Episode 63 How Learning Another Language Can Make You A Better Communicator

Today we're talking about a skill that hopefully you have learned from speaking in a foreign language, that you might not necessarily be applying to your daily life, but perhaps might benefit from. When you speak another language (i.e. not your mother tongue) you often go into the conversation with the INTENTION to listen and TRY to understand the other person. This often results in...more understanding! Even when you're speaking a language that is difficult for both of you, because your INTENTION and focus is on listening and TRYING to understand it's more likely that you FEEL better understood and HEARD in these conversations than perhaps you do in your mother tongue conversations. The book I'm quoting from in this episode called 'The Talking Revolution: How creative conversation can change the world.' by Peter Osborn and Eddy Canfor-Dumas Some quotes from the book were: Steven Covey said 'Seek first to understand, then to be understood.' 'Focus in whoever is speaking' 'Human beings can't process two thinking tasks at the same time at zero cost' 'Any positive changes we make in our role as an understander will definitely be felt by the other person and therefore start to improve the relationship.' (Note: 'understander' is not a word you will find in the dictionary but has been created here do define an idea'.) I think there are so many things we can learn from our language journey but I don't think we always realise how much we learn or what kinds of skills we build that we might be able to apply elsewhere in our lives. Hopefully this gets you thinking.  See you tomorrow! Additional Vocabulary Super duper important - 'super duper' is just an informal way to emphasise something, we should put it before the thing we want to emphasise (in this case 'important'). We can use 'super' by itself, which has become very common in American English recently, or we can use the two together 'super duper'. When I was growing up 'super duper' was often used as we might use 'amazing' but that's much less common now. It's a heavy book, it's heavy going - When we use 'heavy' in this way it means serious or requiring a lot of brain power. 'Heavy going' means something is difficult or too serious or sometimes too depressing. Defaced - means to damage something in some way Squint - as I demonstrated in the video, this is a way to look at something. Cock our head - as I demonstrated in the video this is when we put our head on one side, sometimes to show we are listening carefully. You got the gist of it - this means you get the idea, or you understand the most important part of it. Inclination - when we want to do something, we feel like it's a good idea, we would like to