't go crazy. And then she goes into this You know, she lived in the United States. I think she also lived in France, maybe in Israel for a time But she talks about how for her or just in general, there's nothing like your mother tongue How she says for her in German. She says I have always these, you know Thousands hundreds of poems and nursery rhymes in the back of my mind in German and I'll never attain that in a second language There's so much we have so much lived experience in our primary language that is irreplaceable. And I think for me it was a wait -off. She in that interview talks about how she's maintained a certain distance from the languages that she's learned as a second language. There's nothing like German for her and she speaks her non -native languages in an unidiabatic way that's indicative of not having forgotten her first language. And that just took a wait -off for me. It took a wait -off for me to understand that You can get really proficient, really bilingual. You can attain a very, very, very high level of bilingualism. And still there's no substitute for an entire childhood lived in a certain cultural code. And so I liked that. That helped me. That's beautiful. I love Hannah Arendt. Isn't she the best? Yes. I believe I have something on my nightstand right now. Yeah, I love what you just said. It almost causes one to take more pride in the language that you have instead of thinking, "Oh, well, it's just the one." You know. Yeah. I would be remiss with someone in front of me who knows so much about linguistics, not to ask you a little bit about the the topic of the linguistic topic of this Moto Du Berry project, which is idiomatic language, which you started to speak about just just a little bit just now. And so these these specific kind of phrases and verbs and that have just found to be so delightful to me and really a way of making France. I learned Italian from people from winemakers from all over the country and we would speak general Italian, but then I became interested because I was taught these really fun and sweet phrases in the local language, we'll say, And it really is, now that you've been talking about friendship, I will say it's a way of making friends. I'll meet someone who's speaking Italian and I'll say, "Oh, where are you from?" They'll say, "I'm from Italy." And I'll say, "Where?" And they'll say, "I'm from Napoli." And then I can say, "Does your grandmother call an elevator the tram of the wall?" And without fail, the reaction is generally to sort of gasp and grab my arm and say, "Where did you learn that? Who taught this to you? How do you know this? Who are you? Why are you interested in this?" And I'm very interested in this exact, beautiful, you know, not proficient fill -in -the -blank language, but this local, colorful little pieces and phrases and words and proverbs. And yeah, what happens then is that we're friends. You know, what happens is that we're friends and we can, we start talking about our homelands and, you know, swapping restaurant recommendations and then we're really having a conversation. So oddly, this thing that is so vastly removed from where is the train station becomes a much better conversation starter in my experience with meeting new people. So I just wonder if you can tell us from this amazing scientific background that you have that I'm just barely beginning to scratch the surface of, what do you mean by speaking a language idiomatically and what are these marvelous phrases that I'm attracted to and how can we think about them in the context of the larger idea of language? - Oh, interesting, interesting question. Am I understanding idiomatically just means something that sounds, when you speak a language idiomatically, it sounds natural to a person who grew up in that language. Am I understanding? Though I don't know that that's the dictionary definition. - What about as opposed to the word idiom? - Idiom, idiom I understand as, I guess, like a phrase or or a saying that, "Oh, maybe this is an interesting word from language teaching. My friend, my teacher and friend Jean Lambert taught me this. She calls it a collocation. A collocation is a group of words that together have a specific meaning. So for example, you can have oil and tanker. I'm working on a translation about an oil tanker. That's why this comes to mind. But you can have oil and tanker, and those are two separate things. And oil tanker is a unit of words that together mean something different. So collocation is any group of words that often go together. I think an idiom is a collocation with like, that represents like a common cultural notion or understanding maybe. - Well, I noticed something when I asked you about the word idiom is you just began to smile. - Yeah. - And I wonder Especially if it's not just that I take delight in these phrases, like that we could trade it. When I'm collecting them, I'll say sometimes to get someone to know what I mean, because your mind tends to go blank, what's the proverb, oh, I don't know. But I'll say, well, what do you say when it rains a lot? You know, it's, you know, we'll say it's raining cats and dogs. But I learned in Italian, piove sul bagnato, it rains on the wet. And I would say, "Oh, okay. Well, we say when it rains it pours." And so I wonder if it's not just that I take delight in them, but that what definitionally sets them apart is that they're kind of sweet. What do you think about that? I think they are kind of sweet. And as you're talking, I'm thinking about a conversation I had yesterday, actually, with a friend named Anna. We're working on a presentation for a class we're in on embodiment and specifically translation and interpreting as embodied practices. And we were trying to figure out what to present on. And one thing that I'm interested to present on is sort of a summary of Walter Benjamin's essay, The Task of the Translator. Have you read it before? It's a beautiful essay. It's very dense. There's this YouTube video of 15 minutes of a guy who explains it quite nicely. But one part of that essay and one thing that my friend and I are expecting to talk about is that Benjamin said, Walter Benjamin says that the word "brode", which I'm not pronouncing right, but the word "brode" to a German person means something different from the word "pen" to a French person. And both those words refer to bread, but the notion of bread in French is different from the notion of bread in German as it is in Korean, Portuguese, English, sign language. Well, sign language is maybe not such a good example, but because they're sign languages from all over the world. But anyhow, all that to say like the notions that we hold about things culturally are particular to the groups and places and regions that we come from. But one thing that Anna was telling me, she's wonderful. She's a human rights advocate of Haitian descent in the Dominican Republic, advocating for the rights of people of Haitian descent and Afro descendants all over the world. She's unbelievable. She's believable. She's real and she's lovely. But what she said, her suggestion for this presentation we're doing was that what's lovely about language is that when you have a particular word from a particular language, it does call up a particular cultural notion, but at the same time, bread exists across all these cultures. There are differences, but those differences are subtle, and the thing, the concept is universal. She was talking about the word "mom." It's interesting in French, the word maman is kind of situated right between mom and mother. It doesn't have the emotional weight of mom or like the closeness and intimacy of mom, but it doesn't have the coldness of mother either. And so there's this spectrum of distinction across languages, but also the mother is, I can't imagine any language where mother doesn't exist. So I think maybe idioms may be part of what's so compelling and maybe part of what ignites friendship around idioms is the idea that cultures have very different ways of expressing very similar shared ideas. Yes, I love this example of bread. I was struck recently, I was reading, I think it was in The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin. He's talking about in this incredible essay fashion about all of these really large problems in society and he just takes a moment and he says, and another thing, why are we eating this terrible bread? And he starts talking about, you know, I don't know if he was talking about kind of wonders of food science, bleached loaves and, but he was talking about enjoyment and how this was so important, you know, you have to enjoy yourself. It's as vital as any of these other things that he was talking about that people like to think might be more important. And I was just, this isn't in the story, but I was imagining Baldwin in Paris finding some bread and thinking, oh my god, where has this been? Now this is bread. Wait a second, I need to make sure that everyone knows to have this experience with bread. We haven't really talked much about travel, except for as it's implicit in, you know, why people would suddenly find themselves having that necessity or drive to, you know, but once you're in another place and you learn, yeah, you learn not just another word from bread, but you learn a new bread, you know, which is so lovely. Maybe we'll have a spinoff podcast that's just to collect and compare all the different types of bread. This could be endless - And wonderful and delicious. Goodness, I'm just so happy to have this discussion with you. It's ignited many new ideas about language learning for me. Thank you so much. We will definitely put links in the show page to all of these fantastic books and resources that have come to mind for you in sharing these ideas. But maybe you could tell us if there is somewhere online at this moment where people can find your project and learn more about what you're doing. There's not yet. I'm working on it. But you can email us. You can email us at cwblanguagecollective @gmail .com. That's great. That'll work. I also have like three more thoughts on something that you said before. Can I see? Please, please. One is that you talked about asking for idioms as a way to make friends. But one thought that has been fun to turn over and over in my head lately is that we talk often about a language barrier. We consider language a barrier between people and something to overcome. But in reality, I think what's language is, it's fun, all the paradoxes that live in the practice of language. Language is a barrier, but it's also the door to a culture. And I think by, by expressing, by learning the language, by really putting in the effort to learn a language, because it is effort and takes time. I think that demonstrates to people like a real, it's a demonstrated interest in a culture and it's a reason for somebody to let you in. I was also thinking about language as a, language as, or asking for idioms as a route to friendship. Just because we were talking about Hannah Arryn, or Hannah Arryn, I'm not sure how to pronounce the name correctly. I think friendship is a good means, from where I'm standing, friendship is the best means for language development. But I also think that friendship is kind of one of the key things to fixing our dystopic world. I think we're socialized to understand ourselves as dividing along identity lines, language lines, socioeconomic lines, and another quote, or another line in that interview from Hannah Arendt that I find so impactful, is that she's talking about how friendship transcends political divisions, and I think it really does, how when you're friends with someone, how people organize in political groups in order to achieve certain concrete, shared goals that they have, or meet certain shared needs that they have, but you can, when you're a friend with someone, you're relating with them as an individual, as she says, independent of your relation to the rest of the world. So I think, I don't know, I look around, I'm 29 years old, I've been around in this world for 29 years, I'm like an old young person now. And I look around and there's a lot of stuff, frankly, about the way that the world is set up and organized that I think is really sad and wrong and messed up. And if I chew on how to respond to that. One response, I mean, I don't think you, I think it's naive to say that friendship is gonna fix all the world's problems, but I think it's a place to start. I think developing a genuine friendship with someone allows us to see outside our own reality and makes real and personal the experience of somebody else who fundamentally is, it's gonna be different than yours. I guess that leads to the last thing that I was gonna say, which is that I hope this doesn't mess you up, but you had asked to come with a saying. - Oh, please. Oh, no, no, no, the collection, perhaps, would you call it oral history, a collection of idiomatic sayings from around the world? - I would call everything oral. - Okay, yes, but that's what we do here. Please, please give us a phrase. It's not a saying necessarily from my region, I take this from my friend Florencia, she's from Mexico City, and she taught this to me recently. It also translates really, really well, and I imagine it translates into lots of languages easily, but the saying is cada cabeza es un mundo, and I bet knowing Italian, you can guess what that means, or knowing Spanish too, it means every head is a world, and every human being is a universe, a cosmos, and I think that's what draws me to this thing called oral history. That's what draws me to the field of education. And that's what motivates me personally to push education in new directions because we have so tremendously much to learn from any other person and any other individual. And I think, yeah, cada cabeza es un mundo. Every person is a universe of stories and knowledge and skills. And so I hope our school can be a place where people can share those skills with others and also where we can just learn from each other in an organic and enjoyable way. - That is so beautiful. Thank you so much. I love that phrase. It's really, it makes me think of a moment. You know, I think I was probably a young teenager and I had just learned the definitions of the words connotation and denotation and I had what at the time just felt like a teenage deep thought that maybe I've disregarded until this moment and when I'm remembering it from the phrase you just taught me but I thought, "Oh my goodness, connotations are different for everyone. Everyone has their own set of connotations, and that means that there are as many languages as there are people. - Mm -hmm. - And I hadn't thought about that in a long time until you taught me the phrase that (speaks in foreign language) - You got it. - Beautiful. Oh, I love that. that is such a beautiful phrase to share with this podcast. Thank you so much to my guest, Lindsay Spear, for coming to teach us so many things and also to introduce this wonderful language school culture without borders that we will all be awaiting hearing more about. And thank you to everyone who is listening to this podcast. Wherever you go and whatever you drink, always remember to enjoy your life and to never stop learning. Find out more at motodiberi .com, where you can also read the blog. Music for the podcast was composed by Ercilia Prosperi and performed by the band OU. You can purchase their recordings at oumusic .bandcamp .com. Otro, se engañando, se dejan separarse mismo  

Music composed by Ersilia Prosperi for the band Ou: www.oumusic.bandcamp.com

Produced, recorded and edited by Rose Thomas Bannister

Audio assistance by Steve Silverstein