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Coffee talk and languages

Bonjour. Welcome to the 5-Week Linguist Show. Today, we’re going to talk about coffee talk and spilling the tea. So I have a really interesting family, I think. Regardless of what may go on in with the people in my family, I can say at the very least, I think that they’re all very interesting. And one of them who is very interesting is my uncle. And he’s an amazing man. He is massively intelligent and he went to Phillips Andover in Massachusetts, and then he went to college at Harvard and got one degree. And then he stayed on and got another degree from Harvard, graduating from Harvard Law. And while he’s massively intelligent and very hardworking and very accomplished, he’s the first person to say that if he can do that, anybody can do that. He’s extremely humble and modest and he really believes that.

My grandfather went to Harvard and to Harvard Law and to also that Phillips Andover and he became president of a university and so there was some privilege there. And he always says that he had people who had the money to be able to invest in him, to have the kind of education. And I asked him one time, “Isn’t Harvard, wasn’t that really challenging?” And he said, “Actually, no. When you go to a school like Phillips Andover, they prepare you for that kind of thing. You might have to get up at five in the morning and do your reading just to be able to get through all of your schoolwork, but you’re trained for that kind of thing. They call it prep school for a reason. And there’s plenty of people out there who are just as intelligent as I am, if not more so that just don’t have any education at all, much less the prestigious one that I have.” And he recognizes the good in absolutely everybody.

When he first became a lawyer, he worked for Sargent Shriver in New York and he was the first lawyer they sent into Attica for the prison riots. And he decided quickly that it wasn’t for him. He can empathize with anybody that his talents were going to be better served in a different place. And after traveling the world and teaching law in South America, he moved into a different kind of law, mainly corporate law, which served his interests and his talents really well, in that he’s a great writer, he can see many sides of an issue and he could speak Spanish, very good Spanish. And he has dealt with mostly intellectual law, international property, that type of thing.

He knows the laws of Venezuela and the United States very well and can help with contracts and business taxes, that kind of thing. So I asked him during my journey of learning Spanish and wanted to be able to speak Spanish, as well as a native speaker, really, really strong speaker. I said, “How did you do it?” And he, with his very strong education said, “All of the things that you learn in school are great and take advantage of them. However, at the end of the day, they don’t necessarily matter. They don’t even have to matter. You can get a beer and sit down and talk to somebody.” And this really resonated with me because he’s absolutely right. So take advantage of all the opportunities that you get in school, but coffee talk and spilling the tea have to be huge parts of your language learning routine.

Not everybody drinks beer. Maybe that’s not an appropriate thing. It’s definitely not for minors, but I think it’s that bigger idea of people just connecting and talking, having coffee talks, sitting around over a cup of coffee or spilling the tea, talking, is how you’re going to learn a language. And so I want you to talk about some ways to be able to get that into your life ...