Cold Start - Why confidence beats grammar

SPEAKER_00 0:00

When people think about learning a language, they often think about grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation. But so much of language communication is actually about feeling confident when you are speaking. And the goal, while we get into the technical, you know, the mechanics of how things work, the real goal is what is the framework that you should apply broadly that means that you're not trying to think about the minutia all the time and which robs you of confidence in some ways. Instead, you're applying general principles that get you 80-90% of the way there.

Welcome to the Toastmasters World Tour

SPEAKER_01 0:32

Hi, my name's Brendan O'Sullivan, a Toastmaster from Brisbane, Australia. Welcome to my Toastmasters World Tour podcast. Please join me as I travel virtually around the world and chat to Toastmasters from different countries and all walks of life. Let's explore. And has given two TEDx talks, one entirely in Japanese.

SPEAKER_00 1:36

Welcome to the show. Hi, Brandon. Welcome. Thank you so much. I appreciate the uh the Japanese intro. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 1:43

I'm

Irasshaimase? Welcoming in Japanese

SPEAKER_01 1:44

so excited to have you on the show. We have a bit in common. Not only Toastmasters, but also lingophiles. I too love Japan and the Japanese language and culture. But you're an Englishman who's taken it to a whole other level. I want to get right into that, but firstly, as I'm just a novice, can I ask you a language usage question? Sure. When I was learning Chinese, I found that it's possible to be technically correct in the language, but we'd often hear a phrase Butai Zen, which meant not too natural. Now I'm not going to confirm or deny whether I've been accused of that on occasion in my native English, but my question is around welcoming you to the show with Irishai Muse. I know that's what we hear when we enter Japanese restaurants. It always reminds me of someone running late for their dinner reservation, arriving panting, and they're all commenting, Ooh, he rushed, I must say. But is it appropriate, natural sounding, to use it outside of that context and to welcome you to a podcast?

SPEAKER_00 2:51

So generally speaking, yeah, irashai must say, as you as you mentioned, is used for welcoming people into a shop and it has some connotation of welcome honoured guest or something like that. If you're welcoming someone into your house, you could just say irashai, uh, which is kind of a connected word and and means more like welcome. So yeah, you're not you're not far off and and it works for this purpose. I'm uh I'm not an expert in how you would welcome people onto a podcast. So I guess the the other word that's commonly used is yorkosol. Uh yes. I have heard that. Yeah. Which is more like, you know, like welcome to Japan or something like that. So you could say Toastmaster's World Tour podcast, yeah, Yorkosol would also be.

SPEAKER_01 3:34

Yorkosol.

Why move from Plymouth to Japan?

SPEAKER_01 3:35

I like that. I have heard that. I'm I'm very rusty on it. Changing the topic, whereabouts in England do you hail from? Uh I'm originally from uh Plymouth in Devon, down the southwest coast. Okay, lovely. Do you know of it? I know of it, yes. I know palms whinge a bit about the rain. Did I say a bit? A lot. I can understand wanting to leave, but did you know Japan has a significantly higher annual rainfall?

SPEAKER_00 4:03

I didn't know that. Um well, I mean, where I hail from in Plymouth, I believe I'm I don't know if this is still factually correct, but when I was growing up it was commonly known as having the second highest amount of rainfall in the UK. So we like to take rain to the you know top of the charts, I guess. And yeah, so I I don't know, I didn't really come to Japan for the weather. I didn't leave England for the weather. So why did you emigrate to Japan? Actually, you kind of touched on it already. It was it was primarily for the language point. So I I grew up similar to it sounds like you, Brendan, like loving languages right from the jump. Uh spent a lot of time learning European languages, things like that. And when I was at university, I studied business and psychology and focused my psychology thesis on second language acquisition and how adult learners particularly could effectively learn a foreign language. And the one thing that obviously kept coming up in research was the idea of immersion environments. And so I thought I would venture further away from Europe to a place where I didn't have much bearing with the language. Now, my French teacher had a Japanese pen friend that had come to the UK for like six weeks and had taught some kind of rudimentary Japanese. So I think I was looking at China, Korea, Japan, you know, somewhere that I didn't have much knowledge about the language or culture. And because I had some level of connection to Japan, that was kind of the the outright winner. But the amount of time it went from the idea of moving to Japan to deciding to move to Japan was embarrassingly short. I think it took about probably less than an hour for me to make the decision, and then it was application and gone. So it wasn't uh it wasn't a long forth out plan that I think most people would have. So what year was that that you moved to Japan? So I first came here in 2006, well just the end of 2006. It was like 28th of December or something like that. So I lived here for three years at that time, got married, moved back to the UK with my uh my Japanese wife, and then after five or six years there, we then came back to Japan. So I've been in Japan about 12 years total over the stretch of 20 years.

Enough Japanese to get into trouble

SPEAKER_01 6:09

And did you have much Japanese under your belt before you moved to Japan in 2006?

SPEAKER_00 6:13

Not really. I'd lived in the States for six months prior to that, and knowing that I was going to Japan, I kind of grabbed a lot of the beginner's resources, you know, and learned how to read and write Hiragana and Katakana, which are the kind of the basic phonetic writing systems. And you know, I had I had the way I always describe it, I had enough Japanese to get into trouble and not enough to get out of it.

SPEAKER_01 6:34

That was kind of my early days. I was gonna ask you how hard you hit the study and how long it took to get to a useful level.

SPEAKER_00 6:43

Generally speaking, I'd say about a year. Uh, and obviously bear in mind that's a year living in country as well. So, you know, there's Japanese people all around and the opportunity to practice daily. Although I would say I was working as an English teacher, so my job was uh almost entirely in English. But no, I mean that since that was the main purpose of coming to Japan, I was highly motivated and obviously then also had the need because I was interacting on a daily basis. So every day, both before and after work, I was kind of hitting the books and studying, and you know, Japanese has this concept of nommunication, uh, which is a mixture of the Japanese verb nomu, uh meaning to drink, and communication. And so the idea of, you know, communicating while drunk Dutch courage, as we might call it, or something like that, uh as a way to kind of have enough courage to speak, and and I really use that to my advantage. I was studying a lot during the day, and then, you know, in the evenings I'd go to one of the local watering holes in my neighborhood and uh chat to whatever unfortunate salary man was sat next to me. He became my uh my target practice for the evening. And so over the course of about a year, I would say I became kind of conversationally fluent, and then it's been a process ever since then of degrees and degrees and degrees, and every corner you turn, you realize there's so much more that you don't know. I'm now wherever I am on that scale. So, you know, it's uh it'll be a lifelong journey though for sure.

Starting Bilingua & Japanese perfectionism

SPEAKER_01 8:08

You started a bilingua in 2017 to help Japanese learn English. I have heard something interesting in this space. While Japanese excel academically, they can have a perfectionistic streak that makes them afraid to make mistakes when speaking, and this can hold them back. Do you think there's any truth in that?

SPEAKER_00 8:29

Yeah, I think there's a lot of truth in it. Yeah, maybe maybe Japanese culture leads to kind of an extreme version of it, but in terms of language coaching, I've coached people from all around the world prior to setting up bilingua, and I don't think it's unique to Japanese people, particularly when it comes to speaking a language. We all want to, particularly as an adult learner, not make a fool of ourselves. You know, we don't want, you know, we've got that kind of ego of we're an adult and we should be comprehensible and and whatever, and and so that can cause an extra problem. But on the Japanese point, I think the school system, yeah, very often I think languages are taught in schools all around the world, but especially in Japan, as a school subject just like maths or science or whatever. So that there's you know, grammar is almost used as an equation, and if you put the grammar in the correct order, you will get the correct answer. And going back to the point you mentioned earlier, sometimes there's a difference between the grammatically correct answer and the natural answer. And there's also a functional point here of you could have a dramatically imperfect answer, but if it goes in the flow of conversation and everybody knows what you mean, then actually it doesn't inhibit conversation at all. And so a lot of what I spend my time in my coaching business doing is helping people get out of their own way and kind of overcome those obstacles so that they can express themselves, whether that's in a professional setting or, you know, traveling, personal situations, whatever it may be, without as much of that kind of inhibition. And I think particularly in professional settings, because Japanese has honorific language and respect language, there's an even bigger fear of what if I say something that's perceived as rude or inappropriate. Whereas in English, you know, as we're having this pretty relaxed and casual conversation now, like there aren't as many kind of airs and graces about what you can and can't use with your boss, with a client, with a business partner. And so I think a lot of it is not just the language shift, but also the cultural shift as well.

SPEAKER_01 10:31

Yeah.

Favorite mistake - The dentist and Ki Ni Naru

SPEAKER_01 10:32

That makes a lot of sense. One of the fun parts is making those mistakes because it leads to a lot of good stories. Do you have any favorite learning experiences where you made some mistakes and learnt from it?

SPEAKER_00 10:43

There are so many. Actually, there's one that I mentioned in a telex talk I recently gave, which was about there's a Japanese phrase called kini naru. And very often when we learn a language, we learn via translation. You know, it's how we start relating to the world. We say, okay, this word equals this word. And I had learned this phrase through translation. Kininaru meaning to be interested in something. And so then I was quite surprised when I was at the dentist, and uh the dentist said to me, which means, at least in my mind, it meant if you're interested in something, please raise your hand. And I was like, on earth would I be interested in at the dentist? What do you what are you expecting me to be interested in here? And um so as I got out of the chair, I did a quick kind of search in my dictionary to find there was like 15, 16 different interpretations of this, and some of them were seemingly, you know, complete polar opposites. The one that made sense and I was able to decipher was if something bothers you, if there's some discomfort or uneasiness, then please raise your hand. And the idea was that how could this same phrase in Japanese mean to be interested in something or to be bothered by something? That that seemed a bit of a brain breaker to me. But when you look at it through the Japanese perspective, this ki ninaru, the the idea of ki is kind of the energy spirit key that you get in Aikido or Reiki or something like that.

SPEAKER_01 12:04

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 12:04

And then ninaru basically means to become. And so if you think about it, to be both bothered by something or to be interested in something, become energy and you put your energy towards something. Whereas when we use the translation and we rely on the translation, that can lead us into traps, I think. And so that that wasn't necessarily a faux pas, I've got plenty of those as well, but in that sense, it really makes you realize that we can kind of put ourselves in traps as well by limiting how we engage with a language, both on a spoken side and also on a receptive side.

SPEAKER_01 12:37

And this

The Buddhist altar flowers story

SPEAKER_01 12:38

is why you cannot possibly learn a language properly without understanding the culture, because it leads into so much the meaning behind it. And I love that deeper understanding of where the meaning is coming from. But come on, Nick, let's have a faux pas. We've got to have a faux pas. They're more fun.

SPEAKER_00 12:53

Well, the th the thing is, I've got to try and cast my mind back now because I've been here long enough that I've got to kind of go back to uh, you know, back I mean, well, a a simple one, again, not really a spoken mistake, but uh one my wife laughs at me for is uh Japanese historically used to apply Chinese characters kanji to foreign loan words as well. It doesn't do it as much anymore. And so particularly countries like France and Italy, Furantsu, Italia, in in Japanese have kanji assigned to them. Well, one day after work, I was walking past the supermarket and I had the lovely idea to buy my wife some flowers. I thought, yeah, just pick her up a bouquet of flowers. We walked past, there were some there, didn't think much of it, grabbed a bouquet of flowers, looked on the label, and it had what I interpreted at the time was um a kanji that fits into the Chinese reading or the Japanese kanjification, if you like, of France, and then the kanji for flower. And I was like, okay, well, French flowers, I guess. All right, makes sense to me. Whatever. So I took them home, gave them to my wife, who immediately burst out laughing because I had bought her flowers that were to be given as an offering to uh a Buddhist altar, basically. And so a different reading of that kanji was actually related to the Buddha. These were kind of ceremonial flowers or something like that. So I'm sure any Japanese listeners will have caught that straight away, and any non-Japanese listeners may be slightly confused by that idea. But it just goes to show that every layer you go deeper, there's always another kind of cultural element that maybe you don't know about. And uh yeah, I've I've fall fallen prey to several of those. I can't think of any off the top of my head that are particular spoken ones. Maybe there were several that I made mistakes and I wasn't even aware of. But um, yeah, that was definitely one that led to uproarious laughter in my household and uh I haven't lived it down since.

SPEAKER_01 14:49

Homophones is one of the other things that get you in trouble, or slight mispronunciations. I don't think there's a precise homophone, but a slight mispronunciation. Now, kawaii, if you were going to someone's Japanese child and you wanted to say that they were cute, you could say kawaii. I'm not sure which one I'm saying, to be honest. One of them means cute, but the other one means that they're like horrifying or something.

SPEAKER_00 15:12

Yeah, I've rather I mean I'm impressed by your Japanese knowledge, you're exactly right. Hawaii is cute, and then kawaii is scary. Yeah, you're you're quite right. So that's uh that's a perfect one. I I did I I didn't use that with a child, but I I did apply it. So, for example, if you say something seems cute or whatever, like to say that you would add so in Japanese onto it. And so I had tried to apply that and said kawaii saw, but that doesn't really exist in Japanese. Like you can't say something seems cute, it either is cute or it isn't. And so whenever you say that, even if you say it with correct pronunciation, people always hear it as it seems scary. I made that mistake a couple of times for sure. And you you kind of learn, ah, this works together, this doesn't work together.

SPEAKER_01 15:57

Interesting.

What is a Language Confidence Strategist?

SPEAKER_01 15:58

Getting back to what I said before about giving it a shot, I noticed on your LinkedIn profile it says you're a language confidence strategist. So I think that sort of supports my comment about you've just got to be give it a shot and not be worried about mistakes. But can you tell me a bit more about what you mean by that? What is a language confidence strategist?

SPEAKER_00 16:16

Well, actually, that was something that uh was a name given to me recently. When I did my first TEDx talk, they were putting together a website and they needed a pithy thing to describe each of the speakers. And they picked language confidence strategists based on my LinkedIn bio, and I quite liked it, so I stole it. But to answer your question more directly, I think it really applies to the work that I've done because of what we talked about earlier. When people think about learning a language, they often think about grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, etc. But so much of language communication is actually about feeling confident when you are speaking. You know, and so I run a lot of programs, business training programs, pronunciation intonation programs, things like that. And the goal, while we get into the technical, you know, the mechanics of how things work, the real goal is what is the framework that you should apply broadly that means that you're not trying to think about the minutiae all the time and which robs you of confidence in some ways. Instead, you're applying general principles that get you 80, 90% of the way there. So I run a series of business courses on things like telephone English meetings, presentations, negotiations, things like that. And in each one, I try to teach it through a broad framework that means the learner, when they're in the real battle zone of a meeting, instead of panicking, like, oh, what was that phrase that I needed to say? They could think, okay, we start by opening the meeting, the opening of the meeting has three steps, I'll do those steps. We get through that, now we set the objective. If we set the objective clearly, everything else in the meeting kind of hangs off of that objective. And very often when we focus too much on the linguistic side, we can go into that blind panic and just all of the order falls apart, and then suddenly the meeting becomes more confusing because the objective's not clear, so achieving the result becomes significantly more difficult. And when you factor in language confidence and potentially even a level of, you know, a skill limit, that can suddenly unravel really quickly as soon as people think, oh, I'm not in control of this, or this causes panic. So a lot of the language confidence comes from knowing what you should do, not from a linguistic level, but from a performance level. And then the language falls into place on top of that, particularly when we're talking about business skills. And as I said before, because Japanese has layers of respect language, the last thing they want to be thinking about is what's the next step of the meeting. And so I tend to focus on that as the baseline, and it helps people to build confidence in their communication in a very real way, instead of just focusing on, oh, this phrase is correct or this phrase is polite.

SPEAKER_01 18:58

Now you're a Toastmaster. This must have helped your public speaking, am I right?

How Toastmasters helped in English & Japanese

SPEAKER_00 19:03

Yes. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. In fact, uh I was a teacher long before I was a Toastmaster, and so I think I I went into Toastmasters maybe with some facility for communicating and explaining ideas. Toastmasters has helped no end, both in in English and Japanese communication. I'm part of a bilingual Toastmasters club. Shout out to Nihombashi Century Toastmasters Club, the best club in all of Japan and all the world, in my humble opinion. But through that, again, it's really given me the confidence to have workshops, speeches, things like that in Japanese as well, which was one of my primary reasons for joining. But also, I think as a teacher, as a coach, it's helped me to understand how to communicate in a simpler way to make sure that even relatively detailed or complicated language ideas or cultural concepts can then be put across to even a beginner-level student in a really easy to understand manner.

SPEAKER_01 20:03

I really believe in this concept of cross-pollination. So, I mean, clearly Toastmasters has helped you a lot, like it's helped myself and a lot of my listeners. But what about in the reverse direction? What has your language learning done to help your public speaking and your Toastmasters?

SPEAKER_00 20:18

That's a very good question. I think I think there there's there's maybe several different factors you could put in there. I think people who are drawn to languages have an affinity and potentially a facility for language already. Because if you're interested in learning one or multiple languages, then clearly words are something you like and you want to express, and you kind of you believe that communication is really important. So I think that language learning has done that a lot. For me, as I've learned various languages around the world, I think it also helps you with the point that I mentioned right at the beginning of our conversation about recognizing that there's not just one way to say something and being more comfortable not knowing exactly how to express it, it builds that kind of flexibility muscle. And I think when you're on stage public speaking, having that confidence that if you forget what your script is, if you're the kind of person who memorizes a script, or if you forget what the next point is, that you will have the skill, the deafness, the the control to be able to still communicate effectively, you know, hopefully without all the ums and ahs and things that Toastmasters tries to watch you for as well, and get a good message across, even if it's not the perfect planned message. So I think language learning helps you to overcome that kind of fear because in some ways you're training the constant fluid flexibility of language. And when you're standing on stage in front of people and you panic and you forget what you were supposed to say next, I think having that skill already maybe gives you a little bit more dexterity. Related to actually expressing yourself.

SPEAKER_01 22:02

As a language learner, when you are starting to put sentences together, you will find that there's a lot of words that you don't know, but you have enough building blocks to do what you'd call a workaround. Do you think that's something that has helped you in your journey?

SPEAKER_00 22:18

Yeah, I think I think so. I I think language learning is like constantly solving a puzzle. Because it's very easy, you know, if you imagine it's like a jigsaw puzzle, it's very easy to focus on the things you don't have. And so if you, you know, we all learn with jigsaws that you try to get the edge first and then you've got it. Well, you've got a big blank space in the middle. And when you're a beginner in language learner or an early stage public speaker, there's a lot of things you don't know. And and the question, I think, is how can you use what you know already to get the maximum benefit out of it? So to your point, you know, if you don't know the word window, how can you make your sentence work around that and become still clearly understood? And it might be an even simpler example, you might just point at a window and say that. It doesn't have to necessarily revolve around having perfect grammar or having like a whole paragraph to explain one word. Very often, particularly in face-to-face communication, we can point at a thing and say, what's this? instead of what are these slimy noodles that I don't know the name of, or something like that, which probably takes more language skill than the word itself. So I think it puts you in good stead for table topics, public speaking in general, because if you're already used to solving a problem, being able to focus on what you do know and how can I use that, I think is a good life skill in general. It comes up in both of those fields, but probably beyond that as well, of saying, okay, well, I already know how to do this. Now I just have to figure out the next bit that goes on top of that. And I find that public speaking is also a good ground for language learning because as you craft your speech, there might be a key concept, and you're like, well, I don't really know how to express that in Japanese, in my case, obviously, or in English for a lot of my club members case. And so as you are crafting your speech, that can also be a great opportunity to learn a language and say, Oh, okay, I want to express this idea. What's the natural phrase I need here? What are the key vocabulary? And then your speech itself becomes a form of practice.

SPEAKER_01 24:21

Yeah.

Bilingual clubs - What level do you need?

SPEAKER_01 24:22

So I'm aware that there's quite a contingent of Toastmasters around the world that do it to learn another language. And one of the most common, of course, is being to learn English. If I wanted to learn Japanese or sort of brush up on some Japanese, there is a bilingual club there in Japan. In fact, your club is bilingual, is that right? It is indeed, yes. What sort of level would you need to be able to sort of cope?

SPEAKER_00 24:46

I think it's pretend I think Toastmasters is very kind of open house in that sense. I don't think there would be any expectation of what level you would need to have to try. So I I think maybe the bigger question is what level of courage would you need to have? If you're if you're a beginner Japanese speaker and you are prepared to try a seven-minute speech, I think you would be welcome to try it. It just would require a lot of effort on your sides to say, right, okay, this is what I'm going to talk about. This is, you know, I'm going to use that as much as I can. So I think it's more a level of daring. I think generally speaking, it helps for people to be at an intermediate level. You've learned the mechanics of the language, and now you're using it to build the kind of expression skills, I guess, more than, okay, I don't know this grammar or something like that. So a lot of the members in our club, or those that are using it at least in part, to learn and improve their English, are at least intermediate and above. But even still, there comes a lot of courage with standing in front of that podium and saying, okay, particularly in table topics, you know, impromptu speaking, and saying, I'm now going to express myself for two minutes. I don't know where this is going, and we're going to figure it out together. And I think that really speaks to the warmth and the welcome nature of a Toastmasters club, that the listeners will sit there patiently and listen to your two-minute response, your seven-minute speech, even if it's a jumbled mess. You know, we're all there to learn. And I think Toastmasters in general is more of a test of courage than it is of what level of skill do you come in with? It's, you know, the members are incredibly welcoming, incredibly supportive. And I think that really helps to build that skill as you build your courage to kind of step up every time.

SPEAKER_01 26:33

So let's say you weren't at intermediate level, but you wanted to improve your Japanese and you weren't ready to do a seven-minute speech in Japanese. Could you sit in in more of an observational role and sort of chip in when you felt like you could? Or is that not really a thing?

SPEAKER_00 26:49

I mean, I I think you could. I mean, my advice if someone was going to do it is try to participate full in. Like if you're if you're going there with the intention of language learning, then try to contribute as much as you can. I came into Toastmasters, I guess at what I would say is an upper intermediate or even maybe an advanced level. And I was very intimidated, you know, to join a club. So I don't think that goes away depending on your skill levels. The idea of public speaking, the idea of expressing yourself in a language that's not your native one or even in your native one. You know, the fear of public speaking is pretty well documented. So this there is a different level of fear about standing in front of people and making a mistake compared to you know having a conversation with one person and making a mistake. So I don't think it's really about the level. It's so much more about you and what you're prepared to do. If I were to do it again as a beginner, I probably wouldn't. And it's not because the club wouldn't welcome it, but I would much rather put you know a year's worth of effort into getting to a certain level and then joining and focusing on public speaking. Because I think otherwise you make that fear that that intimidation factor even greater, potentially. But I think you certainly could.

Two TEDx talks - Why in Japanese first?

SPEAKER_01 28:10

You've done two TEDx talks. When was your first one? March this year. And that was in Japanese, am I right? That's right, yes. How did that come about?

SPEAKER_00 28:23

I guess it had been it'd been a thing on the bingo cards for a while, really. As I mentioned, I'm I'm a language teacher and coach, and so I've been working with Japanese learners for the last 20 years to help them improve their language learning. And through all that experience, you you kind of keep bumping up against the same point, a point that we've mentioned earlier, which is, you know, to some extent, getting over that fear of mistakes and just communicating is really the core point. That's kind of the whole game, really. Everything else is the organization of the table, and and you know, at some point you've got to sit down and eat, I guess, is the key point. And so I had this message that I'd shared kind of one-on-one with students or in group classes or seminars or whatever over the last 20 years. And TED or TEDx is a great forum for sharing ideas. So it had been it had been an uh a thought of mine that one, I should share this idea, and two, if the goal is to communicate with Japanese people, sharing it in English comes off one, maybe a little bit arrogant to say this is the way that language learning should work while I'm standing on stage speaking my own native language and um making it as comfortable for myself as possible. So I thought it was a a good you know demonstration by like show by doing kind of example. And, you know, I think it's a Nelson Mandela quote when you speak to a person in a language they understand, you speak to their head, but when you speak to them in their language, you speak to their heart. And I really thought if I wanted that message to resonate with my target audience, which was Japanese learners, then it needed to be in Japanese. And so I worked with a former guest of yours, CJ, and he helped me identify events that would one be, you know, open and willing to have a non-native Japanese speaker give a Japanese speech. And also TEDx events always have a theme. And so he helped me identify events that where the theme fit the idea. And so we were at uh TEDx Innovation U back in March, and uh yeah, they gave me the opportunity to speak and express the idea, and and in the talk I talked about how language learning is not like a school subject. I kind of mentioned that earlier, but instead is much more akin to training and playing a sport, because there's kind of a dynamic opponent there, you know, as a conversation partner where you can't one plus one doesn't always equal two because it depends what the other variables are that are coming in. And so where I think in school we have this assumption that if we learn all of the components, we can then naturally do the skill. You know, if it's history, you can talk about something in history, or if it's mathematics, you can solve a problem. With language, if you know the grammar and vocabulary, that doesn't necessarily equate to you being able to have a conversation. And so there's that training, that experience practice component that's necessary for you to get over that hurdle. And as you quite rightly asked before, I think that's particularly a problem in Japan. And that's why I thought that message was so important, not only to share on a TEDx page, but particularly to share in Japanese and for Japanese people.

SPEAKER_01 31:32

What was the theme of the TEDx? Was it innovation?

SPEAKER_00 31:35

So, yeah, so it was uh it was called Innovation U. And so the idea was uh innovative ideas. So as you can imagine, a lot of people were talking about um maybe the fusion of culture going forward or AI and how it impacts our life and things like that. So it was a little bit of a uh a right turn, I guess, for someone to speak about maybe not an innovation, you know, language learning or something like that, but instead a new way of thinking about it, which particularly somewhere like Japan, I it changes the way that you do all other activities related to language learning, if you think about it through that lens, rather than here's my textbook, I'm gonna study all the grammar. Was that in Tokyo? That was in Tokyo, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 32:17

How many people attended?

SPEAKER_00 32:19

Uh I think it was somewhere in the 100, 150 level, I think.

SPEAKER_01 32:26

But then it's recorded online.

SPEAKER_00 32:28

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 32:29

Could we put a link to that in the show notes? Of course. Yeah, yeah, by all means. Please do. And has there been any sort of sequelae to that? Did you get feedback or any upshot from all that?

SPEAKER_00 32:39

Well, I mean, w whenever you do a speech, you know, whether it's Toastmasters, TEDx, whatever, the idea that's in your head and the idea that people receive, you're never quite sure if they're the same thing. And so I was incredibly grateful. What when you're doing a TEDx, it it's strange because you're kind of talking to two audiences at the same time. You're talking to the audience in the room and then the audience online, which for my Japanese one was not such a big diversion, but I did, I did an English one later this year in June. And then I had kind of three audiences. I had the audience in the room, the audience online that are connected with Japan and therefore would get some of the Japanese concept ideas, and the audience that has no knowledge of Japan that I also had to speak to. And so I think you have to kind of layer a speech a little bit differently than when you're in your club thinking these are the 20 people in front of me and this is the message. So I was really, really grateful that when I came off stage, speeches were done in blocks of four, and I was the last speaker just before there was a 15-minute like networking break. And when I went out, I was immediately kind of surrounded by people coming up saying how the message resonated with them. There were a lot of um teenagers actually, I was kind of surprised by who were had just repatriated to Japan. They'd lived abroad in the US or Europe or something for a number of years. So the ideas seemed to immediately connect. So that was my first inkling of like, oh, okay, I've said something that at least was meaningful to the people in the room. It only came out uh two or three weeks ago online. So there's not been a massive amount of feedback coming in there. But from the people who've watched it, the comments, the emails that I've received so far says that the analogy and the idea has kind of impacted. Hopefully, it was at least an idea worth sharing, as Ted goes with. So that was the goal.

TEDx #2 - Hidden in Translation

SPEAKER_01 34:28

So that was your first TEDx that just came out two or three weeks ago. When did you do your second one? In June this year. So they were three months apart. And what was that on and where was that?

SPEAKER_00 34:40

So that was something we mentioned a little bit earlier. That was an English talk. It was in Awaji Island, which is in the west of Japan. And the topic was all about how translating words does not necessarily reveal the deep purpose. That kind of dentist example comes straight from that talk. Because one of the things I see a lot with my students and language learners in general is there's a kind of hidden assumption that we believe if we learn the words of a foreign language, then we can still think the same way that we do in our native language and it will just communicate. And very often this proves relatively well in school because we typically learn languages of countries that are nearby us. And so in the UK where I'm from, we typically learn French, Spanish, Italian, German, maybe. And so the crossover is quite big. You know, even when you get to the idiomatic level, the grammatical level, the crossover is quite big. But when you have English versus, say, Japanese, where the grammar structure is completely different, the meaning of words, even if we translate them, there might also be a deeper nuanced difference that's that goes in a, you know, goes right when you would expect it to go left. And what I've seen with a lot of intermediate level students and above, which is where I'd mainly focus my coaching, is the ones that struggle to improve are still trying to translate the language. And they keep hitting these same walls of and want to say this idea that exists in Japanese, and I'm translating it word for word, but it doesn't work in English. And so very often we have to talk about the mindset, the culture, you know, the etymology of words and how we kind of got to this point, and ultimately the nuance that sends them in different directions, even though there is an overlap translation which is correct. So the purpose of that talk was really focused on how translation is a great starting point, but limits us from really engaging in the culture, the people, the mindset and the history and traditions of a language that really make it what it is fully.

SPEAKER_01 36:49

A very simple example comes to mind when you say that when it comes to English speakers learning Japanese, and I'm aware of the concept of the word hai meaning yes. And so if you're saying something to someone in Japanese, you're expressing your opinion and they're listening and you're delivering your ideas, if they're going hi, hei, hi throughout it. And then at the end, uh you realize somehow it comes up that they've disagreed with everything you've said, but you were going, but hang on, you were saying yes, yes, yes. My understanding is they weren't saying yes, yes, yes at all. They were basically just acknowledging that uh that they were listening.

SPEAKER_00 37:27

Well, and and I I think we we might even do that on occasion in English, you know, when when you've got someone who's just kind of going on their soapbox about some point, and you just go like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And you don't really want to interrupt and start the complete like contrarian discussion immediately, be like, yeah, yeah. Okay, right, yeah, keep going, keep going. So I think I think that exists, but you you're right. Like all it's not necessarily about vocabulary level, it's about that language is deeply connected to culture and history. You know, so if we take the English language, for example, one of the reasons that our language is so diverse is because it's a layered language. You know, we've got all of these different origins thanks to England being invaded, occupied, controlled, having different kings and whatever over, you know, a thousand years. And so we've got at least, you know, simply put, a kind of dual-level language where we have Germanic words and old English words that were the peasants and farmers, we have pig and cow and chicken and whatever, and then we have the French words for the food that we eat because the nobles were eating pork and beef and things like that. So without having that understanding, as a foreigner learning the language, they're just words. So what's the difference between freedom and liberty? Whereas in a use case in English, there's kind of a level of more sophistication to it. There are more restrictive use cases and things like that that get overlooked because in the dictionary they might just be translated as the same word in Japanese or in any other language for that matter. So your latest today's talk was in June. It's a bit of a funny story. When when the first one came out, there were a couple of um issues with the titling and the description, some wires had been crossed. And so we were going back and forth, kind of getting everything updated, and the day that was updated, the second one then came out. So I was just about to start promoting the first one, and then the uh the second one was released.

SPEAKER_01 39:24

Would

Lessons from the TEDx stage

SPEAKER_01 39:25

you say they were rewarding experiences?

SPEAKER_00 39:28

Yes. Incredibly so. I don't know that I would advise anybody to do two quite so close together. They were probably a bit more stressful than I would have preferred. You know, six months apart would have probably been much more relaxed than three months apart. But the process of getting to work with teams of immensely talented and passionate people on both sides, you know, young people volunteering their time to do everything from you know camera work to sound engineers to you know stage management to hosting to MCs. You can't really imagine the number of moving parts that goes into organizing a TEDx event and getting to be a small part of that as being the speaker on stage. You see all of these incredible people kind of dancing around you to make sure that your day is as easy as it possibly can be. And uh no, it absolutely amazing experiences. And and it really goes to show, from my perspective at least, you know, all of the preparation in Toastmasters made it a much easier experience than I think it was maybe for a lot of the other speakers who didn't have that background in Toastmasters who are maybe really nervous about being on the stage and doing all of the things that Toastmasters trains us to kind of deal with and get more comfortable with. Do you have any plans to do any other TEDx talks? I don't think so. I think if something comes up where I noticed another key idea or I, you know, come up with something that I think would really be helpful for people. The goal was not really about the TEDx talk. I just thought that was a great platform through which to share an idea that hopefully can find its audience and um and can help people with language learning. You know, the first one was in Japanese because I think it was more targeted there. The second one I think applies more globally, particularly maybe where the world is right now and how we constantly look at differences. Unless lightning strikes, I suddenly have an idea that I think would be worthy of that stage again and needs to be shared. Yeah, I'm not trying to do it with the intention of collecting as many TEDx talks as I possibly can. That's not really the uh the goal. I think I've said the core points that I wanted to express, and so for the time being, I'm satisfied. But who knows what comes up in you know five years or something, and if there's something that I really want to share, then maybe.

SPEAKER_01 41:46

I guess it's early days, but has it impacted your bilingua business?

SPEAKER_00 41:51

Uh as you said, yeah, it's it's pretty early days. In terms of, I guess, two core things. It raises awareness to a certain extent. It allows people to kind of learn my teaching philosophy, my coaching philosophy, rather than through marketing materials or whatever. It's you know, it's a 10-minute speech of me on stage sharing an idea. And so hopefully going forward, people that agree with that idea will then be more likely to engage with bilingual materials, courses, um, you know, videos that we put out and things like that to help them with their language learning efforts, you know, hopefully with a bit more alignment. In terms of the direct messages I've had, primarily kind of you know, friends, family, you know, connections on LinkedIn and my own sphere, because it's only been a couple of weeks, the feedback has been that even people who didn't really know anything about my work have found the ideas inspiring. And I think the TEDx brand moniker kind of gives that an air of importance and credibility, like this is something worth listening to, and they are selective in their criteria, which I think helps with that image. So yeah, the the feedback that I've had from people who've never shared anything about my work before has been quite surprising. So if it impacts them and the people in the room, then hopefully people who've never heard of me at all and never engaged with any of my work will uh will likewise be impacted. Do you have any future plans? Too many. You need to narrow that one down slightly more. You mean public speaking-wise, business-wise? Public speaking-wise. Well, actually I'm at something of a crossroads now, because my reason for joining, I joined Toastmasters in January 2020. And and I had kind of three core goals. One was to improve my Japanese and to improve my public speaking, which obviously there's always more you can do on that, but I feel one of the criteria was to get ready to be able to do a TEDx talk, which was the second reason to uh be able and confident to share my ideas about language learning in Japanese. On the TEDx stage. And then the third one was to meet and get to know kind of interesting friends in Japan. And so I joined a bilingual Toastmasters group. One, because I was a little bit of a chicken, and I thought if I threw myself completely into a Japanese one, that might be too intimidating. But two, by nature of having people who are also interested in English, there's a cultural connection as well. Right? I'm interested in Japanese, they're also interested in English. So we have kind of two things in common straight away, I suppose. And that's the big point. I didn't really join Toastmasters with the intention of spending my life as a public speaker. That wasn't really the goal. I've achieved two of those goals completely. I would argue I've achieved all three of them, but the friendships are kind of ongoing through Toastmasters. So the question that I've been wrestling with since I finished a couple of months ago with the TEDx talks was what are my goals for public speaking now? So it's it's exactly the right question. It's a procedent question, and honestly, I don't know yet. So still TBD, I guess.

Best advice - Go hard, go early

SPEAKER_01 45:02

Fair enough. Watch this space. With all your experience as both a Toastmaster, a linguist, a polyglot, and also a TEDx speaker. Do you have any advice for Toastmasters that you think would be helpful?

SPEAKER_00 45:16

I think Toastmasters can be an avenue for what you want it to be. In some ways, it's like a mirror in that regard. You can join Toastmasters to get more confidence in your language skills. You can join Toastmasters to make friends. You can join Toastmasters to improve your professional experience, presentations, workshops, whatever, even business meetings, you know, just being a more coherent and concise communicator when you're expressing ideas. I think Toastmasters is an amazing avenue. And the pathway system gives you flexibility to kind of build your own curriculum based on what you're looking to get out of it. I think if I were to give any advice, when I joined Toastmasters, I made an assumption, which you know, they know you know what they say about assuming. But it was a positive assumption in this case. I assumed that when you join a Toastmasters club, you are supposed to give a speech every meeting. And not just a tabletopic speech. I thought you had to give a prepared speech every meeting. That was my assumption when I joined. And our chairperson at the time, he he had a motto of every day is game day. And so I I kind of came into the club with that expectation. And you know, since I had goals to do the TEDx talks and things, I was like, right, that that's why I'm here. And I think, of course, you know, mileage may vary depending on on the person, but my biggest piece of advice would be when you join Toastmasters, play full in. I I think one of my language learning and learning in general strategies is nobody likes to be stuck as a beginner. So go hard and go full in for a short period of time and get yourself up to like a functional level where you can enjoy, in this case, public speaking or whatever the skill is. Because once you reach that level, you're already getting like 80, 90% of the benefit from Toastmasters. And then you can keep working on the nuance of improving your delivery, improving your speech craft, improving your messages, anything like that. But very often I think when new members join, they are so concerned about the fear of public speaking, the very reason that they joined, that that can mean that beginner journey can end up taking two, three, four years. And I think you can circumvent that fear by jumping into the deep end for six months and really kind of pushing it. You know, I I did in, I can't remember which year it was now, 2022 or 2023. I set myself the arbitrary goal of just speaking at every meeting, regardless of English or Japanese, and wrote a speech. The amount I learned, the amount of confidence I gained in my Japanese speaking in those, you know, 12 Japanese meetings where I gave a full speech, along with 12 in English. By the end of that year, I felt so much more comfortable going off script, even you know, sometimes I was obviously more busy than other months and didn't have, you know, hadn't prepared perfectly, and found that I could still comfortably put together a seven-minute speech based on just bullet points and kind of, you know, vamping for want of a better word, more in Japanese. And so the consistency of going full in, the repetition of getting feedback, and the general just trial and error and the experience that was accumulated meant that I could turn what could have been, you know, a six-year journey into a one-year intensive period. So my biggest recommendation would be you've joined for a reason, go all in to get comfortable with whatever that reason is, because the journey becomes much more fun after that.

SPEAKER_01 48:51

I concur.

SPEAKER_00 48:52

Go hard, go early.

Speech contests - Training vs Test

SPEAKER_01 48:54

Nick, is there anything else you'd like to add today?

SPEAKER_00 48:57

Well, the only other thing that we haven't really mentioned, which has been a big part of my Toastmasters journey, is the speech contests. Again, kind of starting with an assumption. I I thought it was not mandatory, but highly encouraged that everyone joined the speech contests. And so every year that I was a member and was eligible up until this past year where I was preparing the TEDx talks, I joined the global speech contest. And in Japan, we also have a Japanese speech contest, and I've joined that three or four years. And again, I think if Toastmasters is the training, then the speech contest is the test, right? You get to apply all of the things you've learned. And rather than worrying about whether you win or where you place or anything like that, it was a more of a milestone of how much has my public speaking improved year by year. And I could see, you know, how much easier was it for me to build a speech that resonated, how much easier was it for me to memorize that speech or to, you know, go through my own process to learn that speech. And ultimately, what was the evaluation? What was the feedback and the result? And I think if you don't have that objective measure where you go beyond your club and you're speaking in front of strangers, you can create a little bit of an illusion where you're very comfortable standing in front of your club mates, but that's because they're also just your mates. And so you could kind of go, well, I'm I'm comfortable in this room, but if I go to another room, like the boardroom of my company or a client's office, suddenly all of those nerves come back. So that test of going to bigger and bigger stages, and and I was uh lucky enough to get through to the national final on two occasions. And when you mentioned about the TEDx talk being 150 people, when I was at the national final, there were like 500 people there. So ironically, when I then went on the TEDx stage, it felt small to me. It felt like a very comfortable stage because it was much smaller than what I was used to. But had I only had the club experience up until that point, that would have been the biggest room that I'd spoken in. And so I think the contest can give you a little bit of positive pressure. Because there's ultimately no stakes if you don't make it. It's not a business thing or anything like that, but it can really help you to see how much you've grown year by year. So I would highly recommend people give that a try, even if they don't have confidence that they could stand on that big stage. That's part of the joy.

SPEAKER_01 51:19

Did you go in English competitions or Japanese competitions?

SPEAKER_00 51:23

So when I reached the national stage, both of those were in English. And in I always forget the year, 2022 or 2023, I placed second um there. I have gone into the Japanese one uh basically every year. I didn't do it the first year I was eligible, um, because I didn't really know how the the contest worked, so I jumped in only with English. But then every year since I've done both. And I've gone to the area final two times, three times, I think. Bear in mind I'm you know living in Japan, so there's obviously a lot of stiff Japanese competition. So to get to the area final, and I've placed second in the area final, I think, twice. Maybe I've been there three times and placed second twice, maybe I think.

SPEAKER_01 52:05

Sugoi de sione. Nick, it's been an absolute pleasure and honor having you on the podcast today. Thank you so much.

Thank you & how to connect

SPEAKER_00 52:14

Likewise, Brendan. No, I really appreciate it. You're great questions, and and I hope that uh I touched on Toastmasters enough to be worthy of the name of Toastmasters World Tour.

SPEAKER_01 52:23

Arigato Gonzalez. Thanks for listening to today's show. One of the key elements of Toastmasters is evaluations. This is how we grow and improve, both by encouraging comments for things we got right and points for improvement. We all learn and benefit from these evaluations, not just the person being evaluated. So any feedback in the comments is greatly appreciated. If you have a Toastmaster story you'd like to share or would like to be on the show, I'd love to hear from you. You can reach me at Toastmastersworld tour at gmail.com. Thanks for listening.